Gremlin on brain rot

Supposed to be a Yuri!!! On Ice blog but there's a little rock and his leaky space blob in my brain rn. Sorry to the yoi moots for that, I promise I've not abandoned the sacred texts | Art tag: arom antix art | Buy me a glass of milk

[arom-antix]

Smash your competition, baby

Open for higher resolution Credit to @neon-garbage-angel for the idea Close-ups, explanation, design, and extras below the break

So there I was, innocently scrolling Tumblr on a Monday when someone reblogs a post of mine. I go to look and find tags on my Judas piece that immediately katapult me into this piece and, as is tradition for me, listening to the song that inspired this piece on repeat until I was done. Due to stuff, that took three whole days. I want to extend a formal thanks and a formal please I will never get this song out of my head, thank you for that but I also hate you a little bit /j to @neon-garbage-angel for introducing me to Gladiator by Jann. This is canon to me now.

And because I couldn't decide while I was drawing, I did a version where Viktor still has his long hair. However, when I was doing the design sheet and really thought hard about my decisions, the short-haired version makes more sense so that one got the top spot. But have the other version anyway!

Here are some promised close-ups because this thing got intricate. I should've known. I was surprised anyway.

And then last but certainly not least: Me being back on my bullshit! Here, have an extremely cramped design sheet! (I apologise to anyone using a screen reader in advance, I'll try my best with the ALT YuY)

[arom-antix]

Hello PHM peeps. I've decided to sew a quilt inspired by Grace's quilt from the film, but with the motifs on the blocks being of stuff from the story (both the book and the film). I have a 43 item long list already of ideas but I expect I'll need at least 50-55 to have enough stuff to cover the quilt with the way I've designed it so far.

So I'm asking if anyone has any ideas of stuff that would be fun to paint onto a quilt like this. Any suggestions, big or small, serious or silly will be greatly appreciated :)

For anyone interested, details about the quilt so far under the cut.

This is the block layout I've settled on.

The quilt is 2m x 2m so a sizable fella, meaning I have a fair amount of space to paint on each block. Not every block will be painted, I have some fun scraps I plant to use too, but most will be. There are 75 blocks in total.

If you're wondering about the misalignment of the blocks, that's taken directly from the film. The quilt changes almost every time we see it so this is my best attempt at combining those multiple versions.

I'm also taking plenty of artistic liberties to make the quilt something fun for me. I'm obviously replacing the motifs from the film with film and book related motifs, both because I think it's fun, but also because we just don't see the canon motifs enough for me to be able to recreate them. So I'm doing whatever I want. I'm also making the backing colour that warm orangey yellow that's Grace's colour because white backing is boring. And idek what's going on with the binding on the canon one, I think it's printed on, so I made that red for the Petrova line instead of dealing with that mess.

These are the fabrics for the backing and the binding:

Tumblr, stop dulling my images, cmon.

Anyway, the blocks will be an unbleached cotton canvas that I paint whatever colour I want. A gift for the indecisive soul (me).

Anyway, this is about as far as I have pics to share of so far. If people are interested, I can keep posting progress as more stuff reaches a shareable state.

[arom-antix]

Why Rocky speaks Like That™

It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.

Break for the Dash™

I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.

This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:

He speaks clearly. It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up. There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even. It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.

He uses words he knows Grace knows. Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know. And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too. His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.

He speaks in English in Eridian. This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me. Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language. Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is". The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that. Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible. Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.

All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.

It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.

SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.

By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).

Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3

[prismatic-bell]

Not my fandom, not my monkeys, but this is fascinating to me because I have never understood and do not like tone indicators like "/hj" but even having never seen the movie or read the book, just based on dash osmosis, I naturally started using "question?" and "statement" at the end of sentences in places I thought needed more clarity, and I knew none of this. I thought they understood each other through movie magic or something. The fact one of them is actively compensating for a linguistic void never even occurred to me.

[arom-antix]

It's very cool! The film does handwave a lot of the linguistics and it bothers me somewhat, but because I've read the book where the linguistics are significantly more thorough, I can live with it. I watched the film first though and cringed a little at how quickly they gloss over it because I just KNEW most people wouldn't have the linguistics knowledge to understand and fill in those gaps and such. OH AND YES, I actually forgot to mention! Rocky's use of endings like "question" is theorised by Grace in the book to be his Eridian bleeding through, much like how Japanese appends "ka" to statements to turn them into questions. It's never clarified whether Grace is right or if this is another clarity measure taken by Rocky independently to make sure Grace can read his tone, but it's fascinating nonetheless. Glad I could add to your knowledge about this wonderful story! :D

[prismatic-bell]

That was sort of my assumption, that it was Rocky's "accent," for lack of a better word. But, well, as I said on Discord and legitimately want to ask theshitpostcalligrapher to do sometime:

And that said, I was literally on Rednote yesterday explaining the difference between Chinese tones and English tones, so....I feel you.

[ferrousferrule]

Super not canon but in the puppetry for the film, they talk in the behind the scenes stuff how they have Rocky tap a foot twice to indicate a question, so it's exactly like the Japanese "ka," and I thought the same thing when I saw it, with my 20 year old Japanese.

[arom-antix]

Oh yes! I heard about this, it's a lovely detail! Humans also use body language to clarify their speech, we just don't think about it. Like how when we say no, we may add a shake of the head to make it clear what we're saying even if the words don't make it entirely clear. Even languages that we think of as purely verbal can be highly gestural, so when we communicate through a barrier, like text or a call, we compensate by adding extra clarity into the way we say things or by literally writing it out. Tone indicators, punctuation, capitalisation, etc. being used the way they are online are all examples of this compensation for how our communication is being limited by the channel through which we're communicating. There's so much we don't know about Eridian as a language, but whether or not Rocky taps his foot because that's Eridian for ya, like a subconscious human headshake, or because he's trying to be extra clear for Grace's benefit, like a human headshake in a noisy room, I find the movement super fascinating. Eridian body language is just as interesting to me as their verbal language and how I WISH I could know more. The jazz hands, the fists, the self-fistbumps, the foot taps, the everything, I wanna study you, you funky rock.

[arom-antix]

Sorry to snag your tags, @sirigorn , but this brings up a very relevant point about the use of topics like linguistics in storytelling.

While I definitely see your point, I think you're giving Weir too little credit. He's known for his extensive research into the topics he includes, and, as someone who spends time in linguistic spaces among conlangers and such, I can tell he thought a lot of the linguistics through very thoroughly.

I think the overall issue you're running into with Weir's use of linguistics is summarised as: it's not the point.

First of all, the fact that Eridian can even be construed into English sentence structure. There are entirely unrelated languages on Earth that share way more than they should. Finnish and Hawaiian sound similar and have spellings so similar you can find Finnish compound words in Hawaiian. They don't mean the same thing, not even close, but the similarity is there regardless. Languages sharing elements by pure coincidence is not nearly as uncommon as it seems it would be. Language as we know it is simply only arrangeable in a finite number of ways.

Now, is it still very optimistic and fantastical to assume Eridian and English are significantly similar enough in construction for the communication we see in the book to be possible? Absolutely. But Weir had a choice to make. He could either spend a hundred pages exploring this issue, inventing them a complicated English Eridian pidgin and having to teach the readers this pidgin to an extent where they'd be able to follow along while reading, or he could get to the point.

Would 100 pages of alien pidgin make my heart soar? More than anything. Do I understand that this is a book made for average sci-fi readers who most likely are reading this for their interest in space and physics and biology rather than complicated linguistics, and that teaching all your readers what's basically a new language just to make sure they understand what the deuteragonist, who speaks constantly, is saying, knowing that some people straight up will never get it enough, effectively making the book incomprehensible to the average reader, and that that's not a real viable option if the book is meant to sell? Also yes.

The point of the book is not complicated linguistics, no matter how much I'd love that. The point of the book is Grace Rocky Save Stars. A 100 page intermission to invent alien pidgin is just not relevant enough, so he didn't include one. He clearly considered the incompatibility of Eridian and English but chose to prioritise readers being able to actually read the book over highly realistic linguistics. Again, the linguistics are just not the point of the book.

Oh and the "one Eridian language" thing. That's never specified to actually be the case. Grace simply calls the language Rocky speaks "Eridian" because it's the only language he knows from Erid and he has no further context to name it, like, based on culture or tribe or the head of government or whatever. While it's possible Weir didn't consider that Erid most definitely has other languages or at least dialects, I find it more likely that he simply omitted its mention. With the amount of specifics he does get into at some points, I find it hard to believe he didn't once have the thought "What about other Eridian languages?" I'm sure he had someone reading along as he wrote it who would've had the thought at least. It was again not the point and Grace has met one single Eridian and Rocky never brings up any other languages, so it stands to reason that Grace, monolingual and not interested in language, just never gave it much thought. But, regardless, at no point is it ever said that the language Rocky speaks is THE Eridian language so we can have as much fun theorising about other Eridian languages as we want.

Now, is this me calling Weir a super mega turbo genius who can never make any mistakes and thinks every thought ever? No, not at all. Iirc there was actually a mistake in some science something in the original final draft of the book, but someone read it before publication and reached out to Weir to tell him it was wrong. And Weir fixed it! So he can definitely make mistakes, documentedly so, but he has people around him to catch them when they happen. And, as for the linguistics, I feel confident saying that a vast majority of the fantastical linguistic coincidences in the book are due to linguistics and the insane language barrier simply not being the point.

Unfortunately you have to make concessions when you tell a story, one of those being that if you want the book to sell, you have to make sure people can actually read it, no matter how much it breaks your heart to not be able to spend pages upon pages exploring some idea you have regarding the world you've made. I know, I know, Finnegans Wake, but that's famous because it's so incomprehensible that scholars have been arguing about it for a century. The average reader is not reading Finnegans Wake for that exact reason. Weir is not James Joyce, he'd like us to be able to read PHM without a century of scholarly debates.

The film makes many similar concessions simply because of its limitations as a film. It has limited runtime and has to choose what is most essential to make the story work for the average viewer. And thus, it swiftly skips basically all the linguistics (so much so that it hurts my soul a bit how they do it but I can live with it. Begrudgingly). It sucks, but, in a world where the sun is dying and you have several other complicated areas of academia woven into everything all the time, linguistics simply is not what the average reader will care about. They'll care just enough to suspend their disbelief and then move on. And for most people, that suspension of disbelief happens very quickly for language because they simply don't know enough about it to know what's being handwaved.

So, while it breaks my heart, I have to concede the fact that, had I been Weir, I'd have had to make the same choice he did and omit the more complicated linguistics. Are there things I would've done differently to imply a more complex nature to the language barrier? For sure. But I understand that, as you said, for someone whose main interests lie in other places, he may have just gone "you know what, this is good enough, Grace isn't a linguistics nerd either, he would not know this stuff anyway" and moved on.

Oh and this isn't even touching what his editors and publishers etc. might've demanded of him and the book. Maybe he did write that 100 page linguistics intermission but the publisher demanded he cut it. Maybe he included a bit more linguistics to appease the linguists in the audience but that was forcibly cut too. We just don't know.

So while Weir is most certainly fallible, I think a lot of the linguistic concessions made can be attributed to the fact that it wasn't the point and, sadly, most people just don't care about it like we do.

[artbymesa]

I just heard Project Hail Mary's genre coined as "Cosmic Hope" instead of cosmic horror, and I'm getting emotional all over again. I need to sit down. God do I love this story to bits.

[stargirl-and-potts]

Still thinking about how Grace was always treated as disposable. Kicked out of his passion field for his bluntness—underpaid as a (very good) teacher, to the point he can’t afford a car—left alone in a room full of argon with a sample that might kill him, while all the indispensable guys who put him there stood on the other side of the glass and watched. Shoved screaming into a mission that would kill him. And then, then this bonkers little alien who just met him gladly trades years off his life (via extended return mission) to save him. Runs burning through deadly air to keep him from dying. Chooses finally to weave their lives together forever and recreate Grace’s best dreams of Earth to make him happy. No wonder Grace told Rocky he doesn’t have to get him a gift, he’s given him everything. To one little spider guy, Grace is irreplaceable. That’s love.

[ceruleana]

yknow. i really appreciate ryan gosling's commitment to keeping the canon Grace reaction of just fucking crying the entire time. it's in character, and it's like, an extremely realistic reaction to the situation at hand. But. from most actor's ive heard (both irl friends and interviews from professionals) have bemoaned crying scenes in film, because it can be very draining and give you a splitting headache to do multiple takes etc etc. So they could have dialed it back and saved the tears for the more poignant moments. but no. they clearly went fuck it, we're committing. Grace is a Crier. here. have him crying in happiness, sadness, despair, terror, relief, disbelief, overwhelming joy. Have some heaving sobs. have some single tears. oohhh this man is gonna Cry about it.

[yoi-scans]

Thank you @veerierir for scanning this for me ♡

[f-a-b-l-e]

Do you ever think about how canonically there was a camera rolling in the cockpit during the entire Taumoeba Fishing scene, and the footage might've made it onto the Beatles. The people on Earth might've seen it, seen how close it was. "The sky is just slightly on fire." The alarms starting to blare. Rocky screaming in horror as Grace almost dies retrieving the collector. The moment the fuel starts migrating. Grace losing consciousness. Rocky risking everything just to save him. I am going to SCREAM can you imagine watching that and it being real???? Watching with baited breath, knowing it was all okay in the end but not knowing yet how scary it was for them, how dangerous, how it even happened. How much it hurt. I'm gonna be sick.

[mysticblizzardkitty-phm]

Ch. 5

[birdbyrne]

i love that Stratt canonically orders people to clap for Grace when he does something good. and it happens multiple times

[girlrandomstuff]

i love the women of project hail mary

i love annie shapiro and her not having any filter "sorry i had to go use the restroom, i was peeing myself" and her nerdy excitment to get to learn from grace

i love olesya ilyukhina, her bravery and childlike innocense, hugging the earth's dicatator like nothing, taking her teddy bear to a suicide mission, and literally sacrificing her life for humanity without a second thought

i loved dr. lokken's pride and her beef with grace about his theory

i love eva stratt and her love for humaity being so big that she had to destroy herself to give humanity a real chance to have a future

[spielzeugkaiser]

I swear Rocky is looking at Grace like he’s his 15 year old dog who is starting to make strange sounds in his sleep-

[augustellar]

How Do You Participate in Augustellar?

We've gotten a lot of asks about this, so let's go over how taking part in this event works!

First and foremost, Augustellar is open to all types of creatives. That means you can be a traditional artist with pens and paper, a writer of novels or poems, an astrophotographer, a fiber artist, a bookbinder, an essayist. Maybe you make stained glass suncatchers in your spare time, or tiny felted woodland critters. Maybe you like making webweaves, or podficcing, or costume design. Oftentimes, fandom events are solely centered around traditional/digital art and writing, which leaves out a huge amount of the creative arts. Augustellar is open to all of the above and more!

Now, to participate you will need:

An active social media account such as Tumblr; this can also include AO3, Discord, TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky, Pinterest, YouTube, a personal blog or website, etc.

The Official Augustellar 2026: Project Hail Mary Official Prompt List, which can be found here.

A love of space, astronomy, and the universe around us, from our lovely moon to the most distant, unknown galaxies. For this years theme, you'll also ideally love Project Hail Mary!

A creative hobby or hobbies to make art with!

That's it! Partipating is as simple as creating art in whatever ways you create art, then sharing it!

Now, please keep in mind: Augustellar will start on August 1st, and the challenge is to create something every day of the month with our daily prompt list. That means no posting before August 1st and no skipping ahead. You are allowed—encouraged!—to brainstorm, thumbnail, or other prep what you'll be working on, but please stay true to the spirit of the event. The point of Augustellar, and the challenge, is to practice and enjoy your craft(s) every day for an entire month. It's to prove to yourself that your artistic talents are worth consistent time and effort. Enjoy the process!

Lastly, we want to make this clear: participating in Augustellar counts if you make one work, or 31 works. There's no right or wrong way to participate in art challenges. Every creator will have a different goal and a different outcome!

The best way to enjoy Augustellar will be to find the happy medium of challenging yourself to try something new and take accountability for your own artistic progress, while also remembering that art is meant to be a source of joy. One or three works of art at the end of the month is better than no works! That being said, it's easy to let your hobbies slide, to say, "oh, tomorrow I'll do it, I can't today." Be mindful of your hard limits, but remember: you and your craft are worth the challenge of progress.

As Ryland Grace said, and as we hope you'll say: "I'll try my best." That's all we can ever ask!

Next Up: Rules & Guidelines

Excited for this event? More ways to participate below the cut!

Join the Augustellar Community Server!

The official Discord for the Augustellar creative challenge event! | 19 members

Please let us know which social media platforms you'd like to use for this event!

Augustellar Preferred Social Media Platforms

This form is to see what social media platforms the participants of the Augustellar 2026: Project Hail Mary event might prefer to use to pos

[arom-antix]

Why Rocky speaks Like That™

It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.

Break for the Dash™

I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.

This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:

He speaks clearly. It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up. There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even. It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.

He uses words he knows Grace knows. Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know. And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too. His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.

He speaks in English in Eridian. This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me. Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language. Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is". The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that. Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible. Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.

All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.

It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.

SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.

By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).

Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3

[prismatic-bell]

Not my fandom, not my monkeys, but this is fascinating to me because I have never understood and do not like tone indicators like "/hj" but even having never seen the movie or read the book, just based on dash osmosis, I naturally started using "question?" and "statement" at the end of sentences in places I thought needed more clarity, and I knew none of this. I thought they understood each other through movie magic or something. The fact one of them is actively compensating for a linguistic void never even occurred to me.

[jewish-rock]

minor correction: eridian language is specific about pitch; an a minor fifth means something different than e minor fifth, for example. you can't switch chords out or change keys, or your meaning shifts. octaves are the doubling or halving of the frequency (and therefore universal), so eridians use that to show major tone shifts: up an octave for excitement, down an octave for sadness.

since they don't have inflection, the use of tone markers becomes important. the book mentions two that i can remember off the top of my head: "question" at the end of a sentence, like how we use question marks; and a quaver on the first word of the sentence to denote curiosity or excitement.

pacing is an interesting question. in the movie, grace's program would probably struggle with pacing. in the book, grace uses a fourier transform / waveform analysis software to identify the chords one at a time, then translates them using a spreadsheet of english words and the sequence of chords meaning that word.

what might be different with a second eridian, that grace and rocky alone don't have to deal with, is that there are harmonics and overtones. grace's fourier transform picks out the main tones of the chord, implied to be universal among all eridians, but the harmonics are probably unique to rocky and rocky's voice box / sound production organ. (that's something movie!grace's algorithm would likely have struggled with.)

grace is definitely a lot smarter about picking up eridian language than he gives himself credit for, but he's no rocky. eridians have near-perfect auditory memory. it makes sense, for a species whose primary sense is echolocation, and whose language is based on exact frequency tones. rocky probably thinks grace's language is inefficient, being able to only make one pitch at a time, while eridians can make 5. on the other hand, humans can make a wide variety of phonemes, while eridians can only make a whistling noise described as sounding similar to whale song.

backing up op on the points that: rocky is translating to english on the fly while still speaking eridian, which is impressive on its own, and both he and grace resort to simpler grammar for communication to reduce misunderstandings. (grace is not speaking fluent english either! because there are grammatical concepts he's struggling to explain back to rocky! they frequently say to each other: "need word for [very simplified description/circumlocution].")

a big example of something english has that eridian appears not to have is commonplace pronoun/name usage. eridian refers to things fairly descriptively. the ship is simply called "ship"; grace calls it "blip-A" because it's his culture to give it a specific name. the other planets around eridani are called "second planet" and "third planet" since they are second and third from the star, respectively. eridians just call things by their name: whether the given name for a proper noun, or the object name for an improper noun.

but back to the other marker people find charming, since rocky's language has no way to convey tone without question markers, and certainly not in a way that won't confuse grace's translation, especially in the beginning, rocky keeps those in. when rocky says "question" it's really like just reading out "question mark" every time you see the "?" symbol.

[arom-antix]

Not entirely sure what you're correcting since neither I nor prismatic-bell said Eridian isn't specific about pitch but I agree that it most definitely is. I wouldn't find it remotely surprising if it was tonal in some way too. Oh and inflection is the variation of pitch or tone when speaking so Eridian most definitely uses inflection :)

However, Rocky likely can't use it much when speaking to Grace because of all the aforementioned issues with the translation software. Once Grace starts picking up on the words himself, though, I'm sure Rocky would start using it gradually. Like you mentioned, the translator uses waveform analysis that picks out the dominating tones of a given word which is explicitly mentioned by Grace in the book to be oversimplifying Rocky's speech by ignoring all the other sounds going on (overtones, etc.). He only uses it because it's good enough for his purposes. I'm SO curious what all the little intricacies of Rocky's speech mean, STARS I wish this was a real language. Is this how I get into conlang? (Probably not but my goodness is it tempting.)

And very good point that Eridians can't produce distinct phonemes like humans can! They just "whistle/sing". But with how intricate one can make anything with enough determination, I have no doubt that Eridian is at least as complex as English, if not more. Trust me, my native language has one of the most extensive selections of vowel sounds in the world and we get PICKY and will lightheartedly argue as a pastime about the most minute of vowel differences. Learners hate us <3 /lh (We are very impressed by people knowing literally anything because why would you put yourself through learning this language, please.)

To your point about Eridian having no way to convey tone, I'm not entirely sure what you mean? They could easily convey it through inflection, word order, even conjugation or declension, just like some human languages do. Eridian may only have one phoneme but they definitely get the most out of it. That's not to say Eridian doesn't use the equivalent of Japanese か(ka) or Esperanto ĉu, my point is simply that we don't know. Maybe Rocky is using "question" because Eridian is structured that way, or maybe he's using it to be absolutely sure his tone is coming across the thick language barrier, or maybe the Eridian way of marking a question simply is impossible to communicate with their limited vocabulary and simplistic use of inflection. Kinda like how Spanish questions are hard to pick up on for learners coming from "questions affect word order" languages initially because questions in Spanish rely entirely on inflection.

Oh and about the lack of names for things! I actually find this very interesting. Of course there's the cultural difference of Eridians just not caring to name things in the way humans do. However, on the topic of Threeworld, it makes even more sense that they wouldn't have a name for the other planets because they straight up didn't know they existed until relatively recently. How would they? Space has no air, they can't hear the planets. And Erid has no moon so they'd have no reason to expect that there would be more planets out there. They might've theorised there were, much like many big human discoveries were theorised to be real before being proven so, but regardless, space is a technical thing to Erid, a complicated branch of science that most people have little to no relationship to. They can't see it, much in the same way we can't see atoms. We may know they're there but only people who have an interest in it can tell you much about it, and only experts, whether formal or hobby, can really get into the details. The sky is empty to an Eridian. So even if Erid had a culture of naming things like Earth does, their own solar system would be as distant to them in their everyday lives as distant planets around distant stars are to us. Their "world three" is our "40 Eridani c" (40 Eridani is specified to be a single star in this universe :') ). Just a boring name for categorisation.

Oh also I find it very exciting that you know stuff about music because I sure do not, I am winging my way forward. If I do ever start conlanging this, I'll definitely need someone who knows music theory who I can consult. Or just learn it myself. Like normal people do on a Thursday.

[jewish-rock]

ah I think i misinterpreted your sentence "this means rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely constant and steady" on that first point, my bad! my point was, rocky literally can't *change* the pitch of an entire note, because that would change the meaning of the syllable. he can add vibrato or octave shifts, which are definitely inflection, but not the way several human languages (like spanish, and english) do inflection by a literal pitching up or down of the words by some arbitrary amount. i like to imagine eridians use a lot of clarifying tone words, or have variants of words that convey more or less serious tone. kind of like japanese where the word you use changes depending on the formality/relationship between speakers and the mood?

i think we're also running into a little jargon confusion between musical words and linguistics words--tone has a couple different meanings i may have been using interchangeably (:

rocky's tone [as in the physical notes he is making] is pre-determined by the language itself since it's so musical and dependent on pitch. his speed, octave, and inflection is definitely variable!

(he just has slightly fewer ways to inflect than a pitch-variable language, or even just a language with multiple phonemes, does--he inflects using warbles/vibrato, tone-clarifying words, possibly word order though this isn't explicitly ever mentioned, and supplementary gesture, which makes it a lot like ASL in terms of emotion and question structure! i think that's pretty neat ^^ i do think the book states that "question" is a word in eridian to denote questions, although i suppose grace could be wrong about that. he's only learned from rocky, who's clearly simplifying things.)

harmonics and overtones, which are explicitly mentioned in the book as showing up in grace's waveform analysis, are highly dependent on the timbre (basically sound quality) of the instrument or voice making the notes. i wonder if eridians get picky about those things; maybe there's some sort of singing/vocal hierarchy based on who has the best-sounding overtones. they can probably identify each other by voice alone, since everyone's unique voice will have its own variation in timbre, which results in its own overtones. maybe harmonics are something that varies among different colonies of eridians, like an accent. (maybe grace's eridian-keyboard only produces the main chords, so it sounds like a heavily auto-tuned voice...) there are so many possibilities!

what makes me think eridians don't have as much of a sentimental attachment to objects/naming comes from the ship. (pronouns are easier to intuit since rocky mostly says "grace" and "rocky" instead of "you" and "i". it's kind of inconsistent though.) rocky says it's just a ship so they call it "ship", and asks grace if he named the chairs too. rocky seems confused by the culture of naming things when you could just call them by a descriptive noun. (also funny that he was the one that called 'Tau Ceti e' a boring name, since that's exactly how eridians call things.) rocky also seems unconcerned with things that break, since he can fix them.

this next paragraph is headcanon/speculation, but i think eridians' superior materials technology means (or is perhaps just correlated to the fact that) they don't put a lot of sentimental value into objects. things that break are easily replaceable. if they need something they don't have, they can build it. humans tend to form attachments to inanimate objects, but i think eridians generally don't. they don't devalue them necessarily, they just treat objects as objects and people as people, and call everything exactly what it's called. no need to make up a name for something that isn't another eridian when there's a perfectly valid word that already exists for it.

[arom-antix]

Ooooh, yeah that makes way more sense, thanks for clarifying! Yeah, he'd have to keep the correct pitch for any word he says to keep it that word (otherwise Eridian words would be looooong considering their lack of phonemes), and he'd definitely have to keep it consistently for the computer to understand any of what he's saying. I wonder if par tof the simplification of Eridian he does is forego conjugation/declension/etc. since that might be pitch dependent too. Like, the same sound at two different pitches might be the difference between past and present or something like that. There are so many possibilities, oh the temptation to conlang!

Aaah yeah, probably. When I say tone, I'm thinking, like, tone indicator type tone, not musical tones. Makes sense those would get mixed up.

(Yeah, part of my hesitance to say "question" is definitively a trait of Eridian rather than a clarifying accommodation for Grace stems from the fact that we simply don't know if Grace is right. He poses the theory as if it's a trait of Eridian but it's never confirmed to be, and the scientist in me is reluctant to claim anything that isn't outright confirmed. But from a "hehe fun with language" angle I find the idea of there being a word or sound or conjugation or whatever music stuff I don't know enough about to name that's added to a sentence to make it a question very cool! Humans with all our phonemes still do that so there's no reason Eridians wouldn't take that easy out to solve the issue of their lack of phonemes to let the pitch be variable.)

Yesss, I'm so curious about how other Eridians speak, and especially which parts of Rocky's speech are Eridian standard and which are specific to him. Do other Eridians say "bad bad bad" or whatever the Eridian equivalent is? Or is Rocky just like that? Our sample size is one and I need more, please!

And Grace's keyboard! I've been wondering every since I read that line how that sounds to Eridians. Like, no way it doesn't have limitations like how AAC devices tend to have robotic voices, simply from the limitations of that kind of software. I find it highly likely that, with a language as auditorily complex as Eridian, that Grace's keyboard sounds at least somewhat robotic, even if he mentions it has options to express emotions and such. I wonder how complex it is to use. And oh, the engineers working on that must've had a BLAST figuring it all out and probably keep upgrading it until Grace dies. Maybe even past that for other unrelated accessibility purposes. Maybe it's even based on existing Eridian AAC devices for mute Eridians! Oh, the theories are THEORISING!

And yeah, for sure! They definitely don't name things as we know at least. Rocky never once in the book or the film expresses sentimental attachment to an object, at least not as far as I remember. He has his special outfit but that's special because it sounds nice, he's not attached to that specific version of it. If it broke, I'm sure he'd just fix or replace it without much regard for the sentimentality of it. It's just material to him. I wonder why they don't have sentimental attachments to objects. Humans do because we packbond with anything, so if an object is deemed as part of our pack, we name it and personify it, and feel bad for it when it's hurt, and mourn it when it breaks as if it had died. I wonder if Eridians either don't have the same indiscriminant packbonding instincts as humans do or if their culture has just evolved to not place value into the inanimate. Much to think about!

[jewish-rock]

grace says that the repetitive words were an unspoken convention to convey strong emotion (at least in part, rocky definitely said "astrophage on planet bad bad bad" at the beginning, so either rocky came up with it then because he knew grace didn't know the words for "catastrophic", or it was an existing part of eridian grammar that doubling/tripling a word increases emotional strength), probably for the exact reason that conveying tone across such different languages is difficult, but if it wasn't part of the language already, there's no way rocky isn't bringing that back into his speech habits when he gets home 😂

i do wonder how much eridians change volume to show expression?

[jewishtransdyke]

Ok so this isn't about Project Hail Mary, but I just want to push back slightly on something OP said:

...Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure...

It's true that English doesn't have grammatical particles in the same sense that Japanese does, but there is actually a pretty close English equivalent to Japanese ⟨no⟩ in this context: possessive ⟨'s⟩, as in ⟨Rocky's ball⟩.

It's not completely equivalent, mind you. For one thing, you can't use ⟨'s⟩ with pronouns in English - you use an alternate form of the pronoun instead (e.g. ⟨I⟩ vs. ⟨my⟩).

Like, if you tried to do a direct 1:1 morpheme-to-morpheme translation of ⟨watashi no namae⟩, you'd end up with ⟨I's name⟩, which is obviously ungrammatical in English; you have to say ⟨my name⟩. But if you did the same thing with, say, ⟨Jon no namae⟩, you'd get ⟨Jon's name⟩, which is perfectly grammatical in English.

Admittedly, I don't know enough Japanese to know if its place in the word order is the same when the possessor-noun is a phrase rather than a single word, and there are also other ways that ⟨no⟩ is used in Japanese that we don't use ⟨'s⟩ for in English, but when it's used to indicate simple noun-to-noun possession, it's pretty much a direct swap.

[arom-antix]

You are so right and I straight up forgot that was a feature of English. Uuuuh something something, English is not my first language, whoops XD

[arom-antix]

Why Rocky speaks Like That™

It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.

Break for the Dash™

I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.

This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:

He speaks clearly. It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up. There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even. It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.

He uses words he knows Grace knows. Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know. And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too. His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.

He speaks in English in Eridian. This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me. Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language. Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is". The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that. Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible. Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.

All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.

It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.

SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.

By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).

Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3

[prismatic-bell]

Not my fandom, not my monkeys, but this is fascinating to me because I have never understood and do not like tone indicators like "/hj" but even having never seen the movie or read the book, just based on dash osmosis, I naturally started using "question?" and "statement" at the end of sentences in places I thought needed more clarity, and I knew none of this. I thought they understood each other through movie magic or something. The fact one of them is actively compensating for a linguistic void never even occurred to me.

[jewish-rock]

minor correction: eridian language is specific about pitch; an a minor fifth means something different than e minor fifth, for example. you can't switch chords out or change keys, or your meaning shifts. octaves are the doubling or halving of the frequency (and therefore universal), so eridians use that to show major tone shifts: up an octave for excitement, down an octave for sadness.

since they don't have inflection, the use of tone markers becomes important. the book mentions two that i can remember off the top of my head: "question" at the end of a sentence, like how we use question marks; and a quaver on the first word of the sentence to denote curiosity or excitement.

pacing is an interesting question. in the movie, grace's program would probably struggle with pacing. in the book, grace uses a fourier transform / waveform analysis software to identify the chords one at a time, then translates them using a spreadsheet of english words and the sequence of chords meaning that word.

what might be different with a second eridian, that grace and rocky alone don't have to deal with, is that there are harmonics and overtones. grace's fourier transform picks out the main tones of the chord, implied to be universal among all eridians, but the harmonics are probably unique to rocky and rocky's voice box / sound production organ. (that's something movie!grace's algorithm would likely have struggled with.)

grace is definitely a lot smarter about picking up eridian language than he gives himself credit for, but he's no rocky. eridians have near-perfect auditory memory. it makes sense, for a species whose primary sense is echolocation, and whose language is based on exact frequency tones. rocky probably thinks grace's language is inefficient, being able to only make one pitch at a time, while eridians can make 5. on the other hand, humans can make a wide variety of phonemes, while eridians can only make a whistling noise described as sounding similar to whale song.

backing up op on the points that: rocky is translating to english on the fly while still speaking eridian, which is impressive on its own, and both he and grace resort to simpler grammar for communication to reduce misunderstandings. (grace is not speaking fluent english either! because there are grammatical concepts he's struggling to explain back to rocky! they frequently say to each other: "need word for [very simplified description/circumlocution].")

a big example of something english has that eridian appears not to have is commonplace pronoun/name usage. eridian refers to things fairly descriptively. the ship is simply called "ship"; grace calls it "blip-A" because it's his culture to give it a specific name. the other planets around eridani are called "second planet" and "third planet" since they are second and third from the star, respectively. eridians just call things by their name: whether the given name for a proper noun, or the object name for an improper noun.

but back to the other marker people find charming, since rocky's language has no way to convey tone without question markers, and certainly not in a way that won't confuse grace's translation, especially in the beginning, rocky keeps those in. when rocky says "question" it's really like just reading out "question mark" every time you see the "?" symbol.

[arom-antix]

Not entirely sure what you're correcting since neither I nor prismatic-bell said Eridian isn't specific about pitch but I agree that it most definitely is. I wouldn't find it remotely surprising if it was tonal in some way too. Oh and inflection is the variation of pitch or tone when speaking so Eridian most definitely uses inflection :)

However, Rocky likely can't use it much when speaking to Grace because of all the aforementioned issues with the translation software. Once Grace starts picking up on the words himself, though, I'm sure Rocky would start using it gradually. Like you mentioned, the translator uses waveform analysis that picks out the dominating tones of a given word which is explicitly mentioned by Grace in the book to be oversimplifying Rocky's speech by ignoring all the other sounds going on (overtones, etc.). He only uses it because it's good enough for his purposes. I'm SO curious what all the little intricacies of Rocky's speech mean, STARS I wish this was a real language. Is this how I get into conlang? (Probably not but my goodness is it tempting.)

And very good point that Eridians can't produce distinct phonemes like humans can! They just "whistle/sing". But with how intricate one can make anything with enough determination, I have no doubt that Eridian is at least as complex as English, if not more. Trust me, my native language has one of the most extensive selections of vowel sounds in the world and we get PICKY and will lightheartedly argue as a pastime about the most minute of vowel differences. Learners hate us <3 /lh (We are very impressed by people knowing literally anything because why would you put yourself through learning this language, please.)

To your point about Eridian having no way to convey tone, I'm not entirely sure what you mean? They could easily convey it through inflection, word order, even conjugation or declension, just like some human languages do. Eridian may only have one phoneme but they definitely get the most out of it. That's not to say Eridian doesn't use the equivalent of Japanese か(ka) or Esperanto ĉu, my point is simply that we don't know. Maybe Rocky is using "question" because Eridian is structured that way, or maybe he's using it to be absolutely sure his tone is coming across the thick language barrier, or maybe the Eridian way of marking a question simply is impossible to communicate with their limited vocabulary and simplistic use of inflection. Kinda like how Spanish questions are hard to pick up on for learners coming from "questions affect word order" languages initially because questions in Spanish rely entirely on inflection.

Oh and about the lack of names for things! I actually find this very interesting. Of course there's the cultural difference of Eridians just not caring to name things in the way humans do. However, on the topic of Threeworld, it makes even more sense that they wouldn't have a name for the other planets because they straight up didn't know they existed until relatively recently. How would they? Space has no air, they can't hear the planets. And Erid has no moon so they'd have no reason to expect that there would be more planets out there. They might've theorised there were, much like many big human discoveries were theorised to be real before being proven so, but regardless, space is a technical thing to Erid, a complicated branch of science that most people have little to no relationship to. They can't see it, much in the same way we can't see atoms. We may know they're there but only people who have an interest in it can tell you much about it, and only experts, whether formal or hobby, can really get into the details. The sky is empty to an Eridian. So even if Erid had a culture of naming things like Earth does, their own solar system would be as distant to them in their everyday lives as distant planets around distant stars are to us. Their "world three" is our "40 Eridani c" (40 Eridani is specified to be a single star in this universe :') ). Just a boring name for categorisation.

Oh also I find it very exciting that you know stuff about music because I sure do not, I am winging my way forward. If I do ever start conlanging this, I'll definitely need someone who knows music theory who I can consult. Or just learn it myself. Like normal people do on a Thursday.

[jewish-rock]

ah I think i misinterpreted your sentence "this means rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely constant and steady" on that first point, my bad! my point was, rocky literally can't *change* the pitch of an entire note, because that would change the meaning of the syllable. he can add vibrato or octave shifts, which are definitely inflection, but not the way several human languages (like spanish, and english) do inflection by a literal pitching up or down of the words by some arbitrary amount. i like to imagine eridians use a lot of clarifying tone words, or have variants of words that convey more or less serious tone. kind of like japanese where the word you use changes depending on the formality/relationship between speakers and the mood?

i think we're also running into a little jargon confusion between musical words and linguistics words--tone has a couple different meanings i may have been using interchangeably (:

rocky's tone [as in the physical notes he is making] is pre-determined by the language itself since it's so musical and dependent on pitch. his speed, octave, and inflection is definitely variable!

(he just has slightly fewer ways to inflect than a pitch-variable language, or even just a language with multiple phonemes, does--he inflects using warbles/vibrato, tone-clarifying words, possibly word order though this isn't explicitly ever mentioned, and supplementary gesture, which makes it a lot like ASL in terms of emotion and question structure! i think that's pretty neat ^^ i do think the book states that "question" is a word in eridian to denote questions, although i suppose grace could be wrong about that. he's only learned from rocky, who's clearly simplifying things.)

harmonics and overtones, which are explicitly mentioned in the book as showing up in grace's waveform analysis, are highly dependent on the timbre (basically sound quality) of the instrument or voice making the notes. i wonder if eridians get picky about those things; maybe there's some sort of singing/vocal hierarchy based on who has the best-sounding overtones. they can probably identify each other by voice alone, since everyone's unique voice will have its own variation in timbre, which results in its own overtones. maybe harmonics are something that varies among different colonies of eridians, like an accent. (maybe grace's eridian-keyboard only produces the main chords, so it sounds like a heavily auto-tuned voice...) there are so many possibilities!

what makes me think eridians don't have as much of a sentimental attachment to objects/naming comes from the ship. (pronouns are easier to intuit since rocky mostly says "grace" and "rocky" instead of "you" and "i". it's kind of inconsistent though.) rocky says it's just a ship so they call it "ship", and asks grace if he named the chairs too. rocky seems confused by the culture of naming things when you could just call them by a descriptive noun. (also funny that he was the one that called 'Tau Ceti e' a boring name, since that's exactly how eridians call things.) rocky also seems unconcerned with things that break, since he can fix them.

this next paragraph is headcanon/speculation, but i think eridians' superior materials technology means (or is perhaps just correlated to the fact that) they don't put a lot of sentimental value into objects. things that break are easily replaceable. if they need something they don't have, they can build it. humans tend to form attachments to inanimate objects, but i think eridians generally don't. they don't devalue them necessarily, they just treat objects as objects and people as people, and call everything exactly what it's called. no need to make up a name for something that isn't another eridian when there's a perfectly valid word that already exists for it.

[arom-antix]

Ooooh, yeah that makes way more sense, thanks for clarifying! Yeah, he'd have to keep the correct pitch for any word he says to keep it that word (otherwise Eridian words would be looooong considering their lack of phonemes), and he'd definitely have to keep it consistently for the computer to understand any of what he's saying. I wonder if par tof the simplification of Eridian he does is forego conjugation/declension/etc. since that might be pitch dependent too. Like, the same sound at two different pitches might be the difference between past and present or something like that. There are so many possibilities, oh the temptation to conlang!

Aaah yeah, probably. When I say tone, I'm thinking, like, tone indicator type tone, not musical tones. Makes sense those would get mixed up.

(Yeah, part of my hesitance to say "question" is definitively a trait of Eridian rather than a clarifying accommodation for Grace stems from the fact that we simply don't know if Grace is right. He poses the theory as if it's a trait of Eridian but it's never confirmed to be, and the scientist in me is reluctant to claim anything that isn't outright confirmed. But from a "hehe fun with language" angle I find the idea of there being a word or sound or conjugation or whatever music stuff I don't know enough about to name that's added to a sentence to make it a question very cool! Humans with all our phonemes still do that so there's no reason Eridians wouldn't take that easy out to solve the issue of their lack of phonemes to let the pitch be variable.)

Yesss, I'm so curious about how other Eridians speak, and especially which parts of Rocky's speech are Eridian standard and which are specific to him. Do other Eridians say "bad bad bad" or whatever the Eridian equivalent is? Or is Rocky just like that? Our sample size is one and I need more, please!

And Grace's keyboard! I've been wondering every since I read that line how that sounds to Eridians. Like, no way it doesn't have limitations like how AAC devices tend to have robotic voices, simply from the limitations of that kind of software. I find it highly likely that, with a language as auditorily complex as Eridian, that Grace's keyboard sounds at least somewhat robotic, even if he mentions it has options to express emotions and such. I wonder how complex it is to use. And oh, the engineers working on that must've had a BLAST figuring it all out and probably keep upgrading it until Grace dies. Maybe even past that for other unrelated accessibility purposes. Maybe it's even based on existing Eridian AAC devices for mute Eridians! Oh, the theories are THEORISING!

And yeah, for sure! They definitely don't name things as we know at least. Rocky never once in the book or the film expresses sentimental attachment to an object, at least not as far as I remember. He has his special outfit but that's special because it sounds nice, he's not attached to that specific version of it. If it broke, I'm sure he'd just fix or replace it without much regard for the sentimentality of it. It's just material to him. I wonder why they don't have sentimental attachments to objects. Humans do because we packbond with anything, so if an object is deemed as part of our pack, we name it and personify it, and feel bad for it when it's hurt, and mourn it when it breaks as if it had died. I wonder if Eridians either don't have the same indiscriminant packbonding instincts as humans do or if their culture has just evolved to not place value into the inanimate. Much to think about!

[jewish-rock]

grace says that the repetitive words were an unspoken convention to convey strong emotion (at least in part, rocky definitely said "astrophage on planet bad bad bad" at the beginning, so either rocky came up with it then because he knew grace didn't know the words for "catastrophic", or it was an existing part of eridian grammar that doubling/tripling a word increases emotional strength), probably for the exact reason that conveying tone across such different languages is difficult, but if it wasn't part of the language already, there's no way rocky isn't bringing that back into his speech habits when he gets home 😂

i do wonder how much eridians change volume to show expression?

[arom-antix]

Oh right I forgot about that! I love that they have their own little ways of communicating like that. And yeah, it might be an existing concept in Eridian already but I assume its use is probably slightly different. Might be 1:1 but English does doublings for emphasis too (something can be bad and it can be bad bad), so I wonder if Eridian does something similar and maybe Rocky based it off that. Who knows. And oh, for SURE he's gonna end up just using that in his regular Eridian, I so would too XD

Ooo, good question. I can't remember exactly how the sacrifice scene goes down in the book, whether Rocky screams in it specifically, but I'd assume Eridians at the very least increase volume in situations like that. That kind of pain screaming is pretty universal for animals on Earth at least. I don't think Grace ever mentions Rocky raising his voice or lowering it volume wise, only the pitch changes for when sad or excited etc. Maybe Eridian has lingustic constructs to express heightened emotion, making volume change a purely practical thing of communicating across distances/in a quiet room/to alert a crowd/etc. Very interesting question indeed :o

[arom-antix]

Why Rocky speaks Like That™

It has just occurred to me that most people don't have a super solid grasp of how languages work, especially when compared to one another, and that this means most people aren't aware of why Rocky's speech patterns are the way they are in PHM. To those who've only watched the film, it should be noted that the linguistics are more detailed in the book, but even still, it's highly likely that most readers of the book don't know enough about linguistics to fill in the gaps left by Weir. And that's why I'm here! Let your local linguistics enthusiast fill the gaps for you.

Break for the Dash™

I've seen people assume that the way Rocky speaks is a quirk of Eridian just being a simple language. While yes, that could be true to an extent, both the film and especially the book make it very clear that Rocky only speaks in stilted, broken sentences because of the language barrier. By the end, he speaks perfectly clearly in complete sentences with humour and sarcasm and natural sounding exclamations. Grace is at that point fluent and understands all the nuances.

This leads to the first hurdle of Rocky's in communicating with Grace in the beginning: Grace is stupid. He's not but to someone from a species that has the auditory equivalent of photographic memory (I don't think this is mentioned in the film but it is in the book), Grace's lack of such makes it difficult to share a language quickly. Grace needs spreadsheets, audio synthesis software, coding, text-to-speech in the film because he can only "hear" (read: see) in one direction at a time. He's functionally disabled to Rocky. Rocky therefore accomodates him which is very sweet. Here's a list of ways in which Rocky is most likely altering his language use for Grace's benefit:

He speaks clearly. It's mentioned in the book that at one point Grace's translation software (which he programmed himself for all the only-film fans) fails to translate a sentence of Rocky's. Grace is confused and confirms that the software is fully functioning. He realises that the issue is the pitch. Rocky's voice dropped an octave. When he shifts it back into the range the software recognises, it's perfectly translated. This means Rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely steady and repetitive so that Grace's computer can keep up. There's an argument to be made that Eridian might just be like that, but knowing what we know about it (pitch change for emotion, it being a highly auditorily complex language made of musical chords, most likely created from at least five sets of whatever equivalent of vocal chords Eridians have, etc.), I find it highly unlikely that Eridian would be so even. It's much more likely that super genius Rocky, despite never having seen a computer before, quickly realised that it couldn't keep up with those variations without serious programming that Grace isn't good enough at coding to do or manually entering every variation of a word. It's simpler to just speak evenly. And clearly, any mumbling would be a nightmare for the computer to pick apart.

He uses words he knows Grace knows. Obviously he sometimes needs to use words Grace is unfamiliar with and then they're added to the translator, but have you ever tried to speak your native language to a novice speaker and limit your language to the words they know? It's way harder than it sounds. You naturally fall into expressions and phrases and words etc. that you use with other native speakers, and you often have to repeat yourself with altered versions of the original sentences because you accidentally used words the novice speaker didn't know. And Grace has a serious ear for language, like, the speed at which he picks up "Eridian" (I'll get to that) in the book is startling. But he's also human and learning an alien language based on nothing but gestures and their simple shared vocabulary. Rocky must be spending a lot of energy keeping himself from simply speaking Eridian as he usually does so that the computer can keep up and Grace too. His infallible memory definitely helps him remember what words Grace knows, but language is habit, it's a muscle and you don't think about the individual words when you speak. You just have a thought and it turns into words automatically. Eridians either don't have this automisation of repeated tasks in the way humans do, or Rocky is working overtime to keep his speech in check.

He speaks in English in Eridian. This is the big one. Most users on the English speaking internet are native English speakers and, knowing English speaking countries, most likely don't speak more than one language fluently (not an insult, just a statistic, that's just how it is when the entire world speaks your native language). It's therefore completely understandable that this part of Rocky's accommodation of Grace's slower learning went over most fans on this part of the internet's heads. And as someone from a part of the world where speaking two to three languages is standard, I still imagine it went over most of the people in my area's heads too because most people don't think about linguistics all the time like me. Anyway, to put it simply, translation is fucking hard. It seems simple, especially if you don't speak more than one, but it's not. Even highly related languages can end up nigh in comprehensible if you translate them directly into one another. The less related the languages are, the worse it gets. A lot of things cannot be translated directly because those types of words simply don't exist in the other language. Take Japanese. In a super simple basic beginner level Japanese sentence like "watashi no namae wa jon desu", you'd still struggle to translate it. And this is, like, almost comically expansive for how Japanese people actually speak in their daily lives. A causal, fluent Japanese sentence would be nonsense in English. Even this simple basic sentense would translate directly as something like "I my name about John is". The reason it's so weird is because Japanese uses particles to denote the roles of words in sentences, a lingustic concept that English doesn't have. Here "no" is possessive and indicates that the subject in front of it is the owner of what follows. English doesn't have anything even close to that type of structure and it can be really difficult for an English speaker to wrap their head around the sentence structure of Japanese when learning to speak it, not because they don't understand, but because constructing a sentence like that is so foreign. It takes a lot of mental effort to rewire your brain like that. Now imagine speaking English with Japanese sentence structure. Imagine doing that and never slipping into real English sentence structure because then your poor Japanese novice English speaker friend won't understand a word. It's not "my name is John", it's "I name John is" and that's giving you the benefit of not having to find replacements for the particles. That would be impossible. Now imagine you've met a literal alien species and have to start speaking English with alien language sentence structure. I cannot even begin to explain how wildly different Eridian and English likely are in every single way. Hell, they're so different that they're literally unpronouncable to the non-native speaker. And Rocky speaks Eridian with English sentence structure. It's explicitly pointed out in the book. And he does this flawlessly. Never slips up in any scene we get to see. I cannot begin to communicate the mental effort that would take for a human to do. Either all Eridians are crazy good at language or Rocky is just a turbo mega genius at it. Which is honestly not at all out of the realm of possibility.

All of this is to say that Rocky doesn't speak the way he does because that's just Eridian, that would be highly unlikely. He speaks the way he does because the language barrier is THICK and he's putting his entire rocky ass into making it thinner. It's less clear in the film, untouched as far as I remember, but in the book his speech becomes more nuanced as the story progresses. He uses more articles, more pronouns, more conjunctions, constructs more complex sentences, etc. As Grace learns more words and more about how Eridian as a language works, Rocky is fittingly upping the complexity of his speech.

It's never touched on but I have no doubt they spent many an evening (I know, I know, space, let me have this) talking about how Eridian expresses common English phrases and how to say this and that etc. etc. I'm probably the only person who'd find a long ass fic of just them discussing Eridian linguistic concepts and constructs interesting but hey, that's the nerd in me. I am the one writing this post, no one is suprised.

SO, anyway, to summarise, Rocky does a LOT of work to make his speech understandable to Grace. Grace starts to learn Eridian while they're still at Tau Ceti (not made clear in the film but is in the book) but he learns Rocky's frankensteined Eridienglish rather than real Eridian. I bet a lot of the trip to Erid was spent fixing Grace's understanding of Eridian so that he'd understand real Eridian.

By the time we pick back up with them in the biodome 16 years after arrival on Erid, Grace is fully fluent, meaning he must've already done all the hard work to learn proper Eridian which is unsurprising. He's a scientist, there's no way he'd accept just learning Eridienglish and never understanding any other Eridians than Rocky. Gotta be able to catch all the juicy gossip (what new science is being done and how to convince Rocky to convince the science Eridians to let him be part of it).

Anyway, that's my long ramble about why Rocky is a damn trooper and deserves so many accolades for how hard he worked to help bridge the language gap. Rocky is canonically super smart and I need people to see how that also applies to his language use. I love this rock <3

[prismatic-bell]

Not my fandom, not my monkeys, but this is fascinating to me because I have never understood and do not like tone indicators like "/hj" but even having never seen the movie or read the book, just based on dash osmosis, I naturally started using "question?" and "statement" at the end of sentences in places I thought needed more clarity, and I knew none of this. I thought they understood each other through movie magic or something. The fact one of them is actively compensating for a linguistic void never even occurred to me.

[jewish-rock]

minor correction: eridian language is specific about pitch; an a minor fifth means something different than e minor fifth, for example. you can't switch chords out or change keys, or your meaning shifts. octaves are the doubling or halving of the frequency (and therefore universal), so eridians use that to show major tone shifts: up an octave for excitement, down an octave for sadness.

since they don't have inflection, the use of tone markers becomes important. the book mentions two that i can remember off the top of my head: "question" at the end of a sentence, like how we use question marks; and a quaver on the first word of the sentence to denote curiosity or excitement.

pacing is an interesting question. in the movie, grace's program would probably struggle with pacing. in the book, grace uses a fourier transform / waveform analysis software to identify the chords one at a time, then translates them using a spreadsheet of english words and the sequence of chords meaning that word.

what might be different with a second eridian, that grace and rocky alone don't have to deal with, is that there are harmonics and overtones. grace's fourier transform picks out the main tones of the chord, implied to be universal among all eridians, but the harmonics are probably unique to rocky and rocky's voice box / sound production organ. (that's something movie!grace's algorithm would likely have struggled with.)

grace is definitely a lot smarter about picking up eridian language than he gives himself credit for, but he's no rocky. eridians have near-perfect auditory memory. it makes sense, for a species whose primary sense is echolocation, and whose language is based on exact frequency tones. rocky probably thinks grace's language is inefficient, being able to only make one pitch at a time, while eridians can make 5. on the other hand, humans can make a wide variety of phonemes, while eridians can only make a whistling noise described as sounding similar to whale song.

backing up op on the points that: rocky is translating to english on the fly while still speaking eridian, which is impressive on its own, and both he and grace resort to simpler grammar for communication to reduce misunderstandings. (grace is not speaking fluent english either! because there are grammatical concepts he's struggling to explain back to rocky! they frequently say to each other: "need word for [very simplified description/circumlocution].")

a big example of something english has that eridian appears not to have is commonplace pronoun/name usage. eridian refers to things fairly descriptively. the ship is simply called "ship"; grace calls it "blip-A" because it's his culture to give it a specific name. the other planets around eridani are called "second planet" and "third planet" since they are second and third from the star, respectively. eridians just call things by their name: whether the given name for a proper noun, or the object name for an improper noun.

but back to the other marker people find charming, since rocky's language has no way to convey tone without question markers, and certainly not in a way that won't confuse grace's translation, especially in the beginning, rocky keeps those in. when rocky says "question" it's really like just reading out "question mark" every time you see the "?" symbol.

[arom-antix]

Not entirely sure what you're correcting since neither I nor prismatic-bell said Eridian isn't specific about pitch but I agree that it most definitely is. I wouldn't find it remotely surprising if it was tonal in some way too. Oh and inflection is the variation of pitch or tone when speaking so Eridian most definitely uses inflection :)

However, Rocky likely can't use it much when speaking to Grace because of all the aforementioned issues with the translation software. Once Grace starts picking up on the words himself, though, I'm sure Rocky would start using it gradually. Like you mentioned, the translator uses waveform analysis that picks out the dominating tones of a given word which is explicitly mentioned by Grace in the book to be oversimplifying Rocky's speech by ignoring all the other sounds going on (overtones, etc.). He only uses it because it's good enough for his purposes. I'm SO curious what all the little intricacies of Rocky's speech mean, STARS I wish this was a real language. Is this how I get into conlang? (Probably not but my goodness is it tempting.)

And very good point that Eridians can't produce distinct phonemes like humans can! They just "whistle/sing". But with how intricate one can make anything with enough determination, I have no doubt that Eridian is at least as complex as English, if not more. Trust me, my native language has one of the most extensive selections of vowel sounds in the world and we get PICKY and will lightheartedly argue as a pastime about the most minute of vowel differences. Learners hate us <3 /lh (We are very impressed by people knowing literally anything because why would you put yourself through learning this language, please.)

To your point about Eridian having no way to convey tone, I'm not entirely sure what you mean? They could easily convey it through inflection, word order, even conjugation or declension, just like some human languages do. Eridian may only have one phoneme but they definitely get the most out of it. That's not to say Eridian doesn't use the equivalent of Japanese か(ka) or Esperanto ĉu, my point is simply that we don't know. Maybe Rocky is using "question" because Eridian is structured that way, or maybe he's using it to be absolutely sure his tone is coming across the thick language barrier, or maybe the Eridian way of marking a question simply is impossible to communicate with their limited vocabulary and simplistic use of inflection. Kinda like how Spanish questions are hard to pick up on for learners coming from "questions affect word order" languages initially because questions in Spanish rely entirely on inflection.

Oh and about the lack of names for things! I actually find this very interesting. Of course there's the cultural difference of Eridians just not caring to name things in the way humans do. However, on the topic of Threeworld, it makes even more sense that they wouldn't have a name for the other planets because they straight up didn't know they existed until relatively recently. How would they? Space has no air, they can't hear the planets. And Erid has no moon so they'd have no reason to expect that there would be more planets out there. They might've theorised there were, much like many big human discoveries were theorised to be real before being proven so, but regardless, space is a technical thing to Erid, a complicated branch of science that most people have little to no relationship to. They can't see it, much in the same way we can't see atoms. We may know they're there but only people who have an interest in it can tell you much about it, and only experts, whether formal or hobby, can really get into the details. The sky is empty to an Eridian. So even if Erid had a culture of naming things like Earth does, their own solar system would be as distant to them in their everyday lives as distant planets around distant stars are to us. Their "world three" is our "40 Eridani c" (40 Eridani is specified to be a single star in this universe :') ). Just a boring name for categorisation.

Oh also I find it very exciting that you know stuff about music because I sure do not, I am winging my way forward. If I do ever start conlanging this, I'll definitely need someone who knows music theory who I can consult. Or just learn it myself. Like normal people do on a Thursday.

[jewish-rock]

ah I think i misinterpreted your sentence "this means rocky must constantly be keeping his inflection and pitch extremely constant and steady" on that first point, my bad! my point was, rocky literally can't *change* the pitch of an entire note, because that would change the meaning of the syllable. he can add vibrato or octave shifts, which are definitely inflection, but not the way several human languages (like spanish, and english) do inflection by a literal pitching up or down of the words by some arbitrary amount. i like to imagine eridians use a lot of clarifying tone words, or have variants of words that convey more or less serious tone. kind of like japanese where the word you use changes depending on the formality/relationship between speakers and the mood?

i think we're also running into a little jargon confusion between musical words and linguistics words--tone has a couple different meanings i may have been using interchangeably (:

rocky's tone [as in the physical notes he is making] is pre-determined by the language itself since it's so musical and dependent on pitch. his speed, octave, and inflection is definitely variable!

(he just has slightly fewer ways to inflect than a pitch-variable language, or even just a language with multiple phonemes, does--he inflects using warbles/vibrato, tone-clarifying words, possibly word order though this isn't explicitly ever mentioned, and supplementary gesture, which makes it a lot like ASL in terms of emotion and question structure! i think that's pretty neat ^^ i do think the book states that "question" is a word in eridian to denote questions, although i suppose grace could be wrong about that. he's only learned from rocky, who's clearly simplifying things.)

harmonics and overtones, which are explicitly mentioned in the book as showing up in grace's waveform analysis, are highly dependent on the timbre (basically sound quality) of the instrument or voice making the notes. i wonder if eridians get picky about those things; maybe there's some sort of singing/vocal hierarchy based on who has the best-sounding overtones. they can probably identify each other by voice alone, since everyone's unique voice will have its own variation in timbre, which results in its own overtones. maybe harmonics are something that varies among different colonies of eridians, like an accent. (maybe grace's eridian-keyboard only produces the main chords, so it sounds like a heavily auto-tuned voice...) there are so many possibilities!

what makes me think eridians don't have as much of a sentimental attachment to objects/naming comes from the ship. (pronouns are easier to intuit since rocky mostly says "grace" and "rocky" instead of "you" and "i". it's kind of inconsistent though.) rocky says it's just a ship so they call it "ship", and asks grace if he named the chairs too. rocky seems confused by the culture of naming things when you could just call them by a descriptive noun. (also funny that he was the one that called 'Tau Ceti e' a boring name, since that's exactly how eridians call things.) rocky also seems unconcerned with things that break, since he can fix them.

this next paragraph is headcanon/speculation, but i think eridians' superior materials technology means (or is perhaps just correlated to the fact that) they don't put a lot of sentimental value into objects. things that break are easily replaceable. if they need something they don't have, they can build it. humans tend to form attachments to inanimate objects, but i think eridians generally don't. they don't devalue them necessarily, they just treat objects as objects and people as people, and call everything exactly what it's called. no need to make up a name for something that isn't another eridian when there's a perfectly valid word that already exists for it.

[arom-antix]

Ooooh, yeah that makes way more sense, thanks for clarifying! Yeah, he'd have to keep the correct pitch for any word he says to keep it that word (otherwise Eridian words would be looooong considering their lack of phonemes), and he'd definitely have to keep it consistently for the computer to understand any of what he's saying. I wonder if par tof the simplification of Eridian he does is forego conjugation/declension/etc. since that might be pitch dependent too. Like, the same sound at two different pitches might be the difference between past and present or something like that. There are so many possibilities, oh the temptation to conlang!

Aaah yeah, probably. When I say tone, I'm thinking, like, tone indicator type tone, not musical tones. Makes sense those would get mixed up.

(Yeah, part of my hesitance to say "question" is definitively a trait of Eridian rather than a clarifying accommodation for Grace stems from the fact that we simply don't know if Grace is right. He poses the theory as if it's a trait of Eridian but it's never confirmed to be, and the scientist in me is reluctant to claim anything that isn't outright confirmed. But from a "hehe fun with language" angle I find the idea of there being a word or sound or conjugation or whatever music stuff I don't know enough about to name that's added to a sentence to make it a question very cool! Humans with all our phonemes still do that so there's no reason Eridians wouldn't take that easy out to solve the issue of their lack of phonemes to let the pitch be variable.)

Yesss, I'm so curious about how other Eridians speak, and especially which parts of Rocky's speech are Eridian standard and which are specific to him. Do other Eridians say "bad bad bad" or whatever the Eridian equivalent is? Or is Rocky just like that? Our sample size is one and I need more, please!

And Grace's keyboard! I've been wondering every since I read that line how that sounds to Eridians. Like, no way it doesn't have limitations like how AAC devices tend to have robotic voices, simply from the limitations of that kind of software. I find it highly likely that, with a language as auditorily complex as Eridian, that Grace's keyboard sounds at least somewhat robotic, even if he mentions it has options to express emotions and such. I wonder how complex it is to use. And oh, the engineers working on that must've had a BLAST figuring it all out and probably keep upgrading it until Grace dies. Maybe even past that for other unrelated accessibility purposes. Maybe it's even based on existing Eridian AAC devices for mute Eridians! Oh, the theories are THEORISING!

And yeah, for sure! They definitely don't name things as we know at least. Rocky never once in the book or the film expresses sentimental attachment to an object, at least not as far as I remember. He has his special outfit but that's special because it sounds nice, he's not attached to that specific version of it. If it broke, I'm sure he'd just fix or replace it without much regard for the sentimentality of it. It's just material to him. I wonder why they don't have sentimental attachments to objects. Humans do because we packbond with anything, so if an object is deemed as part of our pack, we name it and personify it, and feel bad for it when it's hurt, and mourn it when it breaks as if it had died. I wonder if Eridians either don't have the same indiscriminant packbonding instincts as humans do or if their culture has just evolved to not place value into the inanimate. Much to think about!

[rosettyller]

Behind the scenes of PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)