29.1343, A History of ConLangs, Part II: How Human is Alien Language?

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-29-1343. Tue Mar 27 2018. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 29.1343, A History of ConLangs, Part II: How Human is Alien Language?

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Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2018 12:24:15
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: A History of ConLangs, Part II: How Human is Alien Language?

 
Part II: How Human is Alien Language? Science Fiction, Klingon, and Language

This year's Fund Drive theme is linguistics and pop culture, and to that end,
we're running a short 3-part series about Constructed Languages, one of Pop
Culture's most enduring linguistic artifacts. Part I dealt with the early
years of creative language construction, focusing mainly on the man who 
started it all--J.R.R. Tolkien, philologist and mythos-maker. Part II deals
with Fantasy's daring cousin, Science Fiction, and the role played by ConLangs
in the creation of science-oriented narrative and philosophy. 

>From my first college years, when I told people that I was studying
linguistics, I always got those inevitable questions. Question One is
obviously, "how many languages do you speak?" but of course, the follow-up is
always: "what kinds of jobs are there for linguists?" 
My answers vary, but usually land somewhere near "Linguist IS a job."
Nevertheless, people are often curious if I am interested in working for
Hollywood--in training actors in dialectology, or in working on inventing
languages for the movies. There's a reason for that question, and the reason
is Klingon.

Klingon is probably the most famous Science Fiction ConLang. It started as a
fictional language for the use of aliens in Star Trek, and has become a pop
culture phenomenon unlike any other. You can find Klingon on DuoLingo. I kid
you not. 

Klingon is mentioned in the TV Show version of Star Trek, but is not spoken on
screen until Star Trek: the motion picture (1979). At the time, Klingon was
not a ConLang but essentially alien-sounds without deliberate form. From there
it was developed, regularized, and built up until it could be used for actual
communication. It was officially described by Marc Okrand in 1985, who
designed it starting from the sounds made up by James Doohan (the actor who
plays Scotty) for the first lines of Klingon dialogue. 

Klingon's most interesting features, in my opinion, are phonological. Because
it was designed to sound "alien," Klingon has many typologically rare and
marked features. It had to be possible for a human vocal tract to produce, so
it couldn't reach the Alien heights of Arrival's incomprehensible alien
sounds, which do not notably resemble human language at all, in terms of
strangeness to the human ear. Nevertheless a wide range of places of
articulation, with unexpected unevenness suffice to make Klingon rather
typologically unusual. There is only one sibilant, but there are plenty of
voiced and voiceless fricatives and stops--so far, no so strange. (It was
designed to sound "guttural," so there are a collection of "guttural"-sounding
fricatives and affricates.) Uvulars include stops and affricates. In terms of
uneven phoneme sets, Klingon includes voiceless aspirated alveolar stops like
English... but the voiced alternate is retroflex. In Klingon, there is a
voiced labiodental fricative, but no voiceless alternate. To my mind, this is
a smart strategy--by definition and nature, no speech sound, no matter how
typologically marked, is "alien," and any alien ConLang designed to be spoken
by human actors must be composed out of speech sounds. So the creators, namely
Marc Okrand, decided to use the phonological paradigm itself alongside the
selection of phonemes. The gaps in the phoneme set do more to make the
language strange than the presence of typologically marked sounds. The
strangeness of Klingon is, so to speak, more in its phonological negative
space than its positive space. According to Okrand, this is very much
intentional--he used the phonological space to create a sound system that
deliberately violates the normal phonological patterns and tendencies of human
language. 

But hey, I'm no Klingon expert. Let's let Marc Okrand, who is also responsible
for creating Star Trek's Vulcan language, tell us about it. Check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5Did-eVQDc

Like Tolkien's Elvish, Klingon became the first of a new genre. Where Tolkien
invented fantasy languages deliberate crafted to have the realistic features
of human language, to have diachronies and dialects and variants and
contact-phenomena, Science Fiction ConLangs are more often created to sound as
unlike human language as possible. To that end, a focus on phonology makes
sense. Unusual syntactic features or semantic features may be present in your
SciFi Conlang, but who's going to notice them, or find them strange? Klingon
has grammar, morphology, syllable structure, and other complexities, but
beyond the writing system and phonology, most listeners will never know what
makes the language complex. Nevertheless, as evidenced by DuoLingo, the
language has a popular following and is one of pop culture's most widely
spoken, widely studied, and well-beloved ConLangs. But it's far from the only
one. I love Star Wars, and it would be a mistake to totally leave out mention
of the language use of the Star Wars franchise, such as its constructed script
Aurebesh, but Klingon's far-reaching influence is too important to the history
of ConLangs, and truly deserves the space. Other SciFi ConLangs include
Barsoomian, from 2012's John Carter of Mars movie, and Goa'uld, the fictional
language of Stargate, SG1. Marc Okrand also developed Atlantian for the Disney
movie Atlantis: the Lost Empire, which is not like the other SciFi ConLangs
mentioned here in that it was developed for a Science Fiction movie, but to be
spoken by human characters, not aliens.

The nature of your SciFi language will vary based on your needs. Are your
aliens human-like, or are they cosmically impossible beings from beyond
perception? How much is the audience meant to identify with them and empathize
with them, and is your ConLang meant to act as a barrier or an aide in
creating empathy? As previously mentioned, the language at the center of
2017's Arrival is essentially so alien it cannot be comprehended by humans and
the main character Louise Banks must find a way to work around the spoken
language (she focuses on the set of circular ideograms which were invented for
the movie and which are primarily aesthetic in nature). The creators of the
film and its language are welcome to correct me on this, but to my knowledge
the ideographic writing system used in the movie is not actually a usable
ConLang.

However, in James Cameron's Avatar, the alien language is designed for a
decidedly human-like alien people, the Na'vi. Suitably, Na'vi is not designed
with the same strategy as Klingon. James Cameron himself started the work on
Na'vi language early in his conception of the project. However, the bulk of
the ConLanging work was done by Paul Frommer of USC Marshall School of
Business and Edward Finegan of University of Southern California. Cameron's
initial list of words were reportedly phonologically similar to Polynesian
languages, and the linguists worked from there to develop sets of phonologies
with different features--among them a tonal system, a system with ejectives,
and one with contrasting vowel lengths. Notably, these may sound strange or
"exotic" to the English-speaking world, but are nonetheless not like Klingon's
mismatch of alveolars with its retroflex voiced alternate. Tonal systems and
length-contrasts are certainly not typologically rare! The phonological
choices--and again, phonology is going to be the most or even only salient
feature of a ConLang to the majority of the audience--invoke human speech and
there is nothing about Na'vi that sounds to my ear especially "otherworldly."
But that's the point. The language in Avatar is like it's people--essentially
human, and designed to be empathetic to a human audience. I can't say for sure
whether this was Frommer and Finegan's goal in the design of Na'vi, but I
think it's fair to say linguistic realism was important. There's no emphasis
on creating a language that sounds impossible to humans, and instead a
realistic language is designed--but in the case of language, "realistic" means
"human-like." Language is also meant to be a feature of the movie's world,
(same goes for Klingon), not the primary object of investigation.

And that brings us back to 2017, and our most recent intersection of
speculative fiction and language. Arrival won't get much space here because
it's language is not a ConLang (as far as I know) in the truest sense, but I
would be remiss if I didn't bring the subject of SciFi and Language to bear
upon the inspiration for the Fund Drive theme: the unusually great year for
language in the movies that was 2017. (At least something was great about
2017, right?) In Arrival, the goal is the opposite of Klingon or Na'vi--the
language of the Heptapods is not usable to humans, and the language barrier is
among the chief obstacles of the movie. It's not human-like, it's not easy to
empathize with, it's not even pronounceable. The movie makes language, in a
strange way, both its primary protagonist and its primary antagonist. Instead
of defeating the antagonist, Louise Banks, the movie's linguist-hero,
overcomes her own struggles to understand it, by using the unique approach of
a linguist to the subject of language; she both uses language to achieve
empathy with the Other and overcomes the barriers of language by understanding
it. And that's pretty cool, if you ask me.

Please feel welcome to add your thoughts--did you ever design a ConLang for
SciFi? Tell me about it! Do you know more about the ones under discussion here
and want to share your knowledge? Did I leave anything out, or make any
errors? Are there any less famous SciFi ConLangs that deserve more attention?

Most importantly, of course, don't forget to donate to the LINGUIST List here!
Click here: https://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/ 

We're at just over 20% of our goal. We're here to facilitate the worldwide
conversation between linguists and to provide invaluable resources to the
linguistic community. The LINGUIST List not only provides and manages enormous
amounts of data and resources for academic linguists, but supports young
researchers who otherwise would not be able to fund their studies. 

(Speaking of young researchers, keep an eye out for our next featured
undergraduate in the Rising Stars series we are running for this year's Fund
Drive, which spotlights remarkable students nominated by you, the subscribers
and supporters of LL! Our last spotlighted student was Carlotta H�bener at the
University of Hamburg.)

The third and final part of the ConLangs series will deal with the latest wave
of ConLangs, including Dothraki and Valyrian. See you next time!
--The LL team







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