Hallo conlangers!

On Thursday 13 February 2014 15:10:40 Herman Miller wrote:

> On 2/13/2014 12:42 AM, Adam Walker wrote:
> > Some aliens might not be able to percieve or produce sound. I have one
> > speciec that can hear. But has no physical structures capable of
> > producing anything like speech sounds. Another of my species does
> > talk, but with it's rigid, insectoid mouth parts, the sounds it can
> > make are all accoustically similar to clicks.
> 
> In a galactic civilization, surely there's technology that can perceive
> speech sounds and present them in a form more understandable to aliens
> (perhaps a spectrogram of some sort). Even with our limited technology,
> we have speech recognition software. I imagine that much of the human
> and alien language would have to be preprocessed in some way by
> software. Or humans could learn to understand clicks and vice versa.

I also have a multi-species setting - "The Trellis" - on the back
burner; in that setting, humans are Johnny-come-lately and far
from dominating the galaxy.  There is a metacivilization which
has an artificial lingua franca which only exists in digital form,
and pretty sophisticated translation software.  The languages of
the member species are very different from each other, though most
use the auditory channel, to the point that learning another
species' language is a hopeless enterprise - you probably cannot
even make the sounds, and perhaps cannot *hear* them properly.
(There are several species that use ultrasonic, for instance.)

> There's also the possibility that the pace of communication varies
> greatly. Aliens might speak too quickly for humans to process, or so
> slowly that it's like being at an Entmoot.

This is an issue in The Trellis, too.

> > On 2/12/14, Daniel Demski<[log in to unmask]>  wrote:
> >> I'm designing a setting which involves a galactic civilization with
> >> thousands of alien species, and taking the resulting biological and
> >> cultural diversity fairly seriously. (That's the point of the
> >> undertaking.) The conceit that I'm allowing myself is that a human
> >> empire, somehow speaking something close to modern English, took over
> >> most of the Galaxy and then collapsed, so that we are left with a form
> >> of English as the common language in some situations.
> >>
> >> Now naturally spacefaring alien species will vary in their ability to
> >> acquire fairly flawless English. But I want to make sure that when I do
> >> have a species fail at English, I'm pulling possible failings from an
> >> interesting space. I could certainly decide some species don't
> >> understand personal pronouns, or pronouns in general, or basic sentence
> >> structure. It's always fun to try and think about a species which views
> >> everything as dynamic, and thus misunderstanding essentially static
> >> nouns... and the opposite of course.
> 
> You could always use the convention that English is just a
> representation of the common language they speak. That allows for the
> possibility that the common language has features that are absent from
> English, and some aliens use those strange grammatical structures that
> don't make sense to humans. It's hard to imagine that something close to
> modern English would still be recognizable by the time that humans are
> advanced enough to take over most of the galaxy.

Indeed.  Humans probably won't gain the chops to conquer the
galaxy anytime within the next few centuries, and if they ever
get to that point, their language will no longer be close to
present-day English.  (Frankly, I don't see humans taking over
the entire galaxy *any time*.  It is probably full of other
civilizations that are far older and advanced beyond belief
over us and won't let a human conquest of the galaxy happen.)
 
> >> Naturally it's best to try and decide what strategy the alien's native
> >> language uses to replace these missing parts. But anyway this is
> >> certainly one avenue.
> >> 
> >> Another, which would quickly get tiresome, would be to assume something
> >> like a fixed word order of various roles; such aliens could learn
> >> neo-English vocabulary and phrases, but absorb none or very little of
> >> the syntax. Two such species would sure have trouble understanding each
> >> other!
> 
> I don't know, Yoda isn't that hard to understand. Misunderstandings can
> more easily come from semantic issues. English has a lot of words that
> can have a range of meanings, not directly corresponding with the
> meanings of words in any other language.

Yes.  And many of our words refer to categories of our *perception*,
which may not map easily to those of other species.  Colour terms
are an obvious example.  Another example: one of the species of the 
Trellis, called "Orionese" by humans, uses musical languages where
the phonemes differ only in pitch and duration.  To this species,
"music" and "poetry" are one and the same.  (They *do* have musical
instruments, though, but those are tuned to the pitches used in the
language, and instrumental music has the same linguistic meaning as
vocal music using the same tones.  Also, all Orionese music-poetry
is strictly monophonic, as polyphonic music would be the equivalent
of several voices babbling away at the same time, and equally
irritating.)
 
> >> Besides these sorts of extremes, there's the whole range of simple
> >> problems people on Earth have acquiring international English. So I
> >> guess with just what I've thought of I'm not too bad off.
> >> 
> >> But certainly, there are bigger issues to consider. Are the Gricean
> >> Axioms universal? Could there be an alien species biologically
> >> compelled to say just about everything they think? Anyway I thought I'd
> >> ask for a few ideas here to widen my pool of ideas. Keep in mind
> >> though, since I want to have many species, and I'm already going to do
> >> a lot of biological
> >> decision-making, anything requiring a longer design process isn't what
> >> I'm looking for.
> 
> I'm not familiar with the Gricean Axioms ... Wikipedia suggested
> "Gricean maxims", which is close enough.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle
> 
> I can certainly imagine an alien culture where conversation is
> structured along different lines than these, and indeed in adversarial
> situations, there may be good reasons to violate any one of these
> conditions. But assuming that the speakers do want to be helpful and
> cooperative, there could be other ways to achieve the "handshaking" (to
> adopt a term from computer science). At least with "quality" and
> "quantity". Perhaps irony is so prevalent that "be truthful" can't be
> assumed. The maxim of relation (or relevance) does sound like one of
> those things that might be universal for cooperative language. If you
> say something that's not relevant, it's hard to see how that's being
> cooperative.

This is true.  Civilizations necessitate cooperation between the
individuals; solitary antisocial beings won't build civilized
societies, I think.  Yet, there will be differences.  An obvious
difference would be between a race of individualist intelligences
like us, and a species of eusocial hive creatures, to start with.

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