However, because the tongue is rooted, the tip of the tongue can only be moved back as far as the soft palate just behind the alveolar ridge8. So it would be impossible to make, say, a linguo-uvular sound by touching the tip of the tongue to the uvula.
In the same vein, we might note that trills can be produced by vibrating parts of the vocal apparatus, but only certain parts can be vibrated. The most common trills are like those of Spanish r and rr, with the tip of the tongue vibrating against the roof of the mouth. It is also possible to vibrate the back of the tongue against the uvula, as in Standard French and German uvular r, and a few languages have a bilabial trill produced by vibrating the lips together. But it is impossible (or at least very difficult) to vibrate just the side of the tongue to produce a trilled l. It is quite impossible to vibrate the nose. But a hominid species with a flexible nose might be able to produce a nasal trill.
Turning next to more abstract structures, the sound system as opposed to the vocal apparatus, we note that almost all human phonological systems show a marked degree of regularity and symmetry. There appear to be some universals. All human languages contain vowels (maximally open sounds) and consonants (sounds which have a narrower aperture, producing some interference with the airstream). In the word “Poe,” p—is the consonant, produced by closing the lips and stopping the airstream, and—oe is the vowel. In all human languages, the flow of speech is divided into successive impulses called syllables (a concept not easy to precisely define). By far the most common type of syllable is CV (one consonant followed by one vowel). In some languages, this is the only permissible type of syllable.
Would such universals characterize alien languages also? I think most linguists would argue that all sound systems, not just human ones, would tend to be regular and symmetric. But the specific details would vary wildly. To see why, let us go back to our general model based on the human system.
The human vocal tract produces sounds by moving air through the throat and mouth. If the vocal cords are tightened, they vibrate as the air passes through them.
This air current can be modulated, but the range of possible modulations depends on the size and shape of that part of the vocal tract where the sounds are actually produced (from the vocal cords to the lips in humans), the physical properties of the modulating organs, and the availability of additional resonance chambers (in humans, the nasal passages). We have discussed a few of these possibilities above. Another significant example is the vowel triangle.
The low back vowel [a] in “father” is pronounced with the tongue in neutral position, neither advanced nor retracted; when pronouncing the high back vowel [u] in “rude,” the tongue is bunched up toward the back of the throat; for the high front vowel [i] in “visa,” the tip of the tongue is stretched forward. These three vowels define the shape of the vowel space in the form of an inverted triangle with the apex at the floor of the mouth and the other two points at the far front and far back. Since these vowels are the most acoustically stable of the range of vowels the human vocal apparatus can produce, they are found in almost all human languages and they provide a framework for the vowel system in the sense that other vowels are formed by moving to and from the basic vowels. We thus see a symmetry arising naturally out of the possibilities and limitations inherent in the vocal tract.
Non-human languages would probably have rhythmic units analogous to human syllables and such units would very likely contain resonant nuclei like human vowels. Aside from this, the possibilities are endless. For example, humans have only one set of vocal cords and can produce only one fundamental tone at a time. There is nothing in human language analogous to chords in music. But aliens who possessed two or more resonators could make use of this possibility and perhaps assign different functions to the two; for example, the basic vowel could carry semantic meaning while the chorded vowel could carry grammatical information.
Humans have only one resonance chamber, the nasal tract. Beings with more could produce a wider range of sounds. Symmetrical consonant systems in human languages are largely based on differences of timing (like the difference between p and b in English, which depends on when the vocal cords start to vibrate) or coarticulation (like the—gb—in the African language Igbo which combines the sounds g and b into one). But human languages don't make much use of differences in amplitude. A tongue-like organ that was more flexible than the human tongue might be double-bunched or curled into a tube giving a wider range of friction sounds or trills, or a forked tongue could produce unusual coarticulations (for example, t-like sounds with single or double contact).
Aliens might give misleading visual clues for familiar sounds. In human languages, a closed mouth produces lowered formants and less amplitude. But in aliens who spoke with neck gills, a closed mouth might be associated with louder sounds (example suggested by Bonny Sands).
Intelligent species that are aware of the importance of coding and have done their homework will devise ways of dealing with the problem. Most communication between rational species is likely to require a machine/sentient interface. Computers equipped with the necessary programs could act as translators.
Of course, intelligent computers might have their own agendas. As the Italian proverb puts it, translators are traitors. So if we wanted to have a more direct contact with the original language, we might use something like false color in astronomy, where arbitrary colors in the human visual range are assigned to ultraviolet or X-ray frequencies. In the same way, standard human sounds might be arbitrarily assigned to the alien sounds we can't process directly. Or it might be possible to install the programs directly in our own brains and nervous systems.
SF stories about alien contact tend to draw their metaphors from human history: Rome subjugates the Britons; medieval Europe learns Greek science from Islamic civilization. But surely biological metaphors would be more appropriate—symbiosis, parasitism, predator and prey, ecological balance. After all, we are talking of different species.
For example, the existence of skillful mimics like parrots and mynahs has interesting implications for science fiction. Fans will remember Dr. Ftaeml, the interpreter in Heinlein's “The Star Beast,” who boasts that he can swear in a thousand languages. Could such a species—natural interpreters—evolve? In a galactic cultural network that lasted for a million years or more, species would be affected by evolutionary pressures. A species with a vocal tract and internal programming flexible enough to deal with the speech of other species might evolve, or be deliberately bred.
It is also possible that a species might develop a more efficient coding. Arthur C. Clarke's Overlords speak in “rapid bursts of highly modulated sound.” Actually, this is a pretty good description of human speech, but what Clarke presumably means is that the Overlords’ language is better designed for its purpose. We humans can communicate at speed because we compress sequences of meaningful units into a single gestalt. More efficient coding might result in faster transmission and processing of speech with a concomitant evolutionary advantage.
Finally, alien vocalizations might be interesting to us for reasons other than communication. Birds signal to each other to mark territory, to attract mates, or warn of danger, but to humans, the value of bird songs is that they are beautiful. The vocalizations of some aliens might be valuable for their beauty and strangeness, like whale songs.
Alien languages will be of enormous value to linguists. It is difficult to base a universal theory of language on our one example (particularly since some linguists believe all human languages may have a single origin). But their value will reach beyond the purely technical. In each human language, the flavor of thought is different. The value of a non-human language will lie in the perspective it gives, the light it sheds, on our humanity. We modern humans are losing our resources and the diversity of our environment at a furious rate. By the end of the next century, at least half (some say more) of the 5,000-6,000 languages now spoken will be dead. With each language that dies, we lose a unique
way of thought, a unique way of looking at the world, as well as a unique marriage of sound and thought, a music to be found in no other tongue.
We don't know if they're out there. We've seen no traces of them. We have no clues. We don't know if they'll be our brothers or our enemies or our teachers. But it is pleasant to think that along with the physical wealth, the metals and minerals and bits of data, there may be riches also of the voice and mind and soul.
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Endnotes:
Note 1. Hua is spoken in Papua, New Guinea; Tsez in the Caucasus. Salish is an American Indian language of the Pacific Northwest, while Dyirbal is spoken in Australia.
Note 2. For example, parrots and mynah birds. This is the traditional belief but current research by Dr. Irene Pepperberg is challenging this view. For a review of her work, see www.indiana.edu/~bs/Timberlake-rev-Pepperberg.htm
Note 3. A token is one physical example of the linguistic entity under investigation; for example, the words displayed in the acoustic spectrogram in Figure 3 are tokens of the words “bab” and “gag” produced by a single speaker (Dr. Miller-Ockhuizen) on a single occasion.
Note 4. The primary speech centers, on the left side of the brain in humans, are cross-connected with the right eye, ear, and hand, so that in processing language tasks, humans show a right ear advantage not found in other kinds of tasks.
Note 5. Abercrombie (1967) quoted in Catford (1988: preface) calls speech “audible gesture.”
Note 6. Charles Hockett, American linguist known for his Manual of Phonology and his work on Algonquian languages. In later life, he became a composer. He contributed an article to Analog back when it was Astounding Science Fiction, “How to Learn Martian,” ASF, May 1955.
Note 7. All of the earliest true writing systems—Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Hittite, Chinese—used characters that stood for entire syllables, along with logograms that represent whole words or roots of words. Even the Cherokee writing system devised by Sequoyah under the stimulus of European writing was a syllabary rather than an alphabet, suggesting it is more natural for humans to perceive words as successions of syllables than to analyze the syllables into sounds.
Note 8. The alveolar ridge is the hard part of the palate directly behind the teeth.
Copyright © 2007 Henry Honken
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References:
Catford, J. C. (1988) A Practical Introduction to Phonetics. Oxford University Press.
Cheney, Dorothy L. and Seyfarth, Robert M. (1990) How Monkeys See the World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Hockett, Charles F. (1955) A Manual of Phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics, Memoir 11, Vol. 21, No. 4, Prt. 1.
Ladefoged, Peter (1975) A Course in Phonetics. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Ladefoged, Peter (2003) Phonetic Data Analysis. Blackwell Publishing.
Liberman, Alvin M. et al. (1967) “Perception of the Speech Code,” Psychological Review, Vol. 74, No. 6, pp 431—460.
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For more information:
See especially Peter Ladefoged, A Course in Phonetics, 1975, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ISBN 0-15-515180-0, J. C. Catford, A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, 1988, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-824217-4, and Peter Ladefoged, Phonetic Data Analysis, 2003, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 0-631-23270-2.
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Acknowledgements :
I would like to thank Bonny Sands for many helpful suggestions and Amanda Miller for providing the sound spectrograms in Figure 3.
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About the author:
After over twenty year's residence on the West Coast, Henry Honken last year moved back to the Midwest, where he spends his time in writing and language research. Honken graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BA in anthropology and spent three years in Japan teaching English in a juku. He worked for many years as sales coordinator for Yasutomo and Company, an import-export company based in San Francisco.
Honken has had half a dozen papers published in Khoesan linguistics and recently presented a paper on the history of the tonal system in Central Khoesan at the January 2006 Khoisan Symposium in Riezlern. He has had one story published in Lynx Eye and an article in the Burroughs Bulletin on Burroughs’ use of language under the pen name Sam Cash.
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THE ASTRONAUT
by BRIAN PLANTE
Inspiration doesn't always take the form you might expect....
In May of 2030, right after school let out for the year, my family moved from New Jersey to Seguin, Texas, home of the world's largest pecan, relocating us to follow the company they both worked for. By June, I was bored to death. My friends (all two of them) were back in New Jersey and I didn't know anybody in the new place yet, and wouldn't until school started up in a couple of months. Each morning, my folks would commute to their jobs in San Antonio, an hour's drive to the west on Route 10, so I was alone most of the day, spending my time just staring at the ceiling of my bedroom or watching the Mars Channel on the holovision. The Romulus had been underway for three months, with another three to go before it made its way to the red planet, and even that was starting to get a little boring.
Among the few chores my parents gave me to justify my miserable existence during those long summer months was to keep the lawn mowed. That wasn't such a big deal in New Jersey, where the grass only grew half the year, and the summers were semi-bearable, but in Texas the heat was intense. It wouldn't have been so bad if the house hadn't come with an underground irrigation system, since the grass would have withered and blown away as the land turned back to the desert it naturally should have been, but unfortunately for me this grass was lush and green and it was my job to keep it that way. This was no small task in that scorching heat.
I had the lawn maintenance down to a weekly schedule, and one blistering day late in June it was time to mow again. I was fifteen years old, and like a lot of boys that age, I wasn't particularly industrious when it came to performing slave labor. Instead of mowing the lawn in the cool of the early morning, like any sensible person would have done, I went back to bed after my parents had gone to work. I slept a little more, stared at the ceiling for a while, and watched the transmission from the Romulus for a couple of hours. By 11:00, the sun was high and the heat was building outside, and then I had the mowing to do. What a jerk I was, huh?
So there I was in the noonday sun, sweating bullets as I finished up the lawn, pushing the loud, stinky mower back into the garage, when I first caught a glimpse of her. It was my next-door neighbor, and she was a major distraction. She was probably twice my age, but a real beauty, with a pretty face, strawberry blonde hair and a body to die for, dressed in khaki shorts and a Vikings football jersey. A boy my age with serious hormone problems couldn't have hoped for a nicer neighbor, and I had struck gold.
She was sitting on a fancy riding mower, trying in vain to get the thing started. A damsel in distress. I put away our mower and walked over to introduce myself.
“Hi, I'm Davy Carson, your next-door neighbor,” I said. “Got problems with your mower?”
She looked flustered and startled when I spoke, then looked me over and apparently judged me harmless. “Hello, Davy Carson. Pleased to meet you. I'm Rosemary Horton.” Even though she looked like your typical Texas beauty pageant queen, her voice had a flat Midwestern accent, not the local drawl. It was a wonderful, pleasant voice. “You folks just moved in a few weeks ago, didn't you?”
“Six weeks already,” I said.
“Oh, that long? I really should have come over sooner and said hello. I mean, we're neighbors and all. Is your mom at home?”
“No,” I said. “Both my parents are at work. I, um, take care of the house during the daytime. Hey, would you like me to look at your mower? I'm pretty good with my hands.”
“Could you? I mean, if it's nothing too serious. My husband Richard bought me this stupid thing so I can do the
lawn myself, but I don't know anything about engines.”
Her husband. She was married. I looked at her left hand and there was the ring. I was briefly disappointed—as if I'd really ever have had a chance with an older woman like that! What a jerk I was.
“Let me see what I can do,” I said anyway.
I popped the hood and found the problem almost immediately. It was something simple: a sparkplug wire had come loose and I snapped it back on the plug.
“Try it now,” I said.
Mrs. Horton turned the key and the engine roared to life. She gave it some gas and the mower jerked in reverse, back into the garage, before she slammed on the brakes and stalled it.
“Shoot,” she said. “Say, Davy Carson, you wouldn't like to make some money mowing my lawn, would you?”
Well, there I was, this horny, pimply teenager with nothing but spare time on my hands, and the gorgeous next-door neighbor was offering me money to work for her. Was I gonna say no?
“I have to call my dad and ask if it's all right to use our mower on someone else's yard. He's a bit picky about his tools.”
“No, that's okay,” she said. “I meant for you to use my mower. You can drive one of these things, can't you?”
I hadn't driven a riding mower before, but I wasn't going to tell her that. I said yes, and figured out how to run the thing real quick. I was always good with machines, so it was pretty simple.
While I mowed her lawn, she went back into the house, and I couldn't blame her. It was hot enough just standing around watching, but Mrs. Horton's lawn wasn't that large and the riding mower made quick work of it. I was putting the mower back into her garage when she came out with a pitcher and a couple of tall glasses.
“You look pretty sweaty,” she said. “Would you care for some iced tea?”
Analog SFF, May 2007 Page 9
