I have been interested in alien (invented) languages since my first brush with elven in the Lord of the Rings. I checked out The Klingon Dictionary
New Scientist has a brief article about the possibility of actually preparing for what alien languages might be like. The argument that Terrence Deacon of UC Berkeley makes (according to the article) is that language serves a purpose. It is a communication system for describing the world and since the world is in some way a fixed point of reference (though perception of the world is not), then abstract symbolism is a feature common to all languages.
At one point, the study of xenolinguistics would have been a dream job for me. A nice office at NASA, a field that will probably never be verifiable. Could you ask for more?
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23 April 2008 at 21:31:27
Asad Sayeed
An interesting alien language is the one that CJ Cherryh invents for her long-running Foreigner series. Basically, the aliens, called “atevi”, are similar to humans in a lot of ways, but one of the ways in which they are different is that they have the biological equivalent of a math co-processor (remember those?). So they have a deep attention to numbers both in their grammar and in their culture. Floral arrangements send complicated social signals depending on the numbers of different kinds of flowers. Sentences, in the dominant atevi language (called Ragi), have number-agreement patterns that require solving equations.
23 April 2008 at 22:33:34
Jason Adams
Yeah, I like that idea. Having a math coprocessor would certainly make life a good bit easier.. :)
I’ve only read one thing by CJ Cherryh, which was like Rider at the Gates or something. All I remember are psychic horses. Would you recommend the Foreigner books?
27 April 2008 at 00:52:29
Asad Sayeed
The Rider books are among my least favorite of Cherryh’s opus, and a new one hasn’t been written in a long time (only two made it out the door, it seems).
Yes, I highly recommend the Foreigner books. There’s a reason why it may end up at 12 books. Already nine have been written, and people (including me) haven’t grown tired of it. But, there isn’t a heck of a lot of detail as to the specifics of the grammar. A lot more on the human/atevi interface, and how the atevi language messes up aspects of that interface. For instance, human “on the one hand/on the other hand” discourse habits are extremely jarring to atevi, for whom even numbers, particularly powers-of-two, as associated with ugliness from the POV of modern-minded atevi, and bad luck for superstitious ones.
Some atevi are, predictably, very suspicious of the concept of binary computing…