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For those of you with just too much time on your hands, I found this fascinating. Then again, I've always been fascinated by foreign languages. C'est vrai!
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The great thing about this site is that he talks about languages that aren't in the western European family as models for an alien language.
I know discussions of created language have come up before, but being Croatia, typing on a strange keyboard reminds me of some advice I read.
I've read multiple pieces of advice that say things like, "Don't pack a whole bunch of consonants together to create an alien word like 'Krk' or 'gdje'." In a book, I'd take one look at words like that and think the author was just hitting random letters, except that those are both real Croatian words. One is the name of an island and the other is the word for 'where.'
It all comes down to a balance between remembering who your audience is and not feeling tied to the safety of familiar forms of language. At any rate, its something interesting to think about.
Or, if I touch type that, it reads: <a anz rate...
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I've heard this before somewhere... a number of letters in Croatian that we usually think of as consonants are used as vowels. R was the example given, described as having an 'er' sound, if memory serves.
So its just a weird transliteration, rather than an odd word. I'm not certain about the second one though, that looks decidedly iffy to me. If somebody said "gdje" to me, I'd probably reply "gesundheit."
quote:I've read multiple pieces of advice that say things like, "Don't pack a whole bunch of consonants together to create an alien word like 'Krk' or 'gdje'." In a book, I'd take one look at words like that and think the author was just hitting random letters, except that those are both real Croatian words. One is the name of an island and the other is the word for 'where.'
Good Point. Prst. Czech for finger. Spelled exactly as they spell it, with the same character set.
The thing with created languages (for a book) that makes them interesting is they have to be easily transliterated into English, and resonably pronouncable by your general audience. Which forces them to not be too alien. But my thinking is, at least with fantasy (with an SF alien race it would be different), is that the fantasy worlds we create are like our world in more ways than they are different, so why should we go through so many hoops to make the language words different than ours?
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The point is that languages like Czech and Croatian should really be transliterated for English speakers. Even though they use many of the same letters, those letters differ in pronunciation often enough that we look at them and have no clue how to pronounce the word. It's hard enough with French.
But anytime you're writing words taken from some made-up alien language, or a language of the future, you are "translating" into English for the most part, and transliterating the rest. Therefore, if the word is pronounceable by humans, it should look pronounceable. (Of course, not all pronounceable sounds are present in English, so you might, in reality, have to borrow some letters from other languages, or even make some up [is there any language that has a written letter for the "snort" sound?]) And if the word is unpronounceable by humans, stringing together a bunch of consonants to show it, doesn't work. The sounds themselves would not be represented by any letter of any human language.
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I have looked at that site before, and I even concidered playing with creating a language. Then I started to wonder why.
Tolkien had created his own language, and honestly, I never tried to learn it. So if the reader cannot understand the words on the page, what are they going to do? I will just skip it and read on for the translation that should be in the naration.
So if I were writing a story, and instead of putting in a quoted line of giberish, I just explained that the aliens/creatures/whatevers were speaking in a language the main character couldn't understand. If the main character can, then explain what the character is hearing. Or put it it in plain English for the benifit of the reader with a bit to let the reader know it is another language.
My person view is that this is overkill, I don't think it is necessary.
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I'm not a big fan of trying to incorporate fictional vocabulary into the body of the work, in making that an important part of the work. But I can see how it would be helpful in some circumstances. LDS makes a good point though. I never was so fascinated by Tolkien's elven languages that I had any desire to learn it and the fact that EVERYONE in LOTR has multiple names depending on what culture they are known by distracted me and gave me fits throughout the book. (Now who the heck is that? Oh, yeah. It's the dwarvish name for Strider/Aragorn/on and on and on).
I have a fascination not with languages per se, but with the evolution of languages. I, just because I'm a little strange that way, found an incredibly boring textbook in college to be amazingly interesting--Baugh and Cable's A History of the English Language. So to meld my interest in language development with the topic at hand I offer the following example:
I am currently outlining a story in which a man wakes to find himself 1000 years in the future (his future, our present). One of the key struggles in the first part of the book, apart from the fact that there are things like electricity and motor cars, is that my protagonist doesn't understand the language in his own land. While I could use Lord Darkstorm's suggestions and simply allude to the language, it would be, in my opinion, much more effective if he could belt out a panicked sentence or two in his own archaic words. And there would likely be times when he uses a word here or there or someone refers to words he uses in figuring out the puzzle of exactly what language he speaks--because remember, they would likely have no record of spoken language from 1000 years ago. Consider, if we had no verbal record of the French language, how would scholars believe the words were pronounced? It's not relevant that the reader understand what my protagonist is saying. In fact it's relevant that the reader NOT understand it so he/she might share in the protagonist's confusion and misery.
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I can see the fun of trying to create your own language. I've tried it before. But, how can you really expect your reader to remember your language? So, you end up translating it anyway every time you use it. And, if you don't, the reader will probably lose interest (I know I do).
I say, go for it anyway, if you enjoy it and it "works" for your story, why not? In some ways, it can make a place or culture seem more alive. I think Tolkien's language did that in his books. Although, I do agree, especially like in the Silmarillion that, it can drive you bonkers to have 4 different languages, name your character different in each, and then use them interchangably. Especially if then the characters rename themselves and all their weapons after each significant event in their lives.
quote:It's not relevant that the reader understand what my protagonist is saying. In fact it's relevant that the reader NOT understand it so he/she might share in the protagonist's confusion and misery.
The problem is that, in order to share in "the protagonist's confusion and misery," we should understand the protagonist, but not anyone else. That'll be pretty hard to pull off if everyone else is us. Unless he wakes up in Croatia.
Oh, and scholars often think they have a pretty good idea of how spoken languages were pronounced in the distant past, by looking at the rhymes in poetry. It's a good technique, especially since, if they happen to be wrong, no one is around to contradict them.
quote:The problem is that, in order to share in "the protagonist's confusion and misery," we should understand the protagonist, but not anyone else.
Point made and conceded, rickfisher.
quote:...especially since, if they happen to be wrong, no one is around to contradict them.
So glad to see we don't take someone's word for it just because they have a PhD behind their name.
But I'm still going to argue my point. All scholars have is written language. And true, they can guess at pronunciation by looking at rhyming patterns. But even these patterns don't take into consideration the diversity of dialects within a single language. And since most ancient writings come from the educated who represented a narrow dialectic pattern, do you really think they'd be able to understand much if a real person from that era were dropped into their office? I don't. Would you be able to understand someone from the Harlem ghetto, who reads (hopefully) the same language you do, if he were dropped into your living room? They say they have a 'pretty good idea.' What they have is an educated guess.
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I agree, actually. I meant to say that they think they know. I mean, maybe they do, but who's to know? Ever read Connie Willis's Doomsday Book? This is exactly what happens to the main character (well, not the only thing). She's trained in how to speak for the mid-14th century, and when she gets there she can't understand a word.
Posts: 932 | Registered: Jul 2001
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I think the main reason to create a language for an alien race is because language reflects the culture. If nothing else, it forces you to do homework about your alien culture that you might not have done otherwise. It also would help if you wanted an alien to speak in broken English to know how their language is structured. When one is speaking in a foreign language, the places that the language breaks depends on your mother tongue.
For instance, Mandarin Chinese has no tense or articles so if I do a literal translation I get, "Today I go to store. Yesterday I go to store. Tomorrow I go to store." In German you'd get "I go to the store. I have yesterday to the store gone. I will to tomorrow to the store go." Roughly.
So creating the language structure would make a deeper culture, even if you didn't use it heavily in the story.
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