lingua fandom

I’m an academic in linguistics, with a special interest in language evolution. My studies revolve specifically around online language (Internet linguistics). There will be a lot of general online language posts here, but I know most of my examples will be pulled from online fandoms, which are often composed of the most talkative and innovative language users online. This is a secondary blog, so I can’t follow people from it. I may move house eventually if this becomes a problem for me, but for now, I apologize for not following back.

[sylviii]

“she’s got legs for days” pfffft not impressive. i;ve had mine for years

[neverendingmidnightsun]

how do you guys vocalize the punchline semicolon silly-punctuation I always imagine it’s a teenage boy voice crack

[ot3]

the digital-regional dialect of different emoji usage by discord server

[voidandradiance]

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

[muaddibbler]

The most impressive communal shitpost I’ve yet seen from a linguistics Facebook group

[linguafandom]

Read This Article!!!

How many exclamation points do you need to seem genuinely enthusiastic?

Much like awesome once served a greater purpose, the exclamation point has been downgraded from a shout of alarm or intensity to a symbol that indicates politeness and friendliness. As Shipley and Schwalbe put it in their guide: “Exclamation points can instantly infuse electronic communication with human warmth.” And that’s what we use them for now.

“The single exclamation mark is being used not as an intensity marker, but as a sincerity marker,” says Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist who studies online communication. “If I end an email with ‘Thanks!,’ I’m not shouting or being particularly enthusiastic; I’m just trying to convey that I’m sincerely thankful, and I’m saying it with a bit of a social smile.”

[dedalvs]

So, i you could make languages for Avatar, what sort of languages would you create for that world and how would they differ from place to place?

Okay. Here we go.

One of the things I love about Avatar: The Last Airbender (aside from the artwork, the animation, the story telling, the voice acting, the world building, the action, the humor and the heart) is the fact that Aang, in addition to everything else he is, is literally like 110 years old. Having been frozen in ice, it’s not as if he has distant memories about what things were like in his day: He literally remembers it like it was yesterday, because to him it was. Thus, every so often we see Aang reacting to how things are different: towns he remembers that are gone; new cities he doesn’t remember at all; customs that have been abandoned; international relationships that are vastly different, etc. One of my all time favorite episodes is when he goes to school in the Fire Nation. Some historical dissonance highlights:

Aang remembering the actual history which he experienced and correcting the teacher who has a book that says something different.

Introducing what, by now, is an ancient dance to kids who take to it like it’s something brand new.

“Flameo, Hotman!”

The setting of the series set the stage for tidbits like this, just as the entire series Avatar: The Last Airbender set up The Legend of Korra for callbacks that only those who watched the previous series (and knew the history) would get (Toph’s personal history and what it wrought; Toph and what became the future of metal bending; the names of Aang’s children; the misdirect where Jenora explores the ancient Dai Li prison under Lake Laogai). This is something you don’t see a lot in television. In America, one of the few universes I know where you can do this is Star Trek, where knowing what happened in various series and movies ends up paying off, as writers for any series or movie often reference the earlier stuff, and that history becomes the history for the universe, not just a particular series.

Both series are so incredibly smart about this that it’s incredible to watch. I’m amazed at how well they’re able to make episodes enjoyable if you know nothing, and even more enjoyable if you know everything. It’s a tough trick to pull off, and it does it flawlessly. The only weak link is language.

As a caveat, Avatar: The Last Airbender started being developed in 2001—the same year that the first of the Lord of the Rings movies came out, and like one year after I’d started creating my first language. In 2015, language creation is very much in the public eye; in 2001, it was not—really not. It’s no wonder that the idea of creating a language or languages for the show never occurred to the creators. It would have been a stroke of luck if it had, and there’s a good chance that if it had, it wouldn’t have ended up in the right hands. So all in all, what we’ve got is probably as good as it gets—which is outstanding.

If I’d been there at the beginning, though, this is what I would have done.

The idea of the mythos seems to be that there was the race of men, and then the spirit world. Unless there’s something in the comics I missed, I think it makes sense to have one proto-language for all humans. I don’t think that makes sense for the real world, but fantasy worlds have their own rules and logic. It makes aesthetic sense to do one proto-language. That proto-language would have been suitably stuffed with all kinds of kooky consonants (that’s how you ensure maximally different daughter languages) and probably would’ve had words with concrete meanings based on the place where humans existed at that time.

(This pixel map comes from DeviantArt user ykansaki. Original post here: http://kelly1412.deviantart.com/art/Pixel-Avatar-Map-66980056.)

My guess would be humans sprung up somewhere in the Earth kingdom and traveled outward after that—possibly with the islands originally being a part of a larger Pangea-like land mass. Also, though I don’t think it was made explicit, the Southern Water Tribe folks can just sail south and get to the Northern Water Tribe, right? The world works like that?

Anyway, starting off with one proto-language, the next step would be to figure out when the humans separated into these four nations, and to figure out if the languages preceded the nations, or vice-versa. Once I figured out when the split occurred (and what the world was like at that time), I could start creating the new proto-languages for each nation.

These four proto-languages would end up being the progenitors for the languages we’d see in Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’d also be the origin point for a lot of names in the series. As for what the languages themselves would be like, I imagined doing the following (based on what it looks like they were going for, vis-à-vis the names in the series):

One isolating language (Proto-Earth).

One polysynthetic language (Proto-Water).

One agglutinative language (Proto-Air).

One inflectional language (Proto-Fire).

The rest would take care of itself. If a particular sound was wanted, that’s easy enough to do with a proto-language that has a rich enough sound system. (When a non-language person says “Make a language like Japanese!” what they mean is “Make a language that sounds to me like Japanese!”; they usually don’t know anything about the grammar.) And for dialects or separate related languages, if you have the proto-language, it’s easy to produce a variant (I imagine we’d see more of these in the Earth Kingdom than anywhere else—aside from two main Southern/Northern Water Tribe variants).

With those set, it would’ve been a fun project to take the Avatar: The Last Airbender languages and fastforward them 70 or so years. It wouldn’t have been a ton of changes, but if you imagine the difference between the way people spoken in 1850 and 1920, that should give you an idea.

As for writing, I think it would have been cool to develop at least three separate writing systems, though more would be even more fun. Realistically, though, if language sprang from one source, then one writing system probably gave birth to the others, even if they look nothing alike in the present. There would definitely be an identifiable writing system for the Fire Nation and a noticeably different one for the Earth Nation, at the very least. Provided we could move away from a glyph-based system like Chinese uses, viewers could actually learn and work with the writing systems to produce their own art, read things on the show, etc. Plus we could’ve done a bunch of different font faces, had the system change in Legend of Korra, etc.

That’s the basic idea. I’m really shaky on the very early history of the Avatar universe, so I’m not sure if the proto-world theory would hold water (were people born on the Lion Turtles…?), but it makes fictional sense. But yeah, something like this, that isn’t (or needn’t be) connected to anything else would have been the ultimate sandbox for a language creator. If done right, it absolutely would have bested Tolkien’s work—easily. But it wasn’t to be. Perhaps in the future there will be another truly compelling, truly unique universe that’s created that will incorporate languages from the get-go. We’ll see! Until then, I think you just kind of have to go with the Chinese, etc. used in the series. It’s fine. :)

P.S.: By the way, given how awesome the shows have been with representation, it also would’ve been incredible for the Aang Gang to meet some Deaf signers who would, of course, have a fictional sign language they used. Also would’ve been cool to see the equivalent of Braille in The Legend of Korra. I’d still love to be able to create a signed language for a show.

[cooperhoward]

i just found out merriam webster has a time traveler feature that tells you some of the words that were “born” the same year as you. it’s pretty neat yall should do this

[larkstonguesinaspicpart1]

i was born with vape and i will die with vape

[twenlyonepilots-deactivated2020]

I was born with judgy

[linguafandom]

"In languages like Japanese, Korean, and Chinese you can convey about double the amount of information in one character as you can in many other languages, like English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French," Twitter product manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara wrote in a blog post announcing the test. "We want every person around the world to easily express themselves on Twitter, so we're doing something new: we're going to try out a longer limit, 280 characters, in languages impacted by cramming." 

[rewordfully]

you know how mathematicians have the journal of recreational mathematics, right? where they publish stuff like, ‘oh i found this cool property of this one seemingly boring number’, or, ‘this is literally nonsense but it sounds ~scientific~’ and it’s all great fun to read?

well

behold, the journal of recreational linguistics

with such delightful papers as ‘tennis puns’, ‘animals in different languages’, and ‘gifts from a homonymous benefactor’

excuse me while i go read all 50 volumes in one sitting

[leadraktajino]

a bit of a stray thought but: it seems to me like the bajorans have implant-type UTs (since not only local militia members, who may have translators installed in their comm-badges, like starfleet personnel does, but also the civilians can understand fed. standart/other languages pretty well, even aside from the forced-bilingual thingie), so. LOGICALLY. it may mean odo (who probs can’t shapeshift a part of himself into a complicated machinery (his communicator ie and such)) actually needs to learn languages. speaks good (obvs) bajoran, cardassian and ferengi, knows dominionese instantly through linking, doesn’t understand half of what federation people are saying till like mid-season 2, understands two out of ten words in klingon and, by the end of show, speaks little belarusian (where’s no way worf ever said a word in standart english in his life, what’s the point). in every alien-of-the-week ep he’s just. dissociating in the background waiting for kira to explain him what’s going on

[linguafandom]

[context for non-trekkies: Odo is a liquid-like being known who can hold the shape of a humanoid; his form and nature means an implanted device that interfaces with a physical brain would not work on him]

[linguafandom]

[timellord]

[pervocracy]

Part of the New Internet Grammar: using question marks not to denote questions, but upturns in voice, so that a tentative statement gets a question mark but a flatly delivered question doesn’t.

[argumate]

why would you do this

[pervocracy]

It just seems right?

[linguafandom]

On The Internet, The World's Diversity Of Languages Is Completely Absent

The world's languages aren't dying online. They never even existed.

"Linguists who study endangered languages have identified a few early warning signs," writes Mayyasi. "One is when a prominent language like English or French replaces a native language for a specific function like literature or commerce. Another is when a native language is seen as dated by younger generations."

In the 2013 paper Digital Language Death, researcher András Kornai investigated the dangers to existing languages caused by a move to the digital realm, by applying the same methods of "language vitality assessment" that are used for regular languages. At the end, Kornai concludes that, at best, only 5% of the world’s languages are "digitally ascending." That is, 95% of languages are not vital, thriving, or even borderline viable online.

The problems are complex. For instance, even if a language has a good online presence, it doesn’t mean that it has a community that uses it in any meaningful way (Kornai cites Klingon as an example of this). Also, thanks to the way content hangs around online forever, a language can still exist and be dead at the same time. "Wikipedia is a good place for digitally minded speakers to congregate," writes Kornai, "but the natural outcome of these efforts is a heritage project, not a live community."

[linguafandom]

The Finn-donesian of "The Force Awakens"

For my language column in the Wall Street Journal this week, I describe how some alien-speak in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" ended up being created by a young Finnish YouTube sensation, tailor-made for Indonesian actors. We could call it "Finn-donesian," though the character Fi

The linguistic landscape of "Star Wars" has always been a bit of a mess. We're supposed to think of the English that most characters speak as a proxy for the in-universe lingua franca – Galactic Basic Standard, to those in the know. But some characters jabber away in other exotic tongues without much rhyme or reason. Chewbacca speaks in Wookiee, presumably because his vocal tract isn't equipped to speak Basic. As a protocol droid, C-3PO is of course "fluent in over six million forms of communication," but astromech droids R2-D2 and BB-8 can only bleep away in Binary because… well, who knows, really? They just do.

I had puzzled over these questions growing up with the original "Star Wars" trilogy, and with the release of "The Force Awakens" I started thinking about them again. I eagerly followed a sprawling Twitter conversation a couple of weeks ago, initiated by Gretchen McCulloch, which began with attempts to make sense of BB-8's droidspeak and then spun out into various other linguistic conundrums.

Why, for instance, did J.J. Abrams not take advantage of the community of "conlangers" to make alien languages for "The Force Awakens"? Abrams had, after all, directed two "Star Trek" movies with dialogue from that most famous of invented languages, Klingon. And other big science-fiction releases have featured the efforts of conlangers, like the Na'vi of James Cameron's "Avatar." But as I noted in the New York Times Magazine when "Avatar" was released, alien-speak in the "Star Wars" movies has, by contrast, "never amounted to more than a sonic pastiche" – a pastiche largely assembled by sound designer Ben Burtt using bits of exotic-sounding human languages.

As the tweets flew back and forth, Laura Seaberg pointed out a recently revealed tidbit about "The Force Awakens." Rather than approaching a conlanger, Abrams had instead enlisted Sara Maria Forsberg, a Finnish 19-year-old who found YouTube fame in 2014 with her video, "What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners" (more than 16 million views and counting). In the video, Forsberg proved herself to be an adept mimic of twenty different languages, earning her international attention and an appearance on "The Ellen Show" as "The Multilingual Gibberish Girl." After her bravura performance, Lucasfilm contacted her with a hush-hush offer to work on a scene in "The Force Awakens."

[linguafandom]

Joining the ranks of Stargate and Atlantis: The Lost Empire of scifi movies that center around a linguist protagonist, Arrival follows Amy Adams trying to communicate with aliens who arrive on Earth for unknown reasons. It is based on the short story “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, which is described on Wikipedia as containing major themes of “determinism, language, and an interesting take on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.”

[linguafandom]

“Inflection”

alt text: “Or maybe, because we’re suddenly having so many conversations through written text, we’ll start relying MORE on altered spelling to indicate meaning!” “Wat.”