Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 02 May 2013 18:56:48 H. S. Teoh wrote:

> On Thu, May 02, 2013 at 05:51:51PM +0200, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> > Hallo conlangers!
> > [...]
> > Many science fiction authors goof their alien languages that way.
> > When I read Alan Dean Foster's Humanx novels, I was perplexed by this:
> > he described the language of the vaguely insect-like Thranx as
> > consisting of "clicks and whistles", yet gave names of Thranx such as
> > _Ryozenzuzex_ which did not at all sound like that.  (The species name
> > _Thranx_ itself is a case of this, too.)
> 
> Maybe those vowels are voiceless? Which would approximate some kind of
> whistling sounds with various colors. ;-)

Yes, the human-pronounceable Thranx names may just be such
approximations.

> > > Though you probably still want to use some kind of adaptation of IPA
> > > for the sake of the rest of us, so that we have some kind of
> > > reference point to go on.
> > 
> > Depends on to which degree such an adaptation is practical; it
> > may indeed rather be misleading than insightful.  It makes no
> > sense mapping alien sounds to IPA symbols that show no natural
> > relationship to the alien sounds; I'd prefer an abstract
> > transcription of the alien sounds over an attempt to squeeze
> > them into an anthropocentric procrustean bed.
> 
> [...]
> 
> I suppose. Though that depends on whether Nicole already has some mental
> idea of what the language sounds like.

She did talk about a monstrous phoneme inventory a few days
ago (some 200 consonants and also quite a few vowels).

>       Just because the process of
> speech production is different doesn't necessarily mean the aural
> qualities (as perceived by a human, anyway) wouldn't approximate human
> speech sounds, in which case it might be somewhat useful to use IPA
> adaptations to represent such sounds.

True.  From an acoustic standpoint, it is just a matter of
formants and such stuff, no matter what they are produced with.

>       But from her description, these
> aliens seem sufficiently different that the sound quality of their
> speech would be drastically different from ours, so it's probably best
> to invent a dedicated notation for them.

As Patrick Dunn has remarked (see below), this may not work well
in a novel.
 
> The underlying principles of IPA can still be used, of course.
> Parameters such as point-of-articulation, opening/closing of various
> parts of the vocal tract, the position and shape of the tongue (or
> tongues or analogous organ(s)) would still be applicable.

Yes.
 
> Speaking of which, I discovered just yesterday that birds don't have a
> larynx, but a syrinx, which is located where the trachea forks into the
> lungs, thus giving the possibility of producing multiple simultaneous
> sounds. Has anybody explored this feature in an avian conlang?

I haven't seen any yet, but it would be an idea.

On Thursday 02 May 2013 19:41:19 Patrick Dunn wrote:

> IIRC, one of Nicole's design goals is inventing a plausible language for a
> novel.  In that case, inventing a transcription system for her Yemoran
> language could be a very bad idea indeed.  If I, an avid reader of science
> fiction, picked up a novel with names in it like &*#(&#(897, I would
> quickly put it back on the shelf and back away from it.  That's assuming an
> editor would greenlight it for publication, which I would think extremely
> unlikely.

Sure.  A transcription that looks like an explosion in a
typesetting shop is not a good idea to have in a novel.
Readers want names they can remember in order to follow the
plot.  (Though an alphanumeric designation such as R2-D2 can
still be catchy.)

> In fact, I'm still not sure with that design goal that the language needs
> to be fleshed out very much.  I would be quite happy to see something like
> "Jim shook hands -- or hand and talon -- with the Yemoran ambassador, whose
> name sounded something like Yaak, but with the weird scratchy whistles and
> hums that Jim could barely hear, let alone distinguish, mixed in."  Cool, I
> would think: the Yemorans are weird, and Jim is just making do with the
> closest approximation he can find, which is conveniently something I can
> pronounce quite nicely in my head.  Now I shall read on, and enjoy the
> plot, rather than get bogged down in linguistic theory.

Indeed, that is a good way of handling this in the text to be
published.  A more detailed transcription could be used in the
author's working notes, though; but in the novel, the Yemoran
could indeed go by the name Yaak, as the human characters hear
it in the plot.
 
> Inventing a language for a novel is not automatically an aesthetic bonus,
> unless that language plays a very, very important part in the book: if, for
> example, Jim were a xenolinguist and the plot involved him trying to
> decipher a Yemoran cookbook.

Yes.  Most science fiction and fantasy novels work well without
detailed conlangs.  You usually do not need more than a consistent
naming scheme.  Of course, if you write a novel in which the
language itself plays an important role, you may want to expend
more attention on it, but still, you can write such a novel
without presenting a conlang - see for instance _Babel-17_ by
Samuel Delany, which is about a linguist deciphering an unknown
language and uncovering a conspiracy in which that language plays
an important role, but *no* samples of the language ever occur in
the text!
 
> Otherwise, avoid linguistic howlers and otherwise just offer an airy wave
> of the hand.

Right.  Most readers won't care about the innards of the alien
language any more than about the fuel economics of the starship
engines ;)

--
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http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/index.html
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