Aliens of London: Well, since no-one ever speaks English, it’s a little hard to say – especially with regional variations – but I suspect a native Eldraeic speaker attempting to speak English without benefit of a translator –
(Which depending upon locale configuration would probably produce either Broadcaster’s Mid-Western or Received Pronunciation.)
– would arrive at an accent somewhere halfway between a Southern drawl and Londo Mollari.
First in this initial set, a terribly useful phrase in first contact situations or when wandering around an unfamiliar starport, Floating Market, or lost sophont office, lest you commit a dreadful solecism and confuse a robot, a piece of luggage, a pet, vehicle, furniture, or potted plant for a fellow traveler of an unfamiliar species. Or even worse, the other way around.
Xamelcétar an-val ke mekt anan darávar?
IMPERATIVE + forgive + PRED. / OBJECT CASE + I / LOOSE-LINK SEPARATOR / is it the case that / you (you alone) / sophont + PRED.
“Excuse me, but are you sophont?”
…well worth memorizing for the avoidance of all sorts of awkward situations.
– p. 2, Trade Eldraeic for Beginners
Unusual Euphemism: Eldraeic, by and large, is not a language given to a great deal of euphemism. Circumlocution, yes, but not so much euphemism, as its principal speakers prefer their straight talk to be straight. For example, polite society has no problem with people just saying straight out:
valdar sessqár (“We had sex”)
On the other hand, one can get many of the same overtones by playing around with tense words and affixes. For example, playing around with the “noble” tense and the augmentative affix could produce the following:
valdar chal sessqár
(“We made love”, in a more romantic/poetic sense)
valdar lin-sessqár
(perhaps best translated “We engaged in rampant shagging”, emphasizing the happy-fun activity)
Or even both at once:
valdar chal lin-sessqár
(suitable for describing, say, one’s honeymoon, creative translations capturing both of these senses simultaneously are left as an exercise for the reader)
As a final note, the Eldraeic verb meaning “to have sex” is a mutual verb, that requires a set of at least two members as a subject and takes no object; in these examples, valdar (“we”) literally means “I-and-you”. In one case of not-really-a-euphemism, it is entirely possible that the Eldraeic verb meaning “to masturbate” is actually also sessqár, merely applied to the set of “I-and-nobody”.
(Sorry for the delays in the next part of Darkness Within, folks – having some trouble getting it to gel in my head.)
The Unpronounceable: Quite a few, due to all those species that don’t use spoken language the way we understand it: as mentioned previously, esseli names are DNS strands, myneni names are made of sounds only a synthesizer could love, galari names are modulated EM radiation, and then there are the sonar pings, electrical waveforms, patterns of bioluminescence, complex aromatic chemicals, neural-gestalt-expressed qualia which are very, very hard to parse for anyone of different brain design, etc. All of that is before you get to the really simple problems like different larynx designs.
It is somewhat averted due to the Eldraeic language being designed as a lingua franca, and thus possessing multiple different phonologies for its alphabet, including several designed for different ways of speaking, including sonar, bioluminescence, EM codes and DNA encoding, so in theory it should be possible to transliterate names encoded in those ways into something pronounceable and adequately unique, even if it doesn’t resemble the original all that much to the ear or other organ.
In practice, not so much, or not without your speech organ hurting, or not in a manner that’s agreeable to the person named. But you can try, at least.
Strange Syntax Speaker: Mostly averted by well-programmed translators; of course, this is not the case for relatively recently contacted species (whose linguistic corpuses may not be complete and conclusive, and who may well therefore play this absolutely straight, along with some vocabulary peculiarities) or, of course, cheap knock-off translators.
Also sometimes played straight because many languages include linguistic features not found in others, and if you want a full-fidelity translation, this would make languages like English sound a little strange while all the evidentials and attitudinals and politeness markers and dubifiers and other such qualities are inserted in-band. This is most evident with the attitudinals, since given differences between different species body languages and expressions, everyone’s playing I Do Not Speak Nonverbal straight, and so a full-fidelity interspecies translation would generally involve everyone talking like Mass Effect‘s elcor (“Grumpy: Inconvenient as it is.”).
Also important to recall in choosing the precise description of an entity is that Eldraeic enforces a strict conceptual division between objectives, defined as descriptions of properties inherent to a subject itself, and subjectives, defined as descriptions of properties inherent to a predication, and therefore dependent upon the observing as well as the observed.
For example, consider aelva (“beautiful”). This is an objective, an indisputable fact; to describe something as aelva is to assert that it is beautiful in itself without reference to the observer, and therefore implicitly that all accurate and rational observers must necessarily agree that the subject in question is aelva, and to the same degree.
Eldraeic does permit the use of multiple standards of beauty, or other objective properties. All objectives accept the case tag qori- in their place structure, defining the standard of measurement used. In the case of beauty, this typically refers to some artistic or aesthetic-philosophical school; in the case of more mundane measurements, commonly seen examples would include qori-aladár (“scientist’s measures”), qori-covadár (“merchant’s measures”) or qori-mahadár (“engineer’s measures”).
An seemingly obvious dodge here would be to declare qori-feäval[1], i.e., that one is using oneself as a standard of measure. This is certainly usable, but the speaker should be aware that declaring ones’ own opinions an objective standard by which the universe should abide is moderately arrogant even by eldraeic standards, and should therefore be prepared to answer the inevitable follow-up, “Qori-vé?”
To express a similar subjective view of an object, one must resort to words such as delékith (“pleasing”) or méskith (“attractive”), both of which relate not to a property of the object itself, but to a property of the observer’s view of the object, which is conceptually distinct. Contrariwise, neither of these, nor other words in their class, can be used in an objective mode since they necessarily imply an observer. Implicitly, all such words imply a specific observer whose (subjective) standards are being used, by default the speaker unless an i- (“to”) case tag is used. Qori- may be used with subjectives to inquire into which of several potential personal standards are being used, but is obviously less relevant than in the case of objectives.
(When used in a tra-description, e.g., traméskith darávíël (“an attractive woman”), the standard of objectives and the observer of subjectives is contextually determined – as in all tra-descriptions – if not specified, with a preference for the default when it is otherwise unclear.)
A related differentiation affects the choice of expression of a description. To say sa cálenavar (“it is green”) is to state an indisputable fact about an object’s optical properties, and implies that one’s knowledge about that object is sufficient to make that claim, poor lighting, other environmental conditions, optical illusions, and so forth notwithstanding.
While the limitations of such claims are traditionally qualified by evidentials and dubifiers (see p. 347 et. seq.), in cases where there is any significant degree of unknown doubt, it is preferred to say sa sérivar an-el calen (“it seems/is perceived to be green”), reflecting a proper attitude of epistemic caution.
– Eldraeic As It Is Spoken: Precisionist-Grade Communication for the Unsophisticated Outworlder
[1] Note: not simply qori-val; omitting the abstraction operator implies that you are literally an incarnate standard of measurement, which is almost certainly not the case.
In appropriateness for Thanksgiving, the question of the nature of thanks.
In an etymological discussion on Google+, back in July, which some of you may remember, in which various languages’ ways of saying “thank you” were discussed and their comparative original meanings – in terms of obligation, or gratitude, or mercy, or indeed the fascinating etymology of the Japanese arigato, I was asked how Eldraeic does this. And so, I answered, and I thought while I was at it I would save the substance of that comment for today’s blog article:
It is, of course, a somewhat complex question filled with tasty nuance. Sadly, it is also a complex question filled with etymological detail which I didn’t have to hand then, and since my brain has been busy with other things in the meantime, I still don’t have now, which teaches me to put things on the back burner, I guess. Still, while I don’t have those details available because I have yet to work out how these words would have run in Cestian and Selenarian and so forth before determining their descendants in good old modern Eldraeic, I can talk somewhat about meanings.
Of course, in Eldraeic, it’s all about obligation. Because of coválír and mélith, which for new readers are defined over here, and I talk some more about how they play out in language here. To Eldraeic’s original native speakers, and to those Imperially acculturated, obligation is a spiritual value, a founding principle of civilization, and a measure of moral worth all wrapped up in a single package. And for eldrae, in particular, it’s something about which they get instinctually twitchy in ways that humans simply can’t feel, so.
Thus, there are three combinations in Eldraeic that take the place of our “thank you” / “you’re welcome” pair. In either of the first two, the thanking party opens with “I am indebted”. The first possible response here, used for originating transactions, amounts to “It is known/acknowledged/recorded.” (The word here, based on the etymological notes that I do have, is now specific to this circumstance, but links back to older words relating to knots, tieing, weaving, etc., which is how they used to keep account-books in archaic times.)
I should also point up, probably, that while this might seem cold by human standards, declining to acknowledge/record someone’s offered debt is essentially blowing it off as not worth enough to bother with, which is a particularly insulting way to start a fight provoke someone to a duel. Yay for cross-cultural misunderstandings.
The other one, used for closing transactions when one is cancelling an existing debt, is “It is repaid,” which – oh, hey, more etymology – has links with words meaning “it balances”.
The third form is used in things like, say, buying something and paying for it right then, when the obligation is both incurred and paid off at the same moment. That one’s a worn down form of the old obligator closing that runs something along the lines of “Thus is our contract written; thus is agreement made.”, and it’s said each to each, probably simultaneously, at the close of the deal. You could also think of it as analogous to the Jacksonian “Deal”.
These apply, of course, principally to solicited transactions. Unsolicited ones – well, in their view of the world, you can do something that benefits someone else for your own internal reasons, but you can’t do something for them without their consent – because that would indebt them to you without their consent, and that’s something that only slavers, outworld barbarians, and other terminally uncultured people do. One can, however, declare oneself indebted to someone for something they didn’t do for you, which starts off the whole elegant verbal dance in which they try to persuade you that you’re not indebted (’cause they had their own internal reasons or another debtor, and got paid already) without insulting you by repudiating your debt, and you try to persuade them otherwise…
One might well ask how gratitude fits into this paradigm. Answer: badly, as we conceive of it, ’cause gratitude would imply a sense of indebtedness, and that would be incorrect and inappropriate because the debt has been either acknowledged as an obligation or already paid. It is done, and carrying it further would be a gross solecism.
What they do have, on the other hand, is appreciation – something which, per coválír , has its ties to such words as “appraise” acknowledged much more plainly that in human cultures, because they’re not ashamed to express value as value . Eldraeic is a language in which it is entirely reasonable and appropriate to say “I value your existence/this series of transactions/the [commercial/personal/etc.] relationship/your willingness to participate in this transaction” straight out, which while far from something that it’s appropriate to say every time you buy a cup of coffee, is something one might express to one’s frequent counterparty/regular butcher/favorite barista, etc., etc., as a statement appended to whichever of the above is relevant to whatever transaction you’ve just engaged in.
(It’s also the most appropriate statement to use to respond to things done that benefit-you-but-aren’t-for-you, which in most cases do not generally warrant going to the lengths of declaring oneself personally indebted.
This phrasing is also used to acknowledge gifts – given with no strings attached, for which there is a specific verb, “to-give-in-appreciation-of-your-value”, which I would more readily gloss as “to gift”, at least if we ignore blue-gifting – compliments and other such expressions, and so forth.)
For anyone wondering about the origin of this particular evocative phrase for those regrettable times when one must intervene with the hardware personally, it dates back to those wonderful round-about-the-Industrial-Revolution-equivalent days, when life was steampunk only without the punk, and when computation was done and equipment was run by twelve tons of brass cogs – which is to say, Stannic cogitators, which is in turn to say, Babbage engines gone critical – powered by mighty pressures.
And as such, a sysadmin’s traditional debugging tools included a monkey-wrench and a 14 lb. lump hammer.
Eternal English: Let me put it this way: immortality plays merry hell with linguistic drift. (So does conscious linguistic engineering, but the ongoing presence of a very large body of speakers of the old version certainly helps.)
The distinction between the three generally accepted primary Eldraeic dialects is both informal and quite simple:
“Low Eldraeic” is the language as it is actually spoken day to day, using the common-sense medium of language features and vocabulary that are of use to most of the people most of the time. (It’s still complex and formal by most language’s standards, but it has had most of the rough edges and unnecessary complexity in its native speakers’ eyes rubbed off it.)
“High Eldraeic”, on the other hand, is the language with every idiosyncracy, grammatical feature, additional functionality, and pedantic technical distinction put together by the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology over generations, for reasons technical, philosophical and political, in play. It is used lightly in scientific and technical documentation where it aids in clarity, brevity and accuracy, more heavily in formal ritual, high-falutin’ rhetoric, and particularly grand opera, and most heavily when one speaker in a conversation wishes to browbeat another about just exactly how much better educated, more intelligent, and generally superior they happen to be.
“Trade”, the third dialect, is the worn-down and bastardized form of the language used widely by non-native speakers who learned it from other non-native speakers, or who found themselves reduced to stammering confusion after taking a mnemonetic course and wondering just how the heck they use all these registers and modes and affixes and non-temporal tenses in practice, and just what is an evidential anyway?
Eloquent In My Native Tongue: Eldraeic native speakers tend to come across this way, tending to be either stilted and concise (if they’re aware of it and overcompensating for that by grotesquely simplifying everything, Eldraeic being, ah, very enriched in language features indeed – an approach which is somewhat shameful, but possibly the best compromise they can manage between perfection as defined as accurate communication and perfection as defined as proper use of the foreign tongue) or verbose, over-precisely and redundantly qualified, and pedantic (if they’re simply letting the translator run away with it) in other languages.
(See also: Call a “Smeerp” A Rabbit, Curse of the Ancients, I Do Not Speak Nonverbal, Japanese Honorifics, Mathematician’s Answer, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, Sophisticated As Hell, Spock Speak, Starfish Language, and Translator Microbes.)
Translator Microbes: More or less ubiquitous, in one form or another, and pretty much essential to sustaining galactic culture. Advanced cultures use neuroprosthetic translators, which are embedded directly into the language center of the brain (or are software run on more sophisticated brain implants) which provide real-time translation between ear and thought, thought and mouth, with a thinker-class AI to provide seamless, real-time (you hear the alien language; you just understand it), and meme-level translation; less advanced ones rely on handheld devices, or translators built into clothing or jewelry – which repeat, rather than go in real-time – and lower standards of translation quality.
Either way, there’s no such thing as a “universal” or “self-teaching” translator; the translators generally require the software and database package (the “linguistic corpus”) to be obtained and installed for every language you expect them to handle, and producing those in the first place requires a lot of time and work from professional linguists. Fortunately, two people with translators that both work to/from “Trade” – for all intents and purposes, a simplified Eldraeic I pidgin – can communicate enough for most simple purposes.
Spock Speak: …partially.
To some extent, it’s the nature of the language. Eldraeic doesn’t have contractions (although some words are coined as portmanteaus, more or less), and is designed to match the preferences of its creators (by both species and profession) for low-context, high-precision communications (spurred on, perhaps, by the universality of contracts and/or the nature of, say, spacer or underground society not rewarding sloppiness of mind at all) – or, circumstantially, to provide plenty of scope for wordplay, circumlocution, necessary etiquette and protocol, and occasional out-and-out wilful obscurantism.
(Also, indeed, the tendency of the Empire’s supply of rampaging intellectual elitists, meaning everybody, to prefer $5 words and up.)
While it and its speakers are quite capable of jokes, sarcasm, slang – although the slang would also qualify, by and large, as high-precision, low-context – and metaphor, at least the last three are flagged explicitly by register (and, in metaphor’s and some slang’s case, by grammatical particles); and while it is not required by the language, a care for mélith and appropriate management of one’s valëssef does tend to lead to underplaying of emotions (despite the language’s rich attitudinal/affective vocabulary) except in moments of stress or exceeding frankness.
And ixéren (“indeed”) is indeed a Very Popular Word.
No Ludicrous Precision, though. Ludicrous Precision is, ah, imprecise. (And see also Sophisticated As Hell.)
Decorative Apostrophe: They’re not decorative. Nor are the other accents. The acute indicates a long vowel; the diaeresis indicates, as it does in other languages, that two vowels are pronounced separately, and an apostrophe, found trailing a vowel with a diaeresis, indicates that that vowel is both long and pronounced separately, except that my current software doesn’t let me put both an acute and a diaeresis on the same letter. (Also, “!” is pronounced <click>.)
Something which I need to solve before I get to publishing anything that uses one of those words, belike.
Curse of the Ancients: Quite common, with the wrinkle that the specific form it takes is the use of curses from local languages, rather than the Eldraeic interlingua. (There are other circumstances for this relapse to locality, of course, but they have more to do with what’s chic in language this week).
Constructed Language: Both in and out of universe, Eldraeic is a constructed language.
In-universe, it’s a constructed language designed as an interlingua for the Empire by the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology, with additional requirements for regularity, unambiguity, cultural neutrality where matters other than The Fundamentals are concerned and linguistic imperialism where they are, maximal flexibility, designed to allow the greatest scope for creativity, and simultaneously to promote logical reasoning and precision, and designed to be expressively isomorphic in multiple forms. This heady list of requirements was then tackled by a group of linguists, philosophers, logicians and mathematicians, whose work and arguments produced the language we know today.
Out of universe, it’s also a constructed language, albeit an unfinished one (and given its claims to universality, a perpetually unfinished one – I don’t have the nose to produce the olfactory-description features it inherited from the dar-bandal, for example, never mind some of the real esoterica it’s acquired from various other Starfish Languages). Nor, while I can describe in great detail its 36-character alphabet — well, 3.5 alphabets (for pen, brush, and chisel, the additional half being a variant on the brush alphabet for scratching with claws) and dozen or so phonologies (for different speech apparati, including things like radio and chromatophore matrix), do I actually have them all terribly well defined. Nonetheless, it’s constructed enough that it is possible to say things in it, and even – having participated in a conlang relay or two – for other people to understand what was said.
Type-wise, it’s somewhere between “complete original” and “foreign conversion” – originally, I started using Loglan/lojban as a base, but it’s grown up to be a very different language (it uses case tags than place structures, for one thing, along with many other affixes, and handles a lot of shared features differently, and comes with a lot of different or at least differently implemented features). And it’s nothing at all like English, certainly!
Starfish Language: Oh, plenty of them. Esseli native language, for example, is encoded on RNA strands (although fortunately they can and are more than willing to add extra speech organs as required). Mirilasté language is also notable for using sequences of musical notes as its “phonemes”, and volume and tempo are as linguistically significant as pitch. Seb!nt!at and various other solar clades, along with the galari‘s techlepathy, tend to use dialects designed to be transmitted electromagnetically and which translate very poorly into audio. The qucequql and thegas-giant dwelling sssc!haaaouú use bioluminescence and chromatophores to display changing bands and patterns of color as a form of “speech”. The mezuar communicate chemically, but primarily communicate through direct neural linkage where their roots and branches grow together. Myneni communication has both a chemical dialect and one based on a very flexible chime-and-whistle audio generation that most more conventional larynxes can’t manage. (And the uplifted dogs, of course, retain a certain facility for scent-based communication.) The nsang communicate principally by writing with spinneret material, in two-dimensional ideograms, augmented by gestures for simple or immediate concepts.
Of course, that’s just the first layer. Once we get into the difficulties of coping with higher-level grammatical quirks of the language: galari is structured like hypertext; digisapience communication is often discrete heavily-internally structured concept formats designed for packet transmission as high-speed data pulses (“here, have a wiki-database of my communication”); the múrast and embatil, as collegiate intelligences, throw out the tree-structure of most languages in exchange for matrix-hashes – and the mirilasté, curiously enough, use something more like a stack – seb!nt!at is a quantum language, in which it’s possible to tell three stories at once and then collapse the meaning at the end of the sentence; native whale, although fortunately not standard dar-ííche, doesn’t have sentences, but rather indefinitely long songs – whose individual phrases are even more long-winded than Entish – in which everyone can talk at once (their audio-processing brain finds resolving the threads of conversation trivial) and, indeed, modify each others’ sentences on the fly…
…and the difficulties of relatively simple issues like non-gender genders, attitudinals (very important, since They Do Not Speak Nonverbal), evidentials, context-dependent or referential concepts, alien metaphors, different methods of categorization or metaphysical perspectives on time, space, and reality – things get very weird very quickly.
Even Eldraeic, which was designed as a lingua franca for a polyspecific polity, suffers from this – since due to its ecumenical nature, it includes a very, very large set of optional grammatical features designed to cover as many of the quirks of the above languages as possible, a mode-switching grammar, three alphabets, an ideographic representation, and multiple isomorphic dialects to be spoken in different environments and with different apparatus, including underwater, over digital communications channels, by color, and even with nothing except pause and interval. Speaking pidgin Eldraeic (which is to say, Trade) is easy – but speaking many of the more complex forms is very much not, and its capacity for willful obscurantism is generally acknowledged to be unparalleled.
I Do Not Speak Nonverbal: Due to the number of different species running around with radically different – and hence unrecognizable, without a lot of practice, and never instinctive – expressions and body language, it is generally a good idea to assume that no-one around you speaks nonverbal.
This is also why Eldraeic, its simplified trade pidgin, and most other commonly used interlinguae come with attitudinals as a basic language feature – and with good translators, voice of elcor abounds, as do other means of conveying one’s emotional states. (Although, for the most part, I “edit this out” as part of Translation Convention, since I suspect most readers would find it… irritating.)
Call a Smeerp a “Rabbit”: Another unfortunate aspect of Translation Convention. As described under Taxonomic Term Confusion, Eldraeic has a means of classifying – and words for – species-groups classified by homology alone, so that people can talk about the winged flying creatures that exist on multiple planets easily – without having to resort to a bunch of tedious explanations about “bird-analogs”, especially when there’s not a single ecology of origin for everyone to get their analogs from anyway.
Unfortunately, English doesn’t. Which means that, footnote it as I might, “trees” includes many things that are not part of kingdom Plantae, “birds” includes Elieran four-winged flyers, “fish” includes Phílae’s armed – um, arm-possessing – fish-analogues and Revallá’s tubefish, and so on and so forth.
Call A Rabbit A Smeerp: Almost inevitably, thanks to Translation Convention, and purging of jargon and dialog of obvious Earth-culture references, like, say, “Sorcerer’s Apprentice Problem” and “Newtonian mechanics”. Although at least most of the time, it is trying to indicate some subtle difference: making the distinction between “agorism” and “capitalism”, for example, the latter being a loaded term for most potential readers. And the oft-referenced bandal, for example, isn’t quite the same animal as the Earth dog (although sharing a common origin; see under Ancient Astronauts again), due to their short separate evolution and breeding for different qualities, as you can tell from the size difference, greater paw-manipulation ability, and larger braincase.