Morpheme map of Heptapod B

Morpheme map of Heptapod B, the alien language in the movie Arrival (credit: @‌LanguageCrawler on Twitter)

I see your “humans are incapable of pronouncing my very alien name” and raise you- humans are actually incredible vocal mimics with uncanny knack for xenolanguage.

In Star Trek and a lot of other franchises that deal with aliens, the aliens are pretty much homogeneous. Same language, culture, whatever. A lot of the time they look like clones of each other.

But humans maintain their diversity. I think it’s more likely that two alien species would have trouble talking to each other, but a human would be able to pick up on both languages relatively easily.

I also think that, since languages also use different rules and sounds, people who know certain human languages do better with certain alien languages.

I saw a headcannon here that people who speak Hebrew would be able to pronounce Vulcan names- but imagine how funny it would be if Vulcan was an easier leap from Hebrew than English is.

please tell me more about the stuff in the tags of your last fic, I love xenolinguistics! What if brother and sister were just correlated do to our gendernorms? What is sister in Alternian?

I mean, to be clear, that post is an excerpt, and far from the full fic which is still in process! But uhhh let's see. So in the tags you're addressing, I said

"what if 'motherfucker' and 'brother' are translated different but they're related words in alternian…. #what if 'brother' and 'sister' aren't different words theyre just translated in english based on gender but there's no distinction actually #it's all the word I tend to translate as 'kin'/'family'/'fam' but gendered by english-speakers for comprehension"

My thought wasn't that there was a word for "sister" in Alternian, any more than a word for "brother"! In keeping with the minimal amount of gendering I try to do when I write trolls, I was thinking there could be a single word that just basically means "troll who is part of my 'family'", (although "family" here is its own kettle of fish on Alternia, more on that later). To a conversational learner of Alternian, it would be fairly natural to translate it according to the gender of the person being addressed, since calling someone "brother" or "sister" has more linguistic precedent than the gender-neutral address I've used in clown-fics before, which is "kin".

(I don't think I got that from canon, as far as I remember I came up with that because I wanted more queer characters and needed a gender-neutral church term of address for them, lol).

Bear in mind my worldbuilding is also partially predicated on the way I tend to write the clown church, which is a little more based on real life juggalos than some clown churches I've seen written in fics--I like the idea that purplebloods are still violent assholes to each other, but that they have a weird kind of cohesion, a default allyship with each other via the church that isn't quadranted and isn't necessarily in cahoots, but just expects a certain amount of kinship. "Family", or "troll-closer-than-friend", something that's not quite a quadrant but is closer than the average troll gets to have with other trolls, usually. I like the thought of other blood castes finding that deeply unsettling--and I also feel like it makes a certain amount of sense; both for the sort of weird troll equivalent of an ethnoreligious group and also for a comparatively smaller ruling class that has to keep the much more numerous, psionically-gifted masses in line.

But also as individuals they will certainly still challenge, undercut, and murder each other sometimes haha. They're Alternian trolls after all. ANYWAY

Terms of address in Alternian are actually a really fun concept, especially if I was playing around with the concept I talked about a little in later tags on that same post--that you can present yourself as a superior, inferior, or intentionally give zero inflection either way, which is risky in its own way if the person you're speaking to doesn't agree that you're equals. That actually meshes nicely with one of the few bits of xenolinguistics we do get in the comic, which is that apparently the troll word for "friend" is the same as the word for "enemy"! Which you could work in a couple of ways!

the word just essentially does mean "friend"/"troll I'm close to"--if you are actually friends, then cool. If not, it becomes more like a guy in a bar calling you "pal" and stepping into your space. Humans have their own dominance and submission tone indicators, and imposing closeness or familiarity on a person you aren't familiar with to that degree can be a threat in any language, so it would feel right to me if Alternian had the same thing but much more aggressively codified.

The word is understood as "friend" when it's said in a submissive/friendly/fawning stance, and "enemy" when it's said by a superior or dominant troll. This is actually also fun because it means that unless a highblood is explicitly lowering themself to use a less dominant tone, they're speaking to their social inferiors with pretty overt hostility.

To bring it back around to the original topic, I honestly like option two a little better--if any term of address can be dominant/hostile, submissive/fawning or neutral/equal, then Gamzee when he's introduced using the "equals" inflection of "brother/sister/etc" would carry on his canon vibe of not really acting like A Real Highblood. And then when murderstuck hit, he could drop all the way to a supposedly super friendly and harmless inflection on the "it's me :o)" sentences and an aggressive one on the "AND ALSO ME :o(" sentences.

"Motherfucker" is a fun one because carrying on the thought I was having in those tags, I was imagining "motherfucker" would be a very similar word in Alternian to "kin"--but smushed together with the Alternian for "fuck" and used in all sorts of ungrammatical ways. "Motherfucker" would make sense to me as an Anglicization of a word that in Alternian might mean something more like "(friend-closer-than-friend)fucker". After all, trolls don't have mothers--I think I've written before with the alternate headcanon that it refers to the Mother Grub, and is kind of profane/gross in that sense, but I also like the concept that part of the reason that we see so many purplebloods throwing "motherfuck(ing/er)" around is because they're also the ones who have a concept of "family" via the church, and a nonexistent translator was like "for readability I have not translated this literally but have instead used the nearest human equivalent" lol.

the part of me that wants to invent an alien language with inhuman phonemes and weird syntax is constantly at war with the part of me that wants to invent aliens that are so far beyond the standard cultural image of a sentient alien that its form of communication has nothing that can even be compared to human language

here we go!!!! this took me multiple hours, but here is the fanmade non official galran alphabet!!!!

fun fact about me: i am a SUCKER for fictional languages. like. i go feral for them. i did this instead of writing an essay and it was SO worth it

uhhhh but yeah!! i hope it looks galran enough to be accepted in the fandom 😔 at the time i only had a really blurry photo ref of like. four letters. so like. maybe forgive me??? if it doesn't look??? accurate????

Given that a lot of characters in Ben 10 speak their language without being translated into English, do you think that their language is so common that it's assumed you - supposedly an intergalactic traveler - have whatever language it is as part of your first, second or other languages that it was an oversight (depending on if the Omnitrix has a universal translator or not, one even Azmuth overlooked because something something that one comic about 'the basics to an expert look like advanced knowledge to a newbie') to not include a translation pack for those languages?

Like imagine if Sotoragg (or whatever specific Sotoragg language SixSix and the copycats speaks) is like one of the more common language, if not the MOST common language, of the interplanetarily recognised languages. Whether it's predominantly first language or someone's second language (Mandarin beats out English on first language alone, but countries that predominantly speak English are also predominantly monolingual, English has more second language speakers that pulls ahead), I don't know, but if Tetrax Shard - one of if not the last petrosapien - can understand SixSix while we as the viewer stuck without the knowledge of whatever Sotoragg language he's speaking, maybe it had to be one of the languages he had to learn because guess what Petropian languages aren't very lively now are they!?

Doing some more conlanging. I will have to look more into actual tactile and sign languages in the future to get a more accurate evolution of this, but this is what I've mapped out so far. (Screenshot from Google docs, I apologize for the blur)

toying with the written numerical symbols 

Man the more I look at the linguistic inventory of the trolls, the more it seems like dialects of English that are stigmatised and considered non-standard are synonymous with aristocracy in troll society. Between Meenah, Eridan, Cronus and Gamzee (and maybe Kurloz but I haven’t researched that one yet) there’s a pattern emerging of the use of AAVE at LEAST. Even Vriska tends to use a fair number of non-standard forms, although less consistently. So now I can’t stop thinking about Equius and why his obsession with language trends the way it does. This man is so insecure about his blood colour I s2g.

Klaxon call to Star Trek tumblr!!! Who out there can help this earnest mefite just trying to do the do with their spouse, Klingon-style??

The language of species 10-C

Season 4 of Star Trek: Discovery ought to be called Star Trek: Arrival.

The crew has to figure out how to communicate with species 10-C, which communicates by emitting 16 different pheromones and recombining them in different ways to mean different things.

This is remarkably similar to how human language works, because it exhibits a property called combinatoriality—the ability to recombine a small set of elements into different ways to get new meanings. In spoken language, we recombine a finite set of sounds (anywhere from 11 (Rotokas) to 107 (Taa), depending on the language) into a potentially infinite set of words.

The language of species 10-C has another quirk, however: the pheromones are emitted as a cloud, and the “speaker” has to emit a sequence of flashing lights to tell their interlocutor what order to read the pheromone cloud in. The light pattern acts like a key to a cipher. The 10-C language is thus multimodal, meaning it relies on more than one sense (sight and smell, essentially).

Human languages are also multimodal to a certain extent, relying on both sound and gesture, but not as fully as the 10-C language. Humans can listen to an audio recording with no additional context and still understand the message, whereas species 10-C needs the additional modality of flashing lights in order to be able to interpret the message.

happy holidays!❤️

Every time I tell people I study communication science and they think of frat guys and not uhura a small part of me dies

from a book I'm reading. in-universe, this passage is found in an intergalactic guide book on humans (written from a non-human point of view).

it does present Terran/T-Standard as something you'd be aware of if you are interested in humans, but it would have really helped me if it said, at least, "see the grammar notes in the appendix" next to using the word "pronoun".

since it did not do that, as far as I'm concerned this scifi novel is now centering on the exciting discovery that some language concepts are universal, rather than whatever adventure shenanigans it actually wants me to pay attention to.

Fruity Jason Todd tags on Ao3 that had me... (Part 2)

...go: "Okay, wow."

... relating. The bats do tend to overdo the self-sacrificing thing.

... go: "Haaaah?" As a linguist (with a statistics blog, yes. The irony) I was so digging this tag but I checked out the story and it turned out to not have anything to do with linguistics, so... yeah. :(

...think: I'd sacrifice myself. Really. No biggie.

Go here for Part 1 & Part 3

are you kidding me?? so i got interested after you tagged the vampire city post as "eskew" and finally googled the podcast i saw you talk about. and it's a horror by rusty quill??? I've been looking for a podcast like this for so long and then i chose another one... I've missed the rare opportunity for us to be in the same fandom again. will get to it eventually, but most likely not to soon.... damn......

[in the voice of a comedy villain]So, *folds hands like in the picture*

I got you interested in a fandom, didn't I? I'll wait for you to get to it as long as it takes, I'm patient.

Jokes aside, it's a great podcast - I'm not a horror fan at all and even I enjoyed it a lot and it made me think about so many things (surprisingly including Frei's books) and it has so many themes.