(Today, I’m not in much of a mood for working here. How lucky that I had a guest column prepared. Also, once more, check out Writing Resources, where I have put up several more new items.)
Hey there, folks. This is Golden Dragon Girl, AKA Jessi, AKA GDG, AKA Invid’s sister– adding some “gurl” to your daily blogrun. XD
“Whut?” you may ask. “Whar’s that cool dude who usually writes in here?” Well, he asked me to do a guest column. And since my response was “Ooh, ooh, can I REALLY?” here I am. 
Today’s topic is Devising Alien Languages.
Most beginners simply choose to go for a word for word replacement method when creating their alien languages– in the case of El Goonish Shive, Dan Shive seems to have taken it even farther by using a sound for sound or letter for letter replacement system. This is certainly an effective way to create the sense of alien language for the casual reader; they will glance at it and see nothing more than a jumble of letters and sounds they don’t associate with English.
But what if you’re writing for the non-casual reader, the one who recognizes that it’s just a code, cracks it on you in a matter of weeks, and is distributing spoilers all over the internet? Further, a word for word replacement system might be appealing at first, but eventually it becomes cumbersome to invent new words, to keep track of which sounds you’ve used, and I myself backed myself into some very frustrating corners when I first tried to make a language using this method. Creating an unstructured, word for word replaced language, creates nothing more than a jumbled mess. (If nothing else, one has to figure out a system of tenses, which I’ll get to later.)
More importantly to the truly dedicated science fiction lover, it’s not genuine. French grammar is not Gaelic grammar. Japanese grammar is not English grammar. Each of these languages grew according to the growth of the people who use them. So the first thing you’ll want to consider, before thinking about even sentence structure or conjunction (if you’re reading a blog about writing techniques, I sincerely hope you at least took and remember enough from English class to have a vague idea of how that language works– if not, there are books and websites to help you brush up) is what kind of people are going to be using your language.
Don’t think about what kinds of sounds they can physically make at this stage. Think about their cultural attitude. What are their prevailing values? Independence? Conformity? Discipline? English as it exists today is the product of a very individualistic society. It is flexible and can say the same thing in many, many different ways. Not all languages are half as flexible as English is, and most aren’t– although a large part of the reason is that English is very comfortable inventing and adopting words from other languages, so that’s also a consideration. How adaptable to new, foreign words do you want your language to be? Once you’ve figured that out, it should affect every choice you make onward.
As a quick example of how culture effects a language, one of my alien cultures is very centered on family. They have four words for “first cousin” alone, depending on the gender of the cousin and whether the cousin is on the mother or father’s side of the family.
My next step is usually to set up a sentence structure. Some languages are more forgiving than others about where words go. But in English, the actor usually goes before the action which precedes the acted upon. (This is a better description than using the keywords of subject, verb and object, because it makes remembering and understanding which word is which easier.) In Gaelic and many African languages, the verb comes first, then the actor, then the acted upon. In some languages, the word order changes based on whether the sentence is a statement or a question (“Are you there?” places the verb before the actor, the acted upon– that is, “there,” rests at the end of the sentence. Of course, in English, it depends on the question you’re asking.)
In other languages, the only thing that defines a question is whether the sentence contains a particular keyword in an appropriate place. (“What magic is THIS?”) In Qut’naji, one of the languages of Alien Revenant, my younger webcomic, sentence structure places the object (or acted upon) at the beginning of the sentence, with the verb in front of the subject (the actor). (This was actually inspired by Klingon, which in my opinion is a beautiful example of lingual worldbuilding.) You’ll also have to consider where adjectives– descriptive words– should go in relation to the thing described, or you’re going to get into some beautiful messes later. (Trust me. I’m speaking from experience.)
Now that you’ve decided where the words go, you can start thinking about the words themselves. How many tenses does your language have? The obvious choices are past, present and future, but some languages don’t have those tenses built into the verb system. Some languages have more tenses– a good example is the narrative tense, which English does not have and which Iwaryuun, another Alien Revenant language, does. (I’m rather fond of the narrative tense, myself. It’s used to define whether a story is real and actually happened in the past, or whether it’s just a story that never happened at all. Of course you don’t use it when you’re lying. XD)
Sometimes, different tenses also effect the adjectives used to describe a verb, or even every other word in a sentence. Imagine having to do that in English: “Thed quicked browned foxed jumped overed thed lazied dogged.” (Of course, tenses don’t have to have the SAME effect on every word they effect.) If you wanted, you could simply place a word somewhere in a sentence and not change the other words at all. (“Past I eat fish.”)
Some languages, like Latin, are highly genitive, which means that the nouns have assigned “genders” (called so because the most common genders in human languages are male, female and neuter) which then effect the rest of the sentence in some way. English was born mainly from the Latin lingual family and the Germanic lingual family, both of which are genitive but not in the same way. So English has inherited some quirks along that line. Latin adverbs and verbs change gender according to the gender of the subject.
This is a fun thing to play with, but it is mostly just flavor and fairly simple to inject into a language, although you do have to assign genders to different words that normally wouldn’t have them. (If placing “i” in front of a verb feminized it in English, you could say “GDG iwrites long winded articles.” ;3) Related to genders are “accusative” words, that is, words changing when they are being “accused” of the verb that effects them. English pronouns are accusative. “It was I” is less proper than “It was me,” for example.
When you consider both genders and tenses, it’s a good idea to think about how either one changes the words they change. In English, a verb in the past tense typically has “ed” added to the end (see, I gave an example right in the sentence!) although once again, English has exceptions to everything (it’s what we get for combining two or three different grammatical methods.) But in Iwaryuun, each word is made up of two core parts, and the tense modifier is placed between them (“I talked to him” translates into “Jii yu’tak’un war,” from the core word “yuun,” meaning communication.) Also in Iwaryuun, almost all core words can be made into verbs; “shikai,” for “sleep,” becomes “shi’hi’kai,” for sleeping, but “bhechi” for “small” also becomes “bhe’hi’chi,” “being small.” In Enotiso, another AR language, the modifier is added to the beginning of the core verb instead of the end: “dance” is “ja,” “dancing” becomes “lija.” And in Ashla, another AR language (yes, there are a lot of them) tense is added to the beginning of a verb, the gender of the actor is added to the end (and, in Ashla, the gender modifiers take the place of pronouns), and possessives are indicated by a prefix added to the possessed. There are a few exceptions, mainly in the case of whether it sounds prettier (to me) to put the modifiers as prefixes or suffixes, and the appeal of a sound is a perfectly good reason to create an exception to the rule. (Those exceptions only apply to verbs, though. XD)
How you pluralize words, of course, is something you have to factor in alongside the gender and tense modifications, and there can also be different kinds of pluralization– “gathered together” versus “scattered about,” for example, or a different plural modifier depending on whether the pluralized noun is being acted upon (Latin calls this “accusative”). In Ashla, there are twenty two lingual genders that can be applied to verbs. Try not to think of “genders” in language as being anything the same as animal genders- even “myself” and “yourself” can be considered lingual genders. Other potential gender splits include creating formal versions of preexisting genders, and creating a different gender for physical things versus ideas.
Speaking of such splits, similar ideas can be put into play when creating pronouns. Here’s a list of modern English pronouns (without their modified forms): I, you, he, she, it, them, we. One for self, one for the addressed, one for each gender including neuter, one for multiples and one for multiples the self is part of. Most languages have a pronoun for self, and most have a pronoun for the addressed (that’s you.) But Iwaryuun has no word for “he” or “she,” it has “intelligent alive,” “unintelligent alive,” and “non-alive.” Furthermore, instead of using an entirely new word for multiples, they simply pluralize the pronouns. (There’s another pronoun for things of uncertain nature.) English used to commonly use a formal version of “you,” which was of course “thou,” but as a language becomes more individualistic it also becomes less formal. American English has begun to adopt “y’all” as a plural of the addressed, and while most English teachers would be annoyed with me for saying so, I can’t help but see that as a good thing.
Other kinds of permutations on pronouns besides formal versions and plurals might include a pronoun for ideas or a pronoun for sounds. You might consider a pronoun for the divine (Iwaryuun has one) or for the profane. As long as you can describe it as a type of thing distinct from other things, the way an animal is distinct from a plant, it’s fair game. (In Ancient Egyptian, there was a lingual gender for gay men and eunuchs. I kid you not.)
You should also think about the number system. While many people think of numbers and words as being in different categories altogether, the way a language handles numbers is no different from the way it handles the rest of the world– it uses some form of system. The English system, born of the Germanic one, isn’t really very logical or efficient, which does not mean you need to come up with a better one, but that you shouldn’t worry overmuch about making your number system as efficient as possible, only efficient enough that you can imagine someone putting up with using it.
German actually handles numbers LESS efficiently than English– “twenty-one” in English is “ein und zwanzig” in German– literally, “one and twenty.” But there are a few things to remember about numbers and the way languages handle them: not all languages have a concept of “zero,” although the technological advancement of those cultures is often stymied by this. The more streamlined you can make your numbers, the easier it will be for technology and culture to advance (the Roman system of I, II, III, IV, V, VI, etcetera, was a large factor in why Roman technology never made it past a certain point, while the Arabic system is still used today). And most importantly, not all cultures group numbers in groups of ten, the way Arabic does. (The Roman system actually uses groups of FIVE.)
This is something where you might want to think about your alien’s physiology. We use groups of five and ten because our hands have five fingers each. A culture populated entirely by Ninja Turtles would probably use a system using multiples of three instead, while if Disney Gargoyles cared about numbers, they would probably use multiples of four. No culture, however, is too proud to adopt another culture’s number system if it turns out that it works better– something to think about if your fictional culture has had a lot of contact with other ones.
We’ve talked about verbs, nouns, sentence structure, pronouns, genders, tenses, and even numbers. For the basic structure of a language, there’s not much more you need to know. But there is plenty more you can play with. Formal language extends beyond pronouns and can include the way a person says “yes” (Iwaryuun has seven words for “yes” that depend on the rank and age of the person you’re talking to) or the way a person phrases sentences. For example, in Outsider, the Loroi say things like “Someone seems to have cleaned your clothing” instead of “Someone cleaned your clothes” when speaking formally. (I do not know how the authors chose to structure or create their alien languages, but I thought that was a particularly nice touch.)
[The Loroi are actually technically primarily telepathic; "their" language is a trade tongue for communicating with other species. Of course, it's interesting to note that the Loroi on average consider the spoken word to be a hostile action. Also, it was apparently manufactured with the help of the webside Langmaker.com. -Invid.]
Never mind formal titles of address, which can range from occupational titles (General Smith) to marital titles (which do not have to extend only to a woman’s “Missus.”) (Ironically, “Mrs.” was not always only a method of referring to a married woman– it was short for “mistress,” originally the feminine of “mister” or “master.”) In my older webcomic, The Law of Purple, young children of the Caligulan culture address and refer to adults as “Mister John” instead of “Mister Smith,” which is another consideration to make (although LOP is very light on things like that, being very soft AND humorous science fantasy.) In Iwaryuun, titles are added to the end of a name, such as “Mage Hiyma” becoming “Hiymarao” or “Magess Anri” becoming “Anrirei.”
Then there are dialects. In Japanese, there is a masculine and a feminine dialect which is indicated by word choices, feminine and masculine “self” words, and mannerism. To someone who listens to a lot of Japanese, a woman speaking Japanese has a very different cadence from a man speaking the same language. (Invid and I have agreed that in Japanese, a man’s equivalent of “blah blah blah” sounds more like “gooma gooma gooma,” while a woman sounds sort of like “aka aka aka!“)
When devising the language spoken by the Vymn (again from Alien Revenant), I took this idea of masculine and feminine dialects and assigned different sounds to the different genders: From feminine to masculine, “sh” becomes “ch,” a “G” sound at the end of a word becomes “K,” “T” at the start of a word becomes “D,” and “S” becomes “Z.” With another language I am currently still working on the structures for, I decided to make two dialects that were so different as to be different languages, but similar enough that you might be able to see how they were related. How? By keeping the sentence structure the same, and by making the method of modifying verb tenses different. (There were a few other things similar to the Vymni sound exercise intended to further the distance, but that’s incidental to this discussion.)
In a way, this brings us back to my opening statements regarding word for word replacement and making “codes” to simulate alien language– dialects can be created using methods like coding, except that you’re not trying to divide the languages so far as to make them seem exclusive (although Mandarin Chinese has many dialects that may as WELL be different languages– many language enthusiasts will point out that the only reason these dialects are considered the same language is because the Chinese government says they are.)
Other aspects of dialect include idiomatic language. Many people forget that the word choices we make are individual to a culture. If you wanted a German person to “take a picture” for you, you would have to ask them to “make a picture.” Likewise, an attractive, curvy woman is “juicy” in German, not “sexy.” (I took four years of German in High School, these are the idioms I’m familiar with. XD)
In the trading card game world, a useless card is called “wallpaper” or “toilet paper” in English, but I have heard Japanese people call them what essentially translates into “small fish.” (Which makes perfect sense if you think of “small fish in a big pond.”) Different dialects within a language will have different idioms and colloquial words as well– a soft drink is also a soda, pop, or coke (which I have never understood, because “coke” is a brand name, but that happens. [Of course, "coke" is also cocaine-which is where Coca-Cola got its name. -Invid.]) Jewelry is bling, or you can call it “glitter” if you want.
At one point in Alien Revenant, instead of saying “impossible” in disbelief, a character muttered “fyt nuklokabaa,” which means “foolish/stupid meeting” in Ashla. (Although I translated it as “impossible” for the sake of the reader. It was the spirit she meant it in anyway. XD) In the same language, the word for “bastard” translates more literally into “child of the void,” the spirit of the insult being “you came from nothing.” If the description makes sense to you, even if it’s not what people usually say, you can make it the norm for your language.
Some languages have words for things that other languages don’t– Inuit has several words for snow, while German has no word for privacy (it’s assumed you’ll respect it) and DOES have a word specifically for “the atmosphere of a party when everyone’s drunk just enough to be amiable and not enough to be troublesome.” Further, you may choose to mutate a word slightly to give it a “proper form” versus a “lazy form” or a street form.
In Qut’naji, “Nosh s’jo mi” and “Nosh s’ju mi” mean the same thing (“I have more”) but the second one is considered less proper and frowned upon off the streets. “Azo,” for “person,” becomes “uza,” for “guy.” (In a genderless sense.) “Quanli,” the proper word for “Hello,” becomes “Qon,” which could be translated as “hey” or “hi.” When coming up with lazy forms, though, try to make sure it actually SOUNDS lazier to you than the original word. Otherwise it’s not believable.
Now you may have gotten through this entire thing (for which I thank you for your patience) and still be on the other end thinking “but my aliens only speak in hoots and hand signals! This is no use to me.” Not so. For one thing, there are many different kinds of “hoot,” which are still subject to being systematized. For another? American Sign Language uses the same system as English.
Visual language is much less likely to use little flavor markers like genders, but like all language, it is still a system of symbols used to understand the world. But non-verbal language does bring us to an interesting point– how your language describes the senses. This leaves the talk of actual language rules behind and delves into the physiology and psychology of your aliens. This essay won’t go too deeply into it– it’s a topic for another discussion– but I will point out one thing: Very few human languages have specific words for smells. We adopt words from visual descriptors (“it smells smoky”) or describe scents using simile or metaphor (“it smells like bad cheese.”) This is because we have a sense of smell that’s only slightly better than that of a vacuum cleaner. Scents effect us deeply, certainly, but we’re only barely aware of them most of the time. On the other hand, if a cat or a dog spoke a complex language, they would have as many words for different smells as we do for colors, and only two or three for colors (if that.) So it’s something to think about.
In closing, I expect you all to pester Invid into talking about effective usage of alien languages as soon as possible. Happy crafting!
Eva banuklokabaa, vasu kiirazif.
(Until our next meeting, I hope for your good health.)
