**silence. crickets chirp**

What?

She's a linguist with a gift for languages.

Also when you're living among the people you pick it up fast. When my husband went to Brazil he could speak broken Portuguese in about three months, one year to get fluent. Just give her a few months or a year.

She befriends the local linguist who knows her language.

She brings along someone who knows the language.

Hmm, maybe your heroine should pilot (is she old enough to drive? Mine isn't or she'd pay yours a visit, LOL) her starship over to mine (we're headed to the Gliese 876 system...) and pick up one of these bad boys.

While she's visiting, she might be interested in this new polymer they've been using that is frictionless and impenetrable, and slides into and out of place in a split second. Great for doors/vestibule curtains and these nifty transport discs that you can glide on to get around. Big ship, lots of walking otherwise...

That way your visitors can learn not only how the aliens "talk" but whether they are likely to talk to strangers, or simply cook them for dinner.

If they don't do electronic communications, drop some invisible surveillance drones into their pubs and cafes and parliaments and learn how they speak that way.

I would imagine in the case of the Chemoreceptorians we would study them for several years without their awareness to try and understand their language before making first contact.

I spent some time last night contemplating how an intelligent alien species might evolve without sight or hearing. <I'm sure all you ladies out there envy my wife> Anyhow, I came to a very profound conclusion -

I don't believe it would be possible.

Let me explain. Let's assume that all life must evolve based on natural selection and that intelligent life is a product of a diverse ecology (sorry all you pequenino fans). It would be expected that the creature with the most advanced sensory system would quickly become the dominant species.

That is why most creatures on Earth have all five of the natural senses. If a creature did not have any one of these senses it would likely become prey unless it overcompensated through another sense that gave it some advantage in a specific environment (bats).

A sidebar to the sidebar: A couple weeks ago, I watched a speech by the wannabe world power president of Iran. It was receiving a translation---I imagine there was some lag, 'cause the speech was live.

Several times in the speech, the translator used the word "humankind." Now, I don't speak Farsi (which I presume what he was speaking in, being Iranian---but it could have been Arabic), and don't know what the actual word is or would convey to a fellow Farsi (or Arabic) speaker. But I wondered why someone translating the words of someone devoted to Islamic power and a radical brand of Islam would choose a New-Age-y phrase like "humankind." Why not "mankind" or "humanity" or "the human race"? Or would it be properly translated as something else altogether? Was the translator, a female voice, incidentally, bringing her own biases to bear on the translation?

I think it depends on how "realistic" you want to be about the barriers of learning languages between species. Like most sci-fic stories, I think you can get away with a bit of hand-waving, but too much loses you credibility.

I have a big man-crush on the writer Ted Chiang and his novella "The story of your lives and others" is a very interesting exploration of the language problem (with a lot of other stuff thrown in). If you can get your hands on that, it's a great exploration of the concept of trying to communication with another species that has a fundamentally different way of viewing the universe.

Philocinema's point about mathematics raises its head in the story. The other interesting point it raises is the Contact chestnut about aliens learning English through television broadcasts; the linguist in the story points out that there needs to be interaction with speakers for language to be learnt. Get your hands on the story if you can, Ted Chiang really does his research and engages in as little hand-waving as possible.

Regards,

Nick

This is all very interesting. So many authors just gloss over the language issue--it goes well with the stereoplanet thread--magically everyone speaks the same language on the planet. Or over time, every person in the galaxy has to learn to speak "Common." That certainly simplifies things if isolation isn't one of the themes of your story.

So the simple fix is to assume everyone speaks English; or if they don't, sprinkle in a few words of Little Green Speak to set the tone, then use mostly standard English--same drill as for regional accents. (War movies do the same thing: Germans didn't really speak English with funny German accents in the Second World War.)

One method we could use to help aliens learn our language might be the techniques of teaching English as a foreign language. My brother taught English in Spain despite, himself, speaking almost no Spanish. The rule in the class is that we only speak English, and we use the English we have acquired to learn more. It starts with basics and picture books--pointing at objects and naming them; acting verbs and naming them. At first the English is very broken, but enough to communicate. Early lessons are designed to develop a vocabulary for teaching as well as basic communications. It's a "by the bootstraps" approach. I believe anthropologists use a similar technique when they find lost tribes in remote corners of the jungle, offering gifts to show they mean no harm. Of course, this technique assumes the aliens let us land without blowing us out of their heavens--so it would be unlikely to work for Little Green Speakers visiting Earth ;-)

There are several ways one might keep the alien language(s) flavour in a story. In Star Wars some of the aliens speak odd languages, and we know what they say from subtitles--hard to do in a book. In Star Trek the Klingons speak their own language, and in Firefly the characters swear in Chinese: in both cases we neither need nor usually get subtitles because it's clear from the action what they're saying. A similar technique could perhaps be used in a story, having characters chatter in a foreign language when the content doesn't matter--IIRC Tolkein does it this way in LOTR by having some people sing in foreign languages: we know they're singing of the past and if it matters, Tolkein provides a translation somewhere, but often, it really doesn't matter and we just savour the linguistic flavour and move on. OSC does it well in Speaker for the Dead, joining the story after they've learned the fundamentals of the alien language and the aliens ours (and sparing us the details), constantly reminding us of their alien-ness more through what they do and say than their language--subtle, because different ways of being are reflected in language.

There's another aspect too. Language is determined in part by what matters. These days we're always inventing new words for new technolgies and toys--television and radio didn't exist as words prior to their invention. I believe the Eskimos have several different words for snow, delineating differing kinds of snow, because for them, it matters--just as meterologists and airmen have different words for various kinds of clouds, and most of us distinguish between oak, birch and mahogany.

If you want to be really realistic, there's also dialect and slang to consider. Language evolves constantly, and differently if groups of people are isolated, or even a short distance, from others. So American English has diversified from British English, and in both countries there are dialects local to states, counties, even parts of one town. The same would surely happen with "Common."