Sci-fi Languages

Datana · Post by **Datana** » 2002-07-18 06:59pm

Most sci-fi series feature at least snippets of alien language. Most of the time, languages for TV and movie sci-fi are just not alien enough, being based heavily on English sentence structures and sounds, and only a few cases really being unusual-sounding (Star Wars language bits being at the top of my mind here). Are there any examples of sentence structure and grammar being laid out ahead of time and language being important to the plot? The only two examples of heavily-planned languages that I can think of offhand are the Seikai series of novels' Baronh (AKA Abh) and Star Trek's tlhIngan'Hol (AKA Klingonese).

Post by **Mr Bean** » 2002-07-18 07:46pm

Are there any examples of sentence structure and grammar being laid out ahead of time and language being important to the plot

Hmm I think I forget the book Series but the Laungauge is Dark-Elf and a fun one it is because every, yes EVERY single sentance can be modifed very slightly to become a subtle insult

That it Twi-lek from SW thier race is fun because every name has a built in insult
The example Wedge Antillies,
They merg the first and last name and add two letters, depending on where you add it Wedge Antilles is either
Slayer of Stars
OR
One who is so foul as to induce Vomiting

I just loved that, built in insults

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-07-18 10:10pm

It's not sci-fi but Tolkien literally created two whole complete lnguages for the elves. Quenya and Sindarin were both complete languages. Believe it or not there are actually experts them. They hired them for the LotR movies.

fgalkin2 · Post by **fgalkin2** » 2002-07-18 10:13pm

Stormbringer wrote:It's not sci-fi but Tolkien literally created two whole complete lnguages for the elves. Quenya and Sindarin were both complete languages. Believe it or not there are actually experts them. They hired them for the LotR movies.

They are still based on Finnish, though.

Stormbringer · Post by **Stormbringer** » 2002-07-18 10:25pm

They are still based on Finnish, though.

Yeah. I don't think there is any complete fictional language that isn't based on some language. A lot of Star Wars' language is bad off Dutch if I remember right. Klingon is based off some language, some slavic languae if I remember right. What he was asking was if there were fictional lanuages not based on English grammatical structure.

fgalkin2 · Post by **fgalkin2** » 2002-07-18 10:35pm

Stormbringer wrote:
They are still based on Finnish, though.
Yeah. I don't think there is any complete fictional language that isn't based on some language. A lot of Star Wars' language is bad off Dutch if I remember right. Klingon is based off some language, some slavic languae if I remember right. What he was asking was if there were fictional lanuages not based on English grammatical structure.

Klingon is based on slavic? Sure doesn't sound like it.

Enlightenment · Post by **Enlightenment** » 2002-07-19 12:22am

http://www.zompist.com

Datana · Post by **Datana** » 2002-07-19 01:15am

Hm. Languages have always been kind of an interesting topic for me, hence my bringing this topic up in the first place.
Enlightenment -- thanks for the zompist link. I'm having great fun reading their language creation kit at the moment.

Post by **Edi** » 2002-07-19 07:22am

They are still based in Finnish, though.

Not Sindarin. Sindarin is actually based on Welsh, I've been told. Quenya grammar is based in Finnish, which means you native English speakers really do not want to know the particulars... Unless you like getting a headache, of course...

Anyway, pronunciation of both languages is exactly like you would pronounce Finnish words. I once took a look at the pronunciation instructions in an English copy of LotR and I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. Got my tongue tangled good, however. Then I realized everything came out right if I just spoke them like Finnish. Seems there are some benefits of having an obscure native language after all...

Edi

fgalkin2 · Post by **fgalkin2** » 2002-07-19 11:55am

Edi wrote:
They are still based in Finnish, though.
Not Sindarin. Sindarin is actually based on Welsh, I've been told. Quenya grammar is based in Finnish, which means you native English speakers really do not want to know the particulars... Unless you like getting a headache, of course...

Anyway, pronunciation of both languages is exactly like you would pronounce Finnish words. I once took a look at the pronunciation instructions in an English copy of LotR and I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. Got my tongue tangled good, however. Then I realized everything came out right if I just spoke them like Finnish. Seems there are some benefits of having an obscure native language after all...

Edi

Indeed, Finnnish is ridiculously hard. After three visits to Finland, I was able to pick up ONE word: kiitas(sp?). And, yes, Quenya sounds Finnish.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-07-19 06:18pm

In Star Wars, Huttese is a fully mapped out language, although Droidspeak is not. Also, I think that Huttese IS based on Terran grammatical structure, although the words themselves and the sounds behind them come from a number of different sources. Ben Burt (sound director) came up with them. Rodian is also supposedly somewhat complete (Greedo), but it's only been used a few times.

Post by **Edi** » 2002-07-22 05:32am

fgalkin, where are you from? Anyway, yes, I agree with you, Finnish is ridiculously hard. I know English grammar better than Finnish, if that's any indication. And given that apart from verbs, practically every word in our language has 14 different conjugations, and words that look exactly alike (e.g. hedgehog = siili & brick = tiili) are conjugated differently depending on when they were introduced into the language, no wonder it can give you a headache! And verbs are another story entirely... *shudder*

But three visits and only 'thank you' (kiitos)? Lol, it's not quite that hard! Picking up common words such as 'restaurant', 'beer' and so forth isn't that hard, but I suppose remembering them is. I know I remember very few words of Italian...

Edi

Eleas · Post by **Eleas** » 2002-07-22 06:46am

The Orion's Arm sci fi world comes to mind, where there are even languages for creatures with vocal apparatii different from humans. I never tried to learn those.

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2002-07-22 07:43am

Master of Ossus wrote: Also, I think that Huttese IS based on Terran grammatical structure, although the words themselves and the sounds behind them come from a number of different sources.

Huttese is based on Inca language if I recall correctly. I have also found a document on the net called the "Eldar-English dictionary", about the language of the Eldar of 40K.

BTW, isn't there also some litterature on the language spoken by the Vulcans?? (which appear to be even harder to learn than klingonese!!)

BTW#2, to me the Klingonese language sounds very little slavic, more like Swahili, Turkish and perhaps Urdu thrown in a blender.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2002-07-22 08:28am

I'll have to fork out the snippets of Marain, the Culture's main language, for a taster here.

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2002-07-22 01:08pm

Well this doesnt count as a totally unique language, but in Star Gate the Movie (not the TV show SG-1) the language that the people of the planet speak is a rendition of ancient egyptian, the closest anyone has ever devised. It sounds quite good and the movie doesn't have a single line where the non-Earthers speak english (lots of subtitles). I suggest you take a look at the movie, its really unique.

unigolyn · Post by **unigolyn** » 2002-09-27 06:28am

fgalkin2 wrote:
Stormbringer wrote:It's not sci-fi but Tolkien literally created two whole complete lnguages for the elves. Quenya and Sindarin were both complete languages. Believe it or not there are actually experts them. They hired them for the LotR movies.
They are still based on Finnish, though.

Nope. Only one is based on english, the other's based on Welsh. I forget which is which, because I always confuse the names Quenya and Sindarin, but I know the one in common use in the Third Age is the one based on Finnish, whereas the high-elven ceremonial language is based on Welsh. They're both only based on those languages, though, and each has characteristics of both sources. Tolkien used the Finno-Ugric system of no prepositions, declination and conjugation of words by suffixes, and a loose word order. The sound of the languages is close to the sound of Welsh, although the words in common elvish aren't from Welsh, but either made up or borrowed from Finno-Ugric roots. Neither from of elvish sounds nothing like Finnish or any other Finno-Ugric language I've heard. The languages are not 'modified versions' of any current language, though, and you have to wonder how much difference from existing languages there could be in any alien language. Humanoid life-forms in sci-fi are generally similar enough to humans to warrant the need to communicate the same things that we communicate, with verbs and nouns and adjectives. And there are only so many ways to form those words into sentences capable of expressing abstract ideas, and I'm afraid humans have come up with all of them already. The sentence 'Go in the house' is something that any humanoid alien who lives in some sort of building would have to say in its language. On earth there are tons of ways to say this:

Indo-European
English: Go into the house (verb-illative preposition-definite article-subject)
Welsh: Mynd yn y ty (Go in the house) (verb-illative preposition-def.art.-subject)

Finno-Ugric
Estonian: Mine majja (Go house-in) (conjugated verb-declinated subject+innative suffix) (original form of words: minema, maja)
Finnish: Mene taloon (Go house-in) (conjugated verb-subject+innative suffix) (original form of words: menemään, talo)

A humanoid alien could also want cold water, and on earth there's different ways to say this:

Indo-European
English: I want cold water (personal pronoun-verb-adjective-subject)
Welsh: Rydw i eisiau dwr oer ((untranslatable) I want water cold) (present tense conjugation of 'to be'-personal pronoun-verb-subject-adjective)

Finno-Ugric
Estonian: Mina tahan külma vett (I want cold water) (personal pronoun-conjugated verb-declinated adjective-declinated noun+partitive suffix) (original form of words: mina, tahtma, külm, vesi)
Finnish: Minä haluan kylmää vettä (I want cold water) (personal pronoun-conjugated verb-declinated adjective-declinated noun+partitive suffix) (original form of words: minä-haluta-kylmä-vesi)

This is just to show (in the languages i speak, others do things quite differently) how much variance there is in not just the sounds of language or the vocabularies, but in how the words relate to each other. English and Welsh are distantly related, both Indo-European languages. And although both have the definite article 'the', Welsh lacks the indefinite article 'a'. Estonian and Finnish have neither. Nor do they have the pronouns 'he/she', there's only one pronoun for people, be they male or female. So someone translating The Matrix into Estonian or Finnish would have real trouble with the seemingly simple phrase 'He is the one', because it automatically loses both the implied sex and the definite article, and basically turns into 'It is one' (although inanimate objects do have their own pronoun). Finno-Ugric languages also have a very loose word order, thanks to the lack of prepositions:

English: Stars were often seen in the sky.

Only one way to say it in english, really.

Estonian: Taevas nähti tihti tähti. Taevas tihti tähti nähti. Tihti nähti taevas tähti. Nähti tihti tähti taevas. etc, etc.

32 different possible word orders, all grammatically correct, thanks to the suffixes and no articles (Insky wereseen often stars).

That's just 4 languages out of thousands on earth, all using differing rules of grammar. People write from left to right, right to left, vertically, using alphabets, pictograms, hieroglyphs. There's so much variance in earth languages that to come up with a working system that doesn't use something found in an existing language is in my opinion next to impossible. Sci-fi aliens at least sound pretty alien sometimes, but the most exotic ones are probably electronically tweaked recordings of Gilbert Gottfried backwards.

unigolyn · Post by **unigolyn** » 2002-09-27 06:42am

Edi wrote:fgalkin, where are you from? Anyway, yes, I agree with you, Finnish is ridiculously hard. I know English grammar better than Finnish, if that's any indication. And given that apart from verbs, practically every word in our language has 14 different conjugations, and words that look exactly alike (e.g. hedgehog = siili & brick = tiili) are conjugated differently depending on when they were introduced into the language, no wonder it can give you a headache! And verbs are another story entirely... *shudder*
Edi

Finnish (like Estonian) grammar (the theory of it) is VERY hard, even to a native speaker, but it's not THAT hard to learn to actually speak it. People who actually live among Finnish or Estonian speakers learn it in a few years, and the conjugation becomes a sort of second nature, you learn to wing it. In a way, maybe this makes learning Finnish easier, since you decide early on to throw grammar rules out the window and learn it by the seat of your pants.

The much simpler rules of English grammar seem less of an effort to learn, so students concentrate on that, but conciously memorizing a system is much more prone to mistakes, and as babelfish proves, even a computer can't produce coherent sentences although it has access to all the rules.

Post by **Edi** » 2002-09-27 08:25am

I've never had any difficulty, I inherited a gift for languages from my parents, but given how different Finnish and Estonian are from the Indo-European languages, I wouldn't want to be a foreigner trying to learn either one...

Anyway, you're right, foreigners can learn enough pretty quickly to get by, and some people learn very fast. The English fellow who is coach for one of the Finnish league football (soccer for you Americans) teams learned near perfect Finnish in about two years, which is nothing short of astounding.

Unigolyn, tell me, which language is harder to learn in your opinion, Finnish or Estonian? I find trying to read any Estonian text very hard because you guys use a lot more of the letters g, b and d than we do while pronouncing them as k, p and t respectively, and I always get my tongue tangled when I try to pronounce Estonian.

Could be result of being used to pronouncing things the way they're written, and that throws me off. And then there's the words that mean one thing in Finnish and something completely different in Estonian... AAARRGGHH!!!!

Edi

unigolyn · Post by **unigolyn** » 2002-09-27 11:36pm

I'd consider them about equal as far as difficulty goes, estonian's actually a bit less difficult, since the declination of nouns doesn't go as far as it does in Finnish. Example:

Finnish: 'Minun maani' (my country), 'Sinun maasi' (your country) (minä, sinä, maa)
Estonian: 'Minu maa' (my country), 'Sinu maa' (your country) (mina, sina, maa)

As to the kpt/gbd thing... We consider Finnish to be just as 'wrong' about it as you consider estonian to be

We don't actually pronounce D like you pronounce T, the sound is just a bit softer, and it's not at all aspirated, like the finnish short KPT are. Your GBDs sound very nasal to us, compare the finnish D and B sounds to their english counterparts: 'kade - madison' 'laboratorio - laboratory'. The B and D sound softer and more pronounced in Finnish, don't they? It's not a matter of us using KTP for GBD, it's a matter of consonant lenght - our single KPT is much longer than yours, and almost all Finns have trouble pronouncing Estonian names like Mati. You either say something that sounds a lot like Madi to us (only slightly aspirated), it comes out like the Finnish name Matti (we both pronounce double KPTs in pretty much the same way). Whereas your way of pronouncing GBD sounds like it should be written GGBBDD, if you get what i mean. Similarly, your Ls are a lot softer than ours.

I think the difference comes from different people invading us - more swedes for you as opposed to germans for us. Our consonants sound a lot like german consonants, lenghtwise. Similarly, your GBDs sound similar to their swedish counterparts. And the first people to write our respective languages down were people who spoke either Swedish or German, thus influencing the way they're represented in writing.

I never had any problems confusing the two languages, because my father is finnish, and I learned both languages while growing up. Other estonians do find it amusing that you blow instead of talking (puhumine(blowing)-puhuminen(talking)), and you might find it weird that we rape our money (raiskamine(spending)-raiskaaminen(raping)). And then there's the old joke about a finn in an estonian hotel, shocked when the maid says he can go into his room right after she decorates the corpses (koristan ruumid(i'll clean the rooms)-koristan ruumiit(i'll decorate the corpses).

Kelly Antilles · Post by **Kelly Antilles** » 2002-09-28 12:02am

Master of Ossus wrote:In Star Wars, Huttese is a fully mapped out language, although Droidspeak is not. Also, I think that Huttese IS based on Terran grammatical structure, although the words themselves and the sounds behind them come from a number of different sources. Ben Burt (sound director) came up with them. Rodian is also supposedly somewhat complete (Greedo), but it's only been used a few times.

Actually, I believe Greedo is speaking Huttese. Basically, Huttese is a well known language in the SW Galaxy. Most traveled people speak Basic and Huttese.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2002-09-28 12:03am

Kelly Antilles wrote:
Master of Ossus wrote:In Star Wars, Huttese is a fully mapped out language, although Droidspeak is not. Also, I think that Huttese IS based on Terran grammatical structure, although the words themselves and the sounds behind them come from a number of different sources. Ben Burt (sound director) came up with them. Rodian is also supposedly somewhat complete (Greedo), but it's only been used a few times.
Actually, I believe Greedo is speaking Huttese. Basically, Huttese is a well known language in the SW Galaxy. Most traveled people speak Basic and Huttese.

I don't agree with you. In "Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina," Han Solo tells him, "You can turn off the squawk box [translator], Greedo, I speak Rodian. That, to me, indicates a difference between Huttese and Rodian.

Slartibartfast · Post by **Slartibartfast** » 2002-09-29 03:10am

Does Quechua count? I mean, it was used in a sci-fi game wasn't it?

Peregrin Toker · Post by **Peregrin Toker** » 2002-09-29 01:34pm

Slartibartfast wrote:Does Quechua count? I mean, it was used in a sci-fi game wasn't it?

Quechua? What's that?

kojikun · Post by **kojikun** » 2002-09-29 01:37pm

Quechua is a native Central American (or is it andean?) language. I'm fairly certain that its related to Mayan.

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Sci-fi Languages

Sci-fi Languages

Quenya & Sindarin

Re: Quenya & Sindarin