how do you deal with language barrier betweens humans and aliens?

sassandgroove · May 5, 2013

How do you handle the language barrier between humans and an alien race?

In my story humans encounter a race of bird people. Obviously they need to communicate. In addition to alien language they sing. Their song evokes images of a story but only a handful of humans see the images and can't reciprocate (sing to create images). The humans weren't expecting to find aliens so they don't have a linguist.

What I've looked up just talks about language in general. If it looks like a rabbit and acts like a rabbit call it a rabbit. That kind of thing.

Debbie V · May 6, 2013

Language is cultural, so my best guess is that for a long time, they just wouldn't be able to communicate. (Think about all those eskimo words for snow). Among humans, we use gestures and facial expressions along with images and sound, but we come from the same world and our conceptual language is the same across cultures. A rose by any other name - but if you've never seen a rose, names mean nothing.

That said, humans can't sing but they can make music. Close Encounters anyone. They can also use visuals. Remember it's about concepts/ideas not words. Consider sign language. It would take a long time for them to get enough common ground in their repertoires to get full ideas across to each other, but if both parties try they might succeed eventually creating a Rosetta stone effect, passing a tipping point where it can all become clear.
A linguist may do better than I on this. I'm just a former ESL teacher.

CosmicLibrary · May 6, 2013

I love the idea of the bird people with the song language! Bird songs are often repetitive, so it may be relatively quick to pick up on the basics of the language, but depending on how advanced the language/culture is, it may be more difficult.

Xelebes · May 6, 2013

Debbie V said:
(Think about all those eskimo words for snow).

Blizzard
Oatmeal
Skiff
Skiffings
Sleet
Slush
Snow
Snowball
Snowboulder
Snowclag
Snowdogs
Snowdrift
Snowflake
Snowpack
Snowplate
Snowstorm
Squall

Trust us, we have as many words for snow as the Inuit do.

Furthermore, alien languages would be unintelligible. Sometimes it is fun to consider them intelligible, unintelligible, and so unintelligible you would be talking to a tree.

NinjaFingers · May 6, 2013

In my opinion, immersion would still work... (I use immersion in Transpecial although, admittedly, the person doing it IS a linguist).

You aren't going to get high concept vocabulary without much study of the culture, but you can get *working* vocabulary by the point and speak method (although an alien race might not point...chimps don't unless taught to do so by people!)

Working vocabulary is where you start. Sky, earth, you, me, human, bird...

triceretops · May 6, 2013

I've got the same thing going and my humans are using pantomime, sketches in the dirt, hand gestures, enunciation and some rudimentary language at first. In the first days and weeks they're developing some primary language skills that involve verbs and nouns, at least enough to communicate with.

milkweed · May 6, 2013

sassandgroove said:
How do you handle the language barrier between humans and an alien race?

In my story humans encounter a race of bird people. Obviously they need to communicate. In addition to alien language they sing. Their song evokes images of a story but only a handful of humans see the images and can't reciprocate (sing to create images). The humans weren't expecting to find aliens so they don't have a linguist.

couldn't those humans then act as translators?

Buffysquirrel · May 6, 2013

Presumably they have computers though? Language is data that can be analysed and reduced to algorithms.

sassandgroove · May 6, 2013

Thanks everyone. I really appreciate your feedback.
milkweed, yes, but they also need to communicate back to the birdpeople, and there are only a few of them.

Thanks buffy. I guess I need to go figure out what an algorithim is.

Debbie V · May 6, 2013

Xelebes said:
Blizzard
Oatmeal
Skiff
Skiffings
Sleet
Slush
Snow
Snowball
Snowboulder
Snowclag
Snowdogs
Snowdrift
Snowflake
Snowpack
Snowplate
Snowstorm
Squall

Trust us, we have as many words for snow as the Inuit do.

Furthermore, alien languages would be unintelligible. Sometimes it is fun to consider them intelligible, unintelligible, and so unintelligible you would be talking to a tree.

Many of those things are made from snow, but not snow themselves. Snowstorm, for example, differentiates from rainstorm. It means storm with snow - but the word for snow is still snow. Okay, so I'm nitpicking.

Liosse de Velishaf · May 6, 2013

Xelebes said:
Blizzard
Oatmeal
Skiff
Skiffings
Sleet
Slush
Snow
Snowball
Snowboulder
Snowclag
Snowdogs
Snowdrift
Snowflake
Snowpack
Snowplate
Snowstorm
Squall

Trust us, we have as many words for snow as the Inuit do.

Furthermore, alien languages would be unintelligible. Sometimes it is fun to consider them intelligible, unintelligible, and so unintelligible you would be talking to a tree.

Debbie V said:
Many of those things are made from snow, but not snow themselves. Snowstorm, for example, differentiates from rainstorm. It means storm with snow - but the word for snow is still snow. Okay, so I'm nitpicking.

English actually has more basic roots for snow than Eskimo, which has about four. Goes back to the argument about what a "word" is. You can certainly keep tacking on affixes in an Eskimo-Aleut language, but it's really not any different from what Xelebes was doing with "snow-" compounding in English.

Sass, you can use a computer to sing responses and such back to the birds.

An algorithm is a set of instructions to achieve a goal, such as translating into English from an alien language.

blacbird · May 6, 2013

There exists a wide variety of standard SF tropes to deal with this situation, starting with the simplest:

1. Aliens all speak English.

More commonly these days we have computer tech that can instantly translate any language into English, which amounts to the same thing. I think somebody invented a magic fish that could fit into a human ear and accomplish the same task. Though I never could figure out how they do the lip-movement thing in the movies.

But this seems to me a fertile field for SF writers: What if we can't communicate with encountered aliens, and vice versa?

I can think of few SF works that have really dealt with this possibility. Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is one, in a way. And the old original 1960s Star Trek series touched on it in a few episodes, notably the ones involving a weird thing called "The Crystalline Entity". It was a large lattice of geometric spikes, as I recall, and it traveled through space somewhat randomly, as near as could be discerned. But it had immense power, and seemed inscrutably hostile to any life forms it encountered. The Enterprise and Captain Kirk ran afoul of it on a few occasions, were utterly unable to communicate with it, and ultimately, after much excitement and careening around on the bridge of the Enterprise, they and the Entity parted ways, none the wiser.

I'd love to see the Crystalline Entity return in the new series of movies.

caw

Cornelius Gault · May 6, 2013

If you have enough time in your plot, you could have somebody teach a computer to learn their "words" and then translate them back and forth - albeit disjointedly - and the computer could improve upon the language as time went by and it learned more words. The translation could work both ways - BIRDSONG-TO-COMPUTER-TO-ENGLISH and ENGLISH-TO-COMPUTER-TO-BIRDSONG.

Cramp · May 7, 2013

Embassytown by China Mieville is a Sci-Fi book all about aliens and language and the difficulties of communicating with beings who could be utterly different from us in fundamental ways.

Lissibith · May 7, 2013

I cheated and used pictoral and image-based telepathy as a universal language (ie when one person tries to say "sun" what they actually send to the other person's mind is the idea of a sun - the bright ball of heat and light in the sky, etc.)

This causes a few problems, as it only works in close proximity and also can't be used for written communication.

It also means the general culture of "space" has determined that being able to talk telepathically is one of the baselines for sentience. Meaning my human main character spends a few years being treated like a particularly bright pet until he learns how to speak via telepathy.

But then, I was trying to create a system which would cause specific communication problems, which is probably not the way to go about it.

Buffysquirrel · May 7, 2013

If you've ever used text-to-speech or a GPS or an online translation site, that's the sort of level of quality you'd be talking about. Basic communication. Tenses are wrong, inflections are wrong, but you get the idea.

benbenberi · May 7, 2013

Communication with alien species is a non-trivial problem -- look how well we communicate with dolphins, with whom we share a lot of biology, or with the brainier birds or octopi. (Not very well, if at all.) Positing the possibility of true communication with an alien is in itself a major leap of faith -- so I think you just have to commit, wave your hands purposefully and make use of whatever form and extent of communication serves your story best: it's all magic, however you dress it up. Just think through your parameters & implications, and be consistent.

lbender · May 7, 2013

blacbird said:
There exists a wide variety of standard SF tropes to deal with this situation, starting with the simplest:

1. Aliens all speak English.

More commonly these days we have computer tech that can instantly translate any language into English, which amounts to the same thing. I think somebody invented a magic fish that could fit into a human ear and accomplish the same task. Though I never could figure out how they do the lip-movement thing in the movies.

But this seems to me a fertile field for SF writers: What if we can't communicate with encountered aliens, and vice versa?

I can think of few SF works that have really dealt with this possibility. Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is one, in a way. And the old original 1960s Star Trek series touched on it in a few episodes, notably the ones involving a weird thing called "The Crystalline Entity". It was a large lattice of geometric spikes, as I recall, and it traveled through space somewhat randomly, as near as could be discerned. But it had immense power, and seemed inscrutably hostile to any life forms it encountered. The Enterprise and Captain Kirk ran afoul of it on a few occasions, were utterly unable to communicate with it, and ultimately, after much excitement and careening around on the bridge of the Enterprise, they and the Entity parted ways, none the wiser.

I'd love to see the Crystalline Entity return in the new series of movies.

caw

Sorry Blacbird, but the Crystalline Entity was destroyed in an episode of Next Generation. I suppose there could be others out there - possibly the crystal equivalent of family...

sassandgroove said:
How do you handle the language barrier between humans and an alien race?

In my story humans encounter a race of bird people. Obviously they need to communicate. In addition to alien language they sing. Their song evokes images of a story but only a handful of humans see the images and can't reciprocate (sing to create images). The humans weren't expecting to find aliens so they don't have a linguist.

What I've looked up just talks about language in general. If it looks like a rabbit and acts like a rabbit call it a rabbit. That kind of thing.

There was one episode of Next Generation where the Enterprise came across an alien ship whose language translated to English, but they spoke in metaphors, so the meaning was untranslatable. Communication was achieved by total immersion. Sorry - I don't remember the name of the episode.

sassandgroove · May 7, 2013

Thanks everyone - this is great. I like the idea of a computer program - maybe not instantly translating but using it to build a vocabulary. Also the humans could use the computers to show the bird people images until they figure out the language.

sassandgroove · May 7, 2013

lbender said:
There was one episode of Next Generation where the Enterprise came across an alien ship whose language translated to English, but they spoke in metaphors, so the meaning was untranslatable. Communication was achieved by total immersion. Sorry - I don't remember the name of the episode.

I remember that one. I don't even think it was metaphor it was events. They spoke in events, because in their context they all knew what the implications were. But the humans didn't. IF we're thinking of the same episode.

Humans do that to on a smaller level. We all know about September 11th, when Kennedy was shot, and regionally we know about weather disasters, that big snow storm of 93 or the the APril 27 tornado. But we use language to articulate those things, we don't just reference the event.
Sorry- tangent.

K.R.Schmidt · May 7, 2013

I have toyed with languages in a few book ideas in the past.

Chemical (a book where people communicated with insects found deep in the amazon)

Ritualized Movement (think bees dancing- also in the same book)

Sensory/Bio-electrical (Used by ants and other insects. Story of alien race that could project their consciousness to other planets)

EDIT: Just missed that above post LOL!

Don't forget that there was an episode of Star Trek NG ("Darmok" - Season 5, Episode 2) where the aliens spoke English

rolls eyes

but their language was used to describe events that mirrored their thoughts or feelings, rather than direct communication.

Alexys · May 7, 2013

Or the aliens interpret sound as touch-sensation, meaning that the human concepts of phonemes, etc., just don't work despite the aliens being humanoid in appearance and outlook. (H. Beam Piper's "Naudsonce", an oldie but a goodie, assuming you can accept a future where everyone smokes. In this particular case, it might be worth reading just for the early scene where the humans are trying to establish communication.)

JimmyB27 · May 7, 2013

Are they technologically advanced aliens? You could always cheat and employ handwavium to give them a device to translate?

ECathers · May 9, 2013

benbenberi said:
Communication with alien species is a non-trivial problem -- look how well we communicate with dolphins, with whom we share a lot of biology, or with the brainier birds or octopi. (Not very well, if at all.) Positing the possibility of true communication with an alien is in itself a major leap of faith -- so I think you just have to commit, wave your hands purposefully and make use of whatever form and extent of communication serves your story best: it's all magic, however you dress it up. Just think through your parameters & implications, and be consistent.

Communication with dolphins seems to still be in the working phases, but quite possible. Despite the fact that they are probably far smarter than humans, we haven't quite worked out a Rosetta stone with them. One challenge is that some of their communication might be past our hearing range. Another that we as humans just haven't been smart enough to figure them out yet.

Gorillas have already been taught to communicate via ASL and have been pretty darn fluent in it. Though Octopi seem to be darn smart, they also seem to be rather uncaring about humans, so I'd think it'll take us a while to communicate w them.

LOTLOF · May 9, 2013

You could take a lesson from how the Spanish explorers handled some of the peoples they ran into in the new world. They would take some of the natives and teach them Spanish (along with Christianity of course) just as if they were children.

Now whether some of the aliens would be willing to submit to this; living among humans for months or even years. Or have a few human volunteers live with the aliens, would be an interesting question.

how do you deal with language barrier betweens humans and aliens?

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