#xenolinguistics

[raointean]

I'm writing a story set on Erid and I need ideas for pronouns. I don't want to go crazy with a bunch of neopronouns, but using only they/them or it/its sounds exhausting, so I need an entirely new structure to plug English pronouns into. I'm thinking maybe using different pronouns based on level of closeness with the speaker or possibly social status.

Ideas? Suggestions?

[kelzebub]

Saw Project Hail Mary for the second time in a very small theater. There was an older couple in front of me and three younger people behind me, presumably from the university across the street by their ages, and that group was speaking a language I couldn't identify. Anyway, I could tell even though it was a completely unknown language to me that this one guy was explaining parts of the plot to another. So that kinda made me think that actually you *could* figure out a lot about how to communicate with someone from another planet just from context and stuff. It made me happy.

[linguisticdiscovery]

Morpheme map of Heptapod B

Morpheme map of Heptapod B, the alien language in the movie Arrival (credit: @‌LanguageCrawler on Twitter)

[whatudottu]

Given that a lot of characters in Ben 10 speak their language without being translated into English, do you think that their language is so common that it's assumed you - supposedly an intergalactic traveler - have whatever language it is as part of your first, second or other languages that it was an oversight (depending on if the Omnitrix has a universal translator or not, one even Azmuth overlooked because something something that one comic about 'the basics to an expert look like advanced knowledge to a newbie') to not include a translation pack for those languages?

Like imagine if Sotoragg (or whatever specific Sotoragg language SixSix and the copycats speaks) is like one of the more common language, if not the MOST common language, of the interplanetarily recognised languages. Whether it's predominantly first language or someone's second language (Mandarin beats out English on first language alone, but countries that predominantly speak English are also predominantly monolingual, English has more second language speakers that pulls ahead), I don't know, but if Tetrax Shard - one of if not the last petrosapien - can understand SixSix while we as the viewer stuck without the knowledge of whatever Sotoragg language he's speaking, maybe it had to be one of the languages he had to learn because guess what Petropian languages aren't very lively now are they!?

[splickedylit]

please tell me more about the stuff in the tags of your last fic, I love xenolinguistics! What if brother and sister were just correlated do to our gendernorms? What is sister in Alternian?

I mean, to be clear, that post is an excerpt, and far from the full fic which is still in process! But uhhh let's see. So in the tags you're addressing, I said

"what if 'motherfucker' and 'brother' are translated different but they're related words in alternian…. #what if 'brother' and 'sister' aren't different words theyre just translated in english based on gender but there's no distinction actually #it's all the word I tend to translate as 'kin'/'family'/'fam' but gendered by english-speakers for comprehension"

My thought wasn't that there was a word for "sister" in Alternian, any more than a word for "brother"! In keeping with the minimal amount of gendering I try to do when I write trolls, I was thinking there could be a single word that just basically means "troll who is part of my 'family'", (although "family" here is its own kettle of fish on Alternia, more on that later). To a conversational learner of Alternian, it would be fairly natural to translate it according to the gender of the person being addressed, since calling someone "brother" or "sister" has more linguistic precedent than the gender-neutral address I've used in clown-fics before, which is "kin".

(I don't think I got that from canon, as far as I remember I came up with that because I wanted more queer characters and needed a gender-neutral church term of address for them, lol).

Bear in mind my worldbuilding is also partially predicated on the way I tend to write the clown church, which is a little more based on real life juggalos than some clown churches I've seen written in fics--I like the idea that purplebloods are still violent assholes to each other, but that they have a weird kind of cohesion, a default allyship with each other via the church that isn't quadranted and isn't necessarily in cahoots, but just expects a certain amount of kinship. "Family", or "troll-closer-than-friend", something that's not quite a quadrant but is closer than the average troll gets to have with other trolls, usually. I like the thought of other blood castes finding that deeply unsettling--and I also feel like it makes a certain amount of sense; both for the sort of weird troll equivalent of an ethnoreligious group and also for a comparatively smaller ruling class that has to keep the much more numerous, psionically-gifted masses in line.

But also as individuals they will certainly still challenge, undercut, and murder each other sometimes haha. They're Alternian trolls after all. ANYWAY

Terms of address in Alternian are actually a really fun concept, especially if I was playing around with the concept I talked about a little in later tags on that same post--that you can present yourself as a superior, inferior, or intentionally give zero inflection either way, which is risky in its own way if the person you're speaking to doesn't agree that you're equals. That actually meshes nicely with one of the few bits of xenolinguistics we do get in the comic, which is that apparently the troll word for "friend" is the same as the word for "enemy"! Which you could work in a couple of ways!

the word just essentially does mean "friend"/"troll I'm close to"--if you are actually friends, then cool. If not, it becomes more like a guy in a bar calling you "pal" and stepping into your space. Humans have their own dominance and submission tone indicators, and imposing closeness or familiarity on a person you aren't familiar with to that degree can be a threat in any language, so it would feel right to me if Alternian had the same thing but much more aggressively codified.

The word is understood as "friend" when it's said in a submissive/friendly/fawning stance, and "enemy" when it's said by a superior or dominant troll. This is actually also fun because it means that unless a highblood is explicitly lowering themself to use a less dominant tone, they're speaking to their social inferiors with pretty overt hostility.

To bring it back around to the original topic, I honestly like option two a little better--if any term of address can be dominant/hostile, submissive/fawning or neutral/equal, then Gamzee when he's introduced using the "equals" inflection of "brother/sister/etc" would carry on his canon vibe of not really acting like A Real Highblood. And then when murderstuck hit, he could drop all the way to a supposedly super friendly and harmless inflection on the "it's me :o)" sentences and an aggressive one on the "AND ALSO ME :o(" sentences.

"Motherfucker" is a fun one because carrying on the thought I was having in those tags, I was imagining "motherfucker" would be a very similar word in Alternian to "kin"--but smushed together with the Alternian for "fuck" and used in all sorts of ungrammatical ways. "Motherfucker" would make sense to me as an Anglicization of a word that in Alternian might mean something more like "(friend-closer-than-friend)fucker". After all, trolls don't have mothers--I think I've written before with the alternate headcanon that it refers to the Mother Grub, and is kind of profane/gross in that sense, but I also like the concept that part of the reason that we see so many purplebloods throwing "motherfuck(ing/er)" around is because they're also the ones who have a concept of "family" via the church, and a nonexistent translator was like "for readability I have not translated this literally but have instead used the nearest human equivalent" lol.

[shaonicwhite]

the part of me that wants to invent an alien language with inhuman phonemes and weird syntax is constantly at war with the part of me that wants to invent aliens that are so far beyond the standard cultural image of a sentient alien that its form of communication has nothing that can even be compared to human language

[0xy--m0r0n]

here we go!!!! this took me multiple hours, but here is the fanmade non official galran alphabet!!!!

fun fact about me: i am a SUCKER for fictional languages. like. i go feral for them. i did this instead of writing an essay and it was SO worth it

uhhhh but yeah!! i hope it looks galran enough to be accepted in the fandom 😔 at the time i only had a really blurry photo ref of like. four letters. so like. maybe forgive me??? if it doesn't look??? accurate????

[assholepants]

This is going to be a long post theorising about the linguistic landscape of alternia, as told by me, a dude with a sociolinguistics degree.

Thesis statement: The trolls are native bilinguals in Alternian and English and Alternian society exists in a state of diglossia.

We are told that Doc Scratch has heavy influence over alternia, shaping the society to eventually provide the perfect context for the young trolls to develop the necessary skills to 'win the game' and trigger the chain of events that summon Lord English. Given that interaction with the humans is a fundamental part of this chain of events, it makes sense that the ability to communicate with them in a language they understand would be one of these 'necessary skills'. Introducing English language into Alternian society would be a huge benefit to Scratch's plan and so, I personally think the trolls grew up native bilinguals in Alternian and English.

If this is the case, then given all the contextual clues we have access to, I think bilingualism in Alternia probably existed in a state of diglossia. This means that the two languages are used for different purposes within society and hold different status. The H (or 'high') language (in this case, Alternian) is the language holding higher symbolic status in society, it would be used more in contexts such as education, religion, politics and art. English would then be the L (or 'low') language, having lower prestige, being used among peers, in the home etc.

In the comic, we see all Alternian books and movies are produced in Alternian, which would make sense as the more codified H language. However, I think the trolls are actually using English when communicating with each other online (as opposed to blaming this on the translation convention, where we assume they're speaking Alternian, but the author has written the text in English, because the audience doesn't speak Alternian). My main evidence for this is the trolls typing quirks. Alternian uses a completely different alphabet, so it's unlikely that the quirks used by the trolls would translate over properly.

A couple other things that I think fit well into this theory:

If English is used mainly in informal contexts, it is more likely that its users will invent and perpetuate 'slang'. Instead of viewing 'troll words' as mistranslations, we could view the use of overly literal language as its own form of slang. Viewed this way, the reactions of the highbloods to these words make way more sense, as they look down on the lowbloods use of the slang and encourage them to speak 'properly'.

It adds a pretty funny dimension to how trolls view 'earth media'. Why are they producing all of their art in the L language? Are they THAT uncultured?? Troll media is way more prestigious.

Anyways here's the Wikipedia link for diglossia