Science Fiction Language

Over at io9, there’s an article about languages in science fiction, using as an example how much ours has changed since Shakespeare’s time. It’s neat, and timely, as I’m working on the language section of Shock:Human Contact next. If I do another Preview Edition, it’ll be about language and war.

I’m also drawing on The Language Construction Kit, an indie publication by Mark Rosenfelder. The website is good, but the book is more comprehensive. It really twiddles my linguistic fun center and I’m looking forward to reading the book really thoroughly when I’m done laying out Human Contact. It covers syntax (how words are assembled with each other), lexicon (words and what they mean), morphology (how spoken words are formed), and alphabet construction. I’m also wrestling with the nonfiction Writing Systems of the World and the (comically dense) World’s Major Languages.

If you’ve played Human Contact, you know the placeholder rule: you come up with a handful of syllables, then make names for people and places out of them, adding to the syllabary as needed. The primary function, though, is not just to make proper nouns (and certainly not to replace words we already have with alienish ones), but make words that really represent the way a people thinks. When a society has a concept that we, as players, have a word for, we use that word.

In our game right now, there’s a clan structure in the colony. Clans have made up names (Jun and Bri, for instance, which are added to one’s name, and changed when one changes clan, which happens rather a lot), but the word we use for clans is “clans”. On the other hand, those who serve in a clan military are by definition men, whether or not they’re male. It is scandalously impolite to point out that a marine or spacecraft crewman is female. But one’s biological mother might very well be in the military. The society can’t abide homosexuality, though, so they have a word for one’s female father: drokun. It sounds close enough to the word for “father”, drokung, that you can get the idea across without having to be explicit about it. Everyone can make believe that they heard “drokung” when you said “drokun”, but you’ve conveyed the requisite information. Likewise, I’ve got some stuff about the Academic language, Kepho-Rn, in the wiki, covering a few useful Academic concepts and their pronunciations.

My intention is to have a system that floats at a LeGuin level of language construction, where there are words or phrases to describe particular culturally unique phenomena. I also want to give optional rules for broad language construction for those who, like me, get excited about the linguistic-anthropological  aspects of the game.

4 thoughts on “Science Fiction Language”

  1. Hey, Joshua.

    I think that the idea of language construction on the fly is really cool, and I think your system for it is basically sound.

    As it happens, for technical linguistic reasons, your example is a really bad example, so you probably shouldn’t use it in the book unless you want linguists to tear their hair out.

    Here’s the technical stuff: In almost every human language, the base of “mother” is “ma” or something almost exactly like it. This is because this is the first sound that human babies can produce. The term for “father” is “ba” or “pa” because this is usually the second sound that human babies can produce. These minimally distinguished syllables (ma and pa) and minimally distinguished concepts (mom and dad) are a human universal as far as language is concerned.

    Now, these people are not totally human anymore, and if they have dramtically different mouths and voiceboxes they will have different first sounds. However, it’s really unlikely that any mouth and voicebox configuration would produce a compound consonant like “dr” easily.

    Again, not to say you should put this in the book, just the example might need some tweaking.

  2. “Drokung” and “drokun” are like “father”, not “daddy” or “babbo” or “papa”. “Mother” is probably “nakun”, “daddy” is probably “dadung” or something, with the baby versions being “nanu” and “dadu”. They don’t seem to have any labial fricatives at all in their language, which is weird, but I think it’s a good guide for the way their language sounds. They have a lot of sign language (lots of vacuum in their environment), so the babiest words might be not at all vocal.

    The lacking bits of the system are figuring out what sounds go together, which is most important to me for figuring out how you can tell people from different cultures apart. I want there to be vowel drifts between dialects, for instance, and I want speakers of Kepho-Rn to have a hard time with certain sounds (and vice-versa.)

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