Language barrier problem

Best thing would be to look at ways people try to communicate on Earth when they don't speak the same language. It involves a lot of pointing and gestures. Picture books help with indicating what thing you are talking about if it's not around you to point at it. Drawing would help as well, but not everyone is good enough at drawing to make what they draw recognisable to other people. It's plausible that if you have two characters in a situation they could both be reasonably good at drawing, or one of them is. Acting to convey verbs is another way.

I lived in the Middle East and taught English as a foreign language over there so I've had a lot of experience in overcoming language barriers (my own and my students'). I taught total beginners in classrooms were only English was allowed - using the right techniques one of your characters could teach the other his entire language. Picture books and the ability to draw help a lot. I'm not suggesting one of your characters does this - it's not plausible they'd be trained in how to teach their language - it's just an illustration about how it's actually not as difficult as people think to teach and learn a language when teacher and student don't share any language. (I can speak basic Arabic, but wasn't allowed to use it in the classroom due to the rules of the language school.)

People acquire language quickly. If the two human characters spend a lot of time interacting they'd acquire bits of each others' language and start to develop a patois, even without making a conscious effort to learn each others' language. This would start to develop as soon as they start interacting. Human brains are hard wired to acquire language. They may use gestures, pointing, pictures etc much more in the beginning but as they pick up enough common words from each others' language, they'd not need to rely on that so much.

Also remember that most day to day speech about ordinary things only requires a couple of hundred or so words. More obscure words can be communicated through pictures. And context is important. It's hard to teach "I am hungry" or "I want food" out of context. If you're waiting for a meal to be ready and you say "I'm hungry" while looking hungrily at the food, then it's much more obvious - and this is how we acquire language. From the point of view of writing scenes, you can use the scene itself and the characters actions to convey the context in which they can pick up bits of each others' language. You don't have to do this all the time. You just need to establish that they're starting to pick up bits of each others' language and communication's getting easier.

I don't see how written language would help unless they both spoke a very closely related language that shared a writing system that worked the same way Chinese works. Even though English and French has the same alphabet (albeit French has a few letters with accents) you can't read French unless you can speak French. You can sound out the words if you know the rules of French phonics, but you won't understand them. So I would just forget writing altogether, given this and what you said about the plausibility of feudal commoners being literate.

neandermagnon said:

I don't see how written language would help unless they both spoke a very closely related language that shared a writing system that worked the same way Chinese works.

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Just clarifying: modern Chinese, which is split into Simplified and Traditional Chinese. But the terms aren't always interchangeable or understandable even when written (vocabulary & mindset / viewpoint issues).

Ancient written Chinese was very different to the modern version (though essentially can be deciphered if you know the logographics well enough).

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Otherwise, I agree with Neandermagnon's post.

That depends on what the languages have in common but generally, you start with reference points.

Point at an object. What do you both call it? I say chair, alien dude says zorkalfruster. Now alien knows my word for this object, and I know his.

I would make a list of all the words/concepts they need to know for your story. Things like water/drink, food, home/shelter, spouse/mate, children, danger, sleep- for example. Perhaps you should establish how they go about learning to speak to each other to avoid having to reference it all the time. A simple point or touch and say the word method might be used to start but this can present problem if what is being referred to have multiple aspects- To learn "water" and one person is given a cup of water make sure the water is specifically touched not the cup. For some things they would probably sit and try to figure things out early on, some will probably happen on the fly as it arises.

All this preparatory stuff would drive me nuts.

If it were me, I would just write and see what happened and enjoy the experience through the senses of the POV character as the tale unfolds.

In other words face and cross the hurdles together with the character as they arise.

You already know the basic scenario - they can't understand what each other is saying. Use your imagination - what would you do (if you were ) in your character's shoes?

Good luck.

Bufty said:

You already know the basic scenario - they can't understand what each other is saying. Use your imagination - what would you do (if you were ) in your character's shoes?

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Can't beat this advice.

Bufty said:

All this preparatory stuff would drive me nuts.

If it were me, I would just write and see what happened and enjoy the experience through the senses of the POV character as the tale unfolds.

In other words face and cross the hurdles together with the character as they arise.

You already know the basic scenario - they can't understand what each other is saying. Use your imagination - what would you do (if you were ) in your character's shoes?

Good luck.

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But . . . but . . . we are writers. We must complicate our process or we won't suffer enough. OR is this the difference between pantsers and planners?

BethS said:

Can't beat this advice.

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No, you can't.

Pointing and pantomime can get you a long way, especially with common activities.

As a very simple example, smokers have their own international language formed entirely of two gestures - the pointer and middle fingers brought to one's mouth as if smoking a cigarette, and the loose fisted thumb flick pantomiming a lighter. Those two gestures transcend every linguistic barrier I've ever seen.

Asking the time by looking/pointing at an invisible wristwatch on one's own wrist is also understood everywhere I've traveled, although that experience was gained before phones became the timekeeper of choice, so that one may be going away.

Tazlima said:

Pointing and pantomime can get you a long way, especially with common activities.

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True. Just before retiring, I worked at an apiary with Russian beekeepers. Eight years in Oregon but living in a Russian community in Gresham, the one I partnered with didn't speak very much English nor well enough for me to read lips through a mesh veil, and my "da" and "nyet" did little to help.

However, by pointing and pantomime, we put together a working sign language to amaze his brothers and the boss (a native English speaker who's taught college Russian). It's strange Pavel (below) wasn't interested enough in English to learn much took to ASL like a czar to vodka.



Can't think of much worse circumstances for communications, but we did well for a year and a half.

While not knowing what is in your other planet and how those human-like beings ended up in there and what they are about, I'd be a bit vary of just going the pantomime route and voilá: meaning was conveyed and eventually the language was learned. I think it sounds boring, unbelievable and shows a general lack of understanding of how languages work (and develop). It also misses a huge opportunity in world building!

When I was younger and studying English, I often thought I just didn't know the language well enough to express something I could in my native language, but I've since found out that some concepts (or ways of saying them) just do not translate due to the structural differences of the languages. And this is a problem especially with translating literature (for example Russian is a devilishly difficult language to translate into English, and a lot of the translations into English I've seen are poor - the same is also true of a lot of literature translated from English).

Let me expand on this a wee bit. I speak several languages, and while only two of them (English and my native) I consider myself fluent in, I understand quite well how languages from different language families differ. Ie. a language also carries a "culture" and the way in which we see the world, and the further removed languages are, the more difficult it is to overcome the language barrier. Consider an example: You try to communicate a simple action such as 'I eat food'. You point to yourself, to your mouth, then to the food, right? Some languages just simply don't work like that. In Apalai that would mean the food does something to your mouth (because word order for Apalai is object-verb-subject). So you generate a misunderstanding of the word "eat" and they think you a bit silly for thinking the food walks into your mouth. Or maybe they expect you to feed them? This is only a minor grammatical difference that illustrates the opportunities in what happens when trying overcome the language barrier.

Some languages do not understand (for example) nouns as English does. Some languages only have stems that are necessarily always modified by a person - ie. there are no "passive" universal nouns. Some languages understand nouns for living beings as a spirit occupying a space, rather than a representation of a universal concept or an object. These indicate a different worldview, as in the first case nothing can exist on its own, and in the second case indicating an altogether epistemology that has flowed into the language.

You may also consider that some languages on Earth do not have verb tenses. They do not express the passage of time in action. Or that in some languages people consider blue and green the same basic color, but only differentiated between them similar to we differentiate between light blue and dark blue (they use such specifiers as ocean blue and leaf blue to differentiate if need be). Some languages lack words for color entirely, but only separate dark and light. Some languages don't differentiate between mother and father (not through words, nor through gendered prefixes), even though we would consider this to be a very basic and easily justifiable biologically driven development in a language. If, for example, the planet your thing happens in is ultra-egalitarian, they might not have a word for eating. They might have several words that also signify how many people you share your meal with - the word for eating alone sharing a connotation with our word for treason.

If you take language seriously, the language barrier becomes a fascinating way to build the world. Ann Leckie poked at this in the Ancillary series, where she tied language to gender - and while she did not go much further in the difference between the languages, this in itself became a defining feature in the world building and made the book much deeper.

I guess especially if we assume illiteracy, I don't see where written language would help, and I tend to be pretty leery of world-building as an "opportunity" in a case like this....you invariably build worlds, but man, thinking about it like that, and then maybe thinking back to Tolkien's books, is an invitation to drown your book with it.

All that said, from a simple, practical manner I don't see where gestures and discussion or pantomime are unnatural in a book, given they'd be the first thing most people do in real life, when trying to converse in say a Mexican grocery, or while visiting France or whatever else.....

TSJohnson said:

[...]

If you take language seriously, the language barrier becomes a fascinating way to build the world.

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That was both informative and fascinating. Thanks for weighing in.

quicklime said:

All that said, from a simple, practical manner I don't see where gestures and discussion or pantomime are unnatural in a book, given they'd be the first thing most people do in real life, when trying to converse in say a Mexican grocery, or while visiting France or whatever else.....

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I don't think TSJohnson was saying they're unnatural--just that they can be opportunities for miscommunication. And while a writer wouldn't want to overdue things in the cause of hyper-realism, something like a misunderstood gesture could cause all sorts of interesting complications.

TSJohnson said:

While not knowing what is in your other planet and how those human-like beings ended up in there and what they are about, I'd be a bit vary of just going the pantomime route and voilá: meaning was conveyed and eventually the language was learned.

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I don't think anyone is implying that pantomime is going to teach an entire language, but for basic human functions, it's enough. "I eat food," isn't an idea that one would generally need to convey with the urgency that would lead to pantomime. They're a biological organism, and in this case, the same species, so it's a pretty safe assumption that they eat food. What someone might actually pantomime is "I'm hungry," or "I'm seeking food to trade." In both cases, people would generally pantomime the act of eating, bringing an empty hand to their mouth and pretending to take a bite of something, chew, and swallow. The biological mechanics of how people eat is universal (as is the potty dance). In the case of trade, after they've clarified what they're looking for, they may hold out the item they're willing to trade for said food.

And the pantomime itself gives tons of opportunity for humor, too. The person doing the pantomime may be asking for food, and the person watching perhaps brings them a fish, and is even so kind as to tell them the word for "fish"... which the pantomimer mistakenly thinks translates to "food," subsequently amusing the locals by referring to everything edible as "fish."

Holding up different numbers of fingers to indicate quantity is also fairly universal (although what order the fingers are held up in varies enough that there's a possibility of confusion there (in the US, people start with the pointer finger and end with the thumb, while in western Europe, they start with the thumb and then add fingers - I've witnessed an American hold up three fingers and be served four items because the thumb was assumed to be included in the count). And of course, there's always the possibility of accidentally flashing an obscene gesture.


Clearly this method isn't going to result in any kind of fluency - it will be ungrammatical and lack the delicate shades of meanng that come with properly understanding a language, but it's a tried and true starting point.

5811Heathen said:

First of all, I had no even considered the misunderstanding of gestures. In all of my travels in the world that I have accomplished I had not seen something such as a meal shared i the only way t speak of food in that culture. So I had never even considered something so mundane as a lonely meal as something that could be misunderstood or even offensive. I really appreciate you pointing that out. So for I have done exactly as noted earlier, just write and have fun with it. At one point they break out a notebook my MC has with him and began drawing simple things to get that list so writing went a little smoother. Just trying to pantomime "Thanks for saving me back there" was a mess. I can't count how many times I read that part aloud to make sure that all the described gestures and movements sounded right. This has been a fun experience and challenging for sure. Thanks everyone for the impute.

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Primo Levi has a hilarious scene in "La Tregua," (an autobiographical account of his roundabout journey back to Italy after being freed from Auschwitz), where he and a friend are traveling through a country (I believe they were in Poland at this point) where neither of them spoke the local language. His buddy is a trader who gets it into his head to score them a chicken for dinner, so they enter a tiny village to try and arrange a trade.

He checks to see if any of them speak Italian. Of course, life is never that easy.

He goes the "barnyard sounds" route: "Kickeriki!" - only every language has a different "rooster" sound, so this draws blank stares.

Next he tries pantomime, strutting around, flapping his arms, making chicken noises, even pretending to lay an egg - The locals find this extremely entertaining, but they also look like they're starting to wonder if maybe this stranger has a screw loose.

Finally the guy gets a stick and draws a chicken in the dirt, and they're like "OOOOOH, a chicken!" After that's sorted out, the trade goes pretty smoothly.

...

For a "thank you" gesture, I'd expect someone to do something meaningful in their own culture and hope the other person got the idea (a handshake, bowing or kneeling, some form of salute, a hug, pressing foreheads together - something simple and highly ritualized), or perhaps give some kind of gift to express their gratitude.

Tazlima said:

I don't think anyone is implying that pantomime is going to teach an entire language, but for basic human functions, it's enough. "I eat food," isn't an idea that one would generally need to convey with the urgency that would lead to pantomime. They're a biological organism, and in this case, the same species, so it's a pretty safe assumption that they eat food. What someone might actually pantomime is "I'm hungry," or "I'm seeking food to trade." In both cases, people would generally pantomime the act of eating, bringing an empty hand to their mouth and pretending to take a bite of something, chew, and swallow. The biological mechanics of how people eat is universal (as is the potty dance). In the case of trade, after they've clarified what they're looking for, they may hold out the item they're willing to trade for said food.

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I've personally seen pantomimes for eating that I didn't readily understand. One of them was a weird fast hand motion at breast level (from a culture where people still eat with their hands), while another one demonstrated the holding of a bowl and the flick of a wrist (I realized later this symbolized chopstick movement). Did I understand after a few moments? Yes. Were they universal? No. Like I said, these are symbols, and symbols are culturally laden even if they are based on biological necessities. Of course the vast majority of people (or perhaps all people) understand pointing at your mouth or shoveling stuff in it, and I agree with you on that. I'm just saying that there might be an alien culture out there that has such strange things in it that these provide an opportunity for much horseplay.

I guess the central tenet of what I'm saying, is that I think biological drives can be overcome by culture/social influences, and while biological functions drive us toward certain behavioral patterns, the patterns can still differ vastly between cultures. Especially when the cultures are old/"highly developed".

Oh, there are also cultures on Earth that consider pointing to be very offensive. From an alien culture's perspective it could symbolize stabbing someone with a dagger, or shooting them with pew-pew laser. Far fetched? Well, it's scifi...

And the pantomime itself gives tons of opportunity for humor, too. The person doing the pantomime may be asking for food, and the person watching perhaps brings them a fish, and is even so kind as to tell them the word for "fish"... which the pantomimer mistakenly thinks translates to "food," subsequently amusing the locals by referring to everything edible as "fish."

Holding up different numbers of fingers to indicate quantity is also fairly universal (although what order the fingers are held up in varies enough that there's a possibility of confusion there (in the US, people start with the pointer finger and end with the thumb, while in western Europe, they start with the thumb and then add fingers - I've witnessed an American hold up three fingers and be served four items because the thumb was assumed to be included in the count). And of course, there's always the possibility of accidentally flashing an obscene gesture.

Clearly this method isn't going to result in any kind of fluency - it will be ungrammatical and lack the delicate shades of meaning that come with properly understanding a language, but it's a tried and true starting point.

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Very much agreed on all points.