It is September 29, 2011. Do know where your technology is?
I have discovered that, beyond all reasonable expectations, it is possible to teach an old dog a new trick. The hard part was finding an old dog. Especially one willing to learn a new trick. Then there is the issue of the trick. What might be suitable?
In my case, I learned how to create new pages on my Blogger blog (this one). So I made some new pages, one for each of my novels. I count the ones that are in some stage of the publication process. Two have been accepted and are on the assembly line, two others are tentatively accepted pending approval of the full manuscript, and one is my "baby"--the one through which I hope to grasp eternity. You can check them out (i.e., read what I have put on each page, not visit your library; they aren't that ready yet).
Thought you'd want to know. Not everyone, of course, will be easily impressed by my technological prowess, but someone might. Thus, I decided to post about it. I like when things go my way. It doesn't happen too often, which is all the more reason to celebrate. Tonight I shall drink until drunk, eat until satiated, and sleep the sleep of the dead. Tomorrow I shall learn something new.
29 September 2011
26 September 2011
Is this a Hacker Trick or has Facebook gone Mad?
Moments ago I posted this on my Facebook page - yes, after finally getting back in!
Earlier today, I posted this bit of text, ranting about the misunderstanding I and Facebook were having:
Hey Everybody,
Earlier today, I posted this bit of text, ranting about the misunderstanding I and Facebook were having:
Hey Everybody,
I thought I'd ask: Have you gotten a box pop up when you logged on to Facebook that asks you to log on again and when you click on it to log in AGAIN it asks for your phone number? I am not allowed to proceed until I give a phone number. I remember FB always hassling me to give a phone number "in case I forget my password" but I never forget my password.
I'm wondering if this is a hacker/spammer thing to get people's phone number. The explanation "Facebook" gives is that they want to assure that everyone has only one page.
Anyway, I have 3 pages: one for family/relatives, one for grad school friends, and one as author (plus my fan page). This has appeared on one but not yet on the others.
Let the world know I am locked out until I hand over my precious phone number. (I'm not going to give up my phone number because nobody needs to know that unless I want a call from them.)
Have a nice day!
NOW...in the alternative...Facebook wants me to identify my friends by their pictures...THEN it shows me pictures of their vacation destinations...no people!
I can't imagine how those who have thousands of friends can identify every picture shown.
The point, obviously, is that it is simply easier to give up your phone number to the global community, thereby sacrificing yet another bunch of numbers to corporate marketing, hackers and spammers, and stalkers.
All is calm now...but there is, like the urge to attend to the bathroom, always tomorrow!
I can't imagine how those who have thousands of friends can identify every picture shown.
The point, obviously, is that it is simply easier to give up your phone number to the global community, thereby sacrificing yet another bunch of numbers to corporate marketing, hackers and spammers, and stalkers.
All is calm now...but there is, like the urge to attend to the bathroom, always tomorrow!
19 September 2011
Color by any other Name would be . . . Music
It has come to my attention that not all blogs are created equal. Equality can never be assured if design templates are employed. Someone somewhere will always have the same look. One thing that can be changed, that also will have great impact (so say the soothsayers), is to change the color scheme of the blog pages. (Another change is to have short paragraphs, so...)
I've read on someone's blog page (I'll update the link when I relocate it, thanks!) that readers prefer dark text on light background - rather than what I had: light text on dark background. Thus, forevermore (quothe my raven), shall I use dark text on light background.
This becomes relevant in several ways. First, I make my readers happy, even though no-one has complained about the color scheme. Second, I may yet draw in more readers, those who might have initially been tempted to peek at a scrumptious headline's promising titillation. Third, I am able to satisfy my boredom with the existing color scheme, which has been on tap now for more than a year. And lastly, I am able to fulfill the goal of adding yet another blog post for the month of September.
This last item may yet prove to be the most significant reason. But I digress - even before I regress.
As this blog was birthed chiefly to shout to the world the existence of another world henceforth dubbed The Dream Land and procured and packaged into a trilogy of textual elements, known commonly as The Dream land trilogy, it seems appropriate, and not without some representative jollity, that a pertinent sampling of the same be offered here. It's a passage relating to color, light, and music.
In the first volume of The Dream Land (Book I: Long Distance Voyager), our heroes, two geeky high school sweethearts dabbling in quantum physics out at an abandoned quarry one summer, discuss the way music is actually sound, which is actually light, the manipulation of which could cause the fabric of the universe to tear. One portion reads thus:
And there you have it! An excerpt to stimulate your musical sensibilities and brighten your day. May you always be enamored by the colors of your day, the hues of your moods, and the shades of your thoughts, feelings, and words - for they are all the same: light and shadow - colors.
I've read on someone's blog page (I'll update the link when I relocate it, thanks!) that readers prefer dark text on light background - rather than what I had: light text on dark background. Thus, forevermore (quothe my raven), shall I use dark text on light background.
This becomes relevant in several ways. First, I make my readers happy, even though no-one has complained about the color scheme. Second, I may yet draw in more readers, those who might have initially been tempted to peek at a scrumptious headline's promising titillation. Third, I am able to satisfy my boredom with the existing color scheme, which has been on tap now for more than a year. And lastly, I am able to fulfill the goal of adding yet another blog post for the month of September.
This last item may yet prove to be the most significant reason. But I digress - even before I regress.
As this blog was birthed chiefly to shout to the world the existence of another world henceforth dubbed The Dream Land and procured and packaged into a trilogy of textual elements, known commonly as The Dream land trilogy, it seems appropriate, and not without some representative jollity, that a pertinent sampling of the same be offered here. It's a passage relating to color, light, and music.
In the first volume of The Dream Land (Book I: Long Distance Voyager), our heroes, two geeky high school sweethearts dabbling in quantum physics out at an abandoned quarry one summer, discuss the way music is actually sound, which is actually light, the manipulation of which could cause the fabric of the universe to tear. One portion reads thus:
Gina got him worked up thinking of the Theory. Now she was laughing at him, telling him it was a joke! But here were the notebooks filled margin to margin with equations, charts, graphs—everything to prove her correct. And she was not interested. She wanted to continue her carefree college life learning how to treat mental illness with music.
“It’s Music Therapy,” she said firmly, “and it’s a real subject.”
“What does music have to do with anything?” he asked her. “It’s nice and I enjoy it. Remember my scholarship? Yet, despite making life more pleasant, what does it really have to do with anything important in the universe?”
She shook her head, her blond hair tossed by the breeze.
“You talk about the universe as though it was your own private garden, something you sow and hoe every day,” Gina snapped back. “Sebastian, you can’t see the damn forest because of all the rotten logs falling on top of you! Can’t you put the tiniest figures together long enough to see that music is more than some song you hear. It’s math. It’s more than math, it’s the rhythm of the spheres. Planets spin to music, comets shoot to music, suns go nova to music, the whole damn universe is sewn together by a zillion musical strings—like a curtain with interwoven threads. That’s why we study music—not because it helps us get through our days, but because it makes the entire universe exist! It’s all connected; it all is—all the same thing. You know that. Don’t you? Take middle-C: its frequency is 558.15 Hertz. If you double it you get an octave higher, right? If you double it forty times you get light, specifically the color of light we might call indigo. It’s the same with other notes, with other colors. Play with sound, with the light spectrum, and you’re playing with the universe!”And there you have it! An excerpt to stimulate your musical sensibilities and brighten your day. May you always be enamored by the colors of your day, the hues of your moods, and the shades of your thoughts, feelings, and words - for they are all the same: light and shadow - colors.
15 September 2011
What's Up with Being Happy on Happy Birthday?
Being Happy on B'day (the repost)
So here it is again: the ubiquitous birthday. Same day every year. Why are we not tired of it already? It returns each year like a plague, with swarms of expectations threatening to overwhelm us. Nevertheless, it seems quite reasonable that each of us deserves a special personal day--no matter how naughty we may have been. One day of the year. That's all. 24 hours, give or take. That's harmless enough, isn't it? Everyone should get a day off from work, school, hassle, red lights, dirty laundry, taxation, crying babies, etc.
My history, however, proves that my birthday is usually the worst day of the year for me. I've analyzed the reasons for this phenomena. It probably has to do with the higher expectations I have for the day. Or the timing of the day among the starting of the school year or the football/autumn season. Things seem to happen at this time of the year. One year there was a flood that drew everyone's attention away from my day. Then there was the terrorist attack on September 11th. I'm not claiming that those events occurred exclusively to thwart celebration of my continued aging. Just coincidences. My birthday was a coincidence: my mother often tells the story of how I was "due" eleven days earlier. If only I had been born on time! Perhaps the world would be different now.
So, given the randomness of a birthday and its almost obligatory acknowledgement, what can we do to properly deal with the many expectations and the certain failure we have to meet them? Some would go to extremes to indulge themselves. It's only fair. Others would gather family and friends and have a round of cake and ice cream. One day won't hurt. Some will lie about the advancing years, hide their true age as though it were some fatal disease. My father still insists with every passing birthday that he is "turning 39"--again; which makes me, what? six? year after year.
No, what I want is quite simple:
Just let everything go my way, just for one day. I don't care about a party; I'm an adult now. I don't care about gifts; I can buy what I want now. I don't need celebration; It would either be trite or downright embarrassing. I'd rather pass the day alone, locked in my home, safely away from the world. Inside my fortress of solitude, of course, I'd indulge myself in various ways. Sleep late. Watch a favorite movie. Eat my favorite foods. Play video games. Read a book I've been waiting to get to. Do something absolutely unimportant and unproductive.
And so, for the mother who suffered through labor, for the teachers and classmates who had to deal with me from nursery school through college, for the relatives who alternately tolerated, or were horrified or amused by my life events, for the strangers who happily avoided me, for the colleagues from university and work and extracurricular activities who with some disdain endured the annual rituals of self-abandonment on this day, for all of the people I have encountered, for better or worse, let me say a humble thanks for not getting in my way on the one day of the year when I really do wish, with the maximum amount of sincerity and straight from the gut, to say to the world: "Leave me the hell alone! ...at least for 24 hours."
Thanks, and see you all next year.
My history, however, proves that my birthday is usually the worst day of the year for me. I've analyzed the reasons for this phenomena. It probably has to do with the higher expectations I have for the day. Or the timing of the day among the starting of the school year or the football/autumn season. Things seem to happen at this time of the year. One year there was a flood that drew everyone's attention away from my day. Then there was the terrorist attack on September 11th. I'm not claiming that those events occurred exclusively to thwart celebration of my continued aging. Just coincidences. My birthday was a coincidence: my mother often tells the story of how I was "due" eleven days earlier. If only I had been born on time! Perhaps the world would be different now.
So, given the randomness of a birthday and its almost obligatory acknowledgement, what can we do to properly deal with the many expectations and the certain failure we have to meet them? Some would go to extremes to indulge themselves. It's only fair. Others would gather family and friends and have a round of cake and ice cream. One day won't hurt. Some will lie about the advancing years, hide their true age as though it were some fatal disease. My father still insists with every passing birthday that he is "turning 39"--again; which makes me, what? six? year after year.
No, what I want is quite simple:
Just let everything go my way, just for one day. I don't care about a party; I'm an adult now. I don't care about gifts; I can buy what I want now. I don't need celebration; It would either be trite or downright embarrassing. I'd rather pass the day alone, locked in my home, safely away from the world. Inside my fortress of solitude, of course, I'd indulge myself in various ways. Sleep late. Watch a favorite movie. Eat my favorite foods. Play video games. Read a book I've been waiting to get to. Do something absolutely unimportant and unproductive.
And so, for the mother who suffered through labor, for the teachers and classmates who had to deal with me from nursery school through college, for the relatives who alternately tolerated, or were horrified or amused by my life events, for the strangers who happily avoided me, for the colleagues from university and work and extracurricular activities who with some disdain endured the annual rituals of self-abandonment on this day, for all of the people I have encountered, for better or worse, let me say a humble thanks for not getting in my way on the one day of the year when I really do wish, with the maximum amount of sincerity and straight from the gut, to say to the world: "Leave me the hell alone! ...at least for 24 hours."
Thanks, and see you all next year.
08 September 2011
The Allure of Time Killers
It is now September and I am feeling pressure to post the first blog of the month. Strange sensation, the pull of words! The push of perusers! The tickle of the morning light and how it calls the fingers to the keyboard even before the mind has formed thoughts, translated them into language, and sent them along the neural pathways to the fingertips. And yet...I'm doing it. It is less than an addiction, more than OCD.
These days, it seems, especially now that my so-called day job has exploded into a full-time monstrosity, a certain portion of each day must be spent on connecting to one's myriad electronic venues. There has always been email to check, and the more accounts one has--each for its own nefarious purpose, no doubt--but now there is also Facebook and its multiple personas to monitor and manage, and the same perhaps for MySpace, Tumblr, and other similar "social networking" sites. (I wish I had coined that term; could be making billions off the rights by now!) Plus Twitter--again with several separate accounts. Now there's Google+ which I'm still not sure how to operate. And for writers and readers, there are plenty of sites online such as Goodreads, of which I have recently become a member. I have also joined a site for those interested in Steampunk, a genre or sub-genre (no fights, please) of science-fiction or utopian/dystopian fiction. And don't get me started on all the blogs my friends and a few strangers have created, maintain, and add to often enough, occasionally intriguing or amusing me.
I find myself getting up earlier now than I really need to just to get myself ready for a weekday's normal effort simply to be able to check everything. I need to be sure the world is safe for social networking. I need to be certain that my previous comments have been commented on--or rejected--or, worse, ignored. I shun arguments on Walls--unless I'm right and everyone knows it. I must check that things are happening, that political views are in balance, that social issues are being taken care of by someone, someone other than me. And, for good measure, I usually check them all again, in order or perhaps only the most critical ones, before logging off and leaving for the day's Grand Illusion.
I feel refreshed, confident, relaxed, knowing that I have checked in, that my field of audiences have been informed that I still exist. (Some are no doubt surprised.) Perhaps that fact alone is enough to compel some to socially dismiss the network in favor of the other, older networks: what used to be the visual arena of ideas and entertainment, expanded a thousandfold. Yes, I speak of television, that splintered soul now languishing in the wastelands of electronica, hanging on for dear life with dancers and singers and Hollywood mavens of malevolence, or whatever else can be stood in front of a camera and later mocked. (It's endless, of course.)
And so there remains, for an escape, the ancient art of linguistic scribbles pressed into wood shavings. I refer to the ubiquitous book. Such pleasures I have known with a good book between my hands! Such adventures I have fled the world to enrapture myself in! And still, that paradise, that comfy bed of brain bliss, even that venue is changing! Yes, the sacred objet-d'art is joining the electronic universe! With a few tweaks and more than a few reconsiderations ("Do I really want to say that? Will anyone actually read this?"), any book written today may be sent through the vast airwaves to a handheld mechanical device upon which one's eyes may come to focus for pleasure, perversion, or perhaps a person's private pontification. The possibilities are perfectly pointless.
However, this is not the place (though it may seem to be, being one of those electronic utopias about which I rant) for a discussion of the nature of the newest Age of Books. (No, I'm not cynical; I'm Stephen.)
I must now click the "post" button and make my words part of the universe--praying that someday, some far-away intellectual fool on a far-away world, in some random, slavish moment of silence comes to encounter these words, translate them into ideas, and thereby know that I existed, once upon a very long time ago, a time which was less fairy tale than instructional manual, and closes its eye(s) in delightful calm after a good night's fine contemplation.
These days, it seems, especially now that my so-called day job has exploded into a full-time monstrosity, a certain portion of each day must be spent on connecting to one's myriad electronic venues. There has always been email to check, and the more accounts one has--each for its own nefarious purpose, no doubt--but now there is also Facebook and its multiple personas to monitor and manage, and the same perhaps for MySpace, Tumblr, and other similar "social networking" sites. (I wish I had coined that term; could be making billions off the rights by now!) Plus Twitter--again with several separate accounts. Now there's Google+ which I'm still not sure how to operate. And for writers and readers, there are plenty of sites online such as Goodreads, of which I have recently become a member. I have also joined a site for those interested in Steampunk, a genre or sub-genre (no fights, please) of science-fiction or utopian/dystopian fiction. And don't get me started on all the blogs my friends and a few strangers have created, maintain, and add to often enough, occasionally intriguing or amusing me.
I find myself getting up earlier now than I really need to just to get myself ready for a weekday's normal effort simply to be able to check everything. I need to be sure the world is safe for social networking. I need to be certain that my previous comments have been commented on--or rejected--or, worse, ignored. I shun arguments on Walls--unless I'm right and everyone knows it. I must check that things are happening, that political views are in balance, that social issues are being taken care of by someone, someone other than me. And, for good measure, I usually check them all again, in order or perhaps only the most critical ones, before logging off and leaving for the day's Grand Illusion.
I feel refreshed, confident, relaxed, knowing that I have checked in, that my field of audiences have been informed that I still exist. (Some are no doubt surprised.) Perhaps that fact alone is enough to compel some to socially dismiss the network in favor of the other, older networks: what used to be the visual arena of ideas and entertainment, expanded a thousandfold. Yes, I speak of television, that splintered soul now languishing in the wastelands of electronica, hanging on for dear life with dancers and singers and Hollywood mavens of malevolence, or whatever else can be stood in front of a camera and later mocked. (It's endless, of course.)
And so there remains, for an escape, the ancient art of linguistic scribbles pressed into wood shavings. I refer to the ubiquitous book. Such pleasures I have known with a good book between my hands! Such adventures I have fled the world to enrapture myself in! And still, that paradise, that comfy bed of brain bliss, even that venue is changing! Yes, the sacred objet-d'art is joining the electronic universe! With a few tweaks and more than a few reconsiderations ("Do I really want to say that? Will anyone actually read this?"), any book written today may be sent through the vast airwaves to a handheld mechanical device upon which one's eyes may come to focus for pleasure, perversion, or perhaps a person's private pontification. The possibilities are perfectly pointless.
However, this is not the place (though it may seem to be, being one of those electronic utopias about which I rant) for a discussion of the nature of the newest Age of Books. (No, I'm not cynical; I'm Stephen.)
I must now click the "post" button and make my words part of the universe--praying that someday, some far-away intellectual fool on a far-away world, in some random, slavish moment of silence comes to encounter these words, translate them into ideas, and thereby know that I existed, once upon a very long time ago, a time which was less fairy tale than instructional manual, and closes its eye(s) in delightful calm after a good night's fine contemplation.
31 August 2011
A Day in the Life of YEAR OF THE TIGER
Hey, Readers and Reader wannabes, check this out:
YEAR OF THE TIGER
What would you do if you awoke to find yourself inside the mind of a wild animal, living its life--hunting, killing, mating?
Every night Karl Edwards has strange, violent dreams. He sees the world as though looking through the eyes of a huge Bengal tiger, and it's driving him insane! His sexy wife notices the effect but, fortunately, she knows a hunky young doctor who can help--help her have Karl committed, that is! Locked away, the nightmares worsen for Karl and grow ever stronger as the tiger hunts down the men who killed its mate.
Karl has a plan, however. All he has to do is persuade Althea, the mousy young nurse on his floor, to help him escape. Next, he must find a way to get to India. Then he must find that one special tiger and kill it. Only then will Karl have for himself the mind he and the tiger seem to share. Simple, right?
But others are interested in joining the hunt. The doctor who put Karl in the mental hospital fears Karl will reveal the doctor's criminal behavior, so the doctor is after human prey. And famous big game hunter Colonel John Barrington is ready to come out of retirement, with worldwide media in tow, for one last chance at a man-eating tiger! Who will get to the tiger first? And will the tiger be the one to have the last roar?
Set in 1986, YEAR OF THE TIGER is a fast-paced adventure novel that weaves together a virtual jungle of intrigue which explodes at the end of the trail.
COMING SOON (well, all right, maybe sometime in 2012) from Fantasy Island Book Publishing!
YEAR OF THE TIGER
What would you do if you awoke to find yourself inside the mind of a wild animal, living its life--hunting, killing, mating?
Every night Karl Edwards has strange, violent dreams. He sees the world as though looking through the eyes of a huge Bengal tiger, and it's driving him insane! His sexy wife notices the effect but, fortunately, she knows a hunky young doctor who can help--help her have Karl committed, that is! Locked away, the nightmares worsen for Karl and grow ever stronger as the tiger hunts down the men who killed its mate.
Karl has a plan, however. All he has to do is persuade Althea, the mousy young nurse on his floor, to help him escape. Next, he must find a way to get to India. Then he must find that one special tiger and kill it. Only then will Karl have for himself the mind he and the tiger seem to share. Simple, right?
But others are interested in joining the hunt. The doctor who put Karl in the mental hospital fears Karl will reveal the doctor's criminal behavior, so the doctor is after human prey. And famous big game hunter Colonel John Barrington is ready to come out of retirement, with worldwide media in tow, for one last chance at a man-eating tiger! Who will get to the tiger first? And will the tiger be the one to have the last roar?
Set in 1986, YEAR OF THE TIGER is a fast-paced adventure novel that weaves together a virtual jungle of intrigue which explodes at the end of the trail.
COMING SOON (well, all right, maybe sometime in 2012) from Fantasy Island Book Publishing!
24 August 2011
Interlude (an excerpt from The Dream Land trilogy)
Excerpt from Chapter 21 of The Dream Land (Book II: Dreams of Futures Passed)
What ever happened to that vagabond Diert-Gangus once his sweetheart was assassinated by the Captain of the regiment in Sorêg?
Down the cobblestone streets he [Set-d’Elous, a.k.a. Sebastian Talbot] went as a light rain fell, spotting the stones, green clouds rolling overhead, smothering him. Strangers watched him trudge toward the wharfs. The sailors wondered if he sought a job onboard, one asked and he waved the sailor off.
The rain grew thicker, and thunder banged his ears, streaks of lightning cutting across the sky, the roar of time filling his head. He knew what he had done. He had changed history—yet he had to wait years and years to see what effect it would bring. That feat was impossible, he suddenly realized with a snap of a ship’s mast near him. Sailors scrambled to untangle the ropes and steady the fallen post. The world was collapsing around him, and only he knew it.
[. . .]
A shadow fell over him. “There won’t be any war!”
At first he thought it was his alter ego, his doppelganger, a past-timeline self come to talk him out of suicide. But it was not. He looked up and saw a man staring down at him, the black silhouette somehow unmenacing.
“You speak English?” he asked the stranger in English.
“Famê-ke?Famê Ingloosz-se?” the shadow responded.
The words were all in Ghoupallêan; he had merely translated them into English in his head. He knew he was still sane and continued in Ghoupallêan, using a rough country tone that fit a man of his appearance, only moments before soaked by a rainstorm on the wharf in Selauê harbor yet now amazingly dry, waiting for the future and feeling a twinge of hunger for crusty bread and creamy butter, perhaps a spicy sausage and a slice of cheese on the side, and iced tea. Lots of iced tea.
“Why do you say there won’t be any war?” he asked the stranger.
The shadows shifted, and the sunlight was momentarily blinding as the man sat down on the wooden planks beside the captain.
“No war as long as Sarrêban stays in power,” the stranger replied, alluding to the monarchy, a passive family business content to let the bureaucrats run everything. The military offered a counterbalance to official incompetence and rampant corruption. “I don’t wish for war, yet the people cry out for justice in all the corners of the land. In the end there will be war, yet not as long as Sarrêban remains in power. In their comfort and luxury they have no will to change, not a finger to lift toward justice. I have seen their kind of justice. From a close view!”
He looked over the man, tattered clothes like himself, soaked and forlorn. They were two of society’s rejects. Only, he was an expatriate from another world, someone who could come and go as he pleased, someone with a steady job on the graveyard shift at the local Internal Revenue Service Center, someone who might have a wife and 2.4 kids, a 401(k) plan, and a late-model minivan. He studied the strange image in his mind, then rudely dismissed it. That was not him. Somehow, sitting in once-again wet clothes beneath the green sky, he felt empathy with this stranger.
“Tell me your story, stranger,” he spoke finally.
Through the curls of smoke from a clay pipe the stranger wove his tale of desperation: from a simple boyhood in the bucolic forests of Sorêg disrupted by the accidental death of his father by soldiers on patrol and the death a few years later of his mother while gardening, mistaken for a scavenger and cut down by saber, to the life of a state-sponsored student at Sorêg university, focusing on politics with a goal of gaining entry into the local government, all the better to affect change in policy and do away with the annual patrols, do away with the interference of Selauê, do away with the controlling claws of Seas—ah! the crops of Sorêg set upon the dining tables of so many administrators in that southern capitol, the meat of Sorêg livestock slathering the dinner plates of so many bureaucrats while peasants dug roots from the dirt and made do with the hooves and tails of their beasts shipped-off to the starving cities, praying for a heavy rain to muddy the roads and halt the train of wagons removing their wealth week by week, year by year, as all the while the youth ran thin and dumb in the streets.
In his third year of study at the university he had met a young woman, another student who was beginning a satisfying journey through the state’s curriculum, blissfully unaware of the true condition of the economy and the laws which permitted the wanton destruction of their Danid way of life. Her name was Basura and she wrote poetry beside the lake, sitting in the thick grasses that bound the shore, writing verse which set aside the worries of the world for him, one stanza at a time. Sometimes, she would read aloud to him, the two of them side by side in the grass, beneath the shading branches of the trees, the suns warming them, the breeze cooling them, the bird calls reminding them that they were one with nature and nature with them, far away from the urban noise and urban grunge and urban terrorism. Then one day she announced she had met a captain of the Coræsz, straight up from the Selauê garrison, an educated man who knew something of poetry and appreciated her talent. From that day, she went forth to meet him and returned only in spirit.
The regiment detained him and beat him until he would confess to an act he had not committed, would never consider committing, not given the pure innocence of the victim. Innocence! he laughed. The medic determined she had started a child, and they guessed he was the father. He, a student, would fear fatherhood prior to graduation so it was a motive for murder, to shield something that would ruin his scholarship, something that would bring scandal. So he endured the abuse for weeks, well past the time when it was no longer possible to pull out of him the words he refused to give up—until it was solely for the amusement of the guards, until the new captain grew weary of him and had him thrown out, bloody and ravaged. Having no school ties following the ordeal, having no family, no occupation, no money to his name nor beast to carry him, he had walked the road down to Selauê seeking justice by his own hand.
The courts were full of guards, he was not surprised to discover, and fearing another vacation in the local garrison he relented and wandered the streets to invent a new plan. That brought him to the wharf, where most vagabonds ended their wanderings, staring out across the harbor at the sea, the swaying green waves somehow soothing: the complaisance of contemplation soothed all manner of horrors, swept away the past, occasionally encouraged the future, made the present something like a statue that could be examined from all sides, could be walked around, could be frozen in time, a moment in time—
“Gina said that, once upon a time,” he muttered despite the stranger’s never-ending tale—and he saw it suddenly: the shift of time, the appeal to perfection he had wished for and now found.
History had changed, indeed! Beside him was a man named Diert-Gangus who once was inspired to pursue a curriculum of justice at Sorêg university, a course which would lead him to form a group of students to lead a revolt that would eventually topple the monarchy and set themselves up as the new government, as the Council of Five, the governing body that would initiate the expansion of borders, the annexation of neighbor states, and the subsequent invasions and conquests that would—
“The least I can do is buy you a drink,” he spoke up in Ghoupallêan.
They clasped thumbs in agreement and stepped down the wharf. There were many taverns in the area and the second one they found was open to them. The first had refused them entry even after he showed a handful of coins to pay for their drinks. It was the clothing, he knew. And perhaps their smell. So, before they could finish their first drinks, others more easily offended came over to persuade them to quickly remove themselves from the establishment or risk a beating. His companion had enough of that activity and hurried out, and he followed in sympathy.
“I’ll need to get you some decent clothes,” he announced, pointing toward the shopping district, “so they don’t think you’re a rebel or terrorist.”
“How could I, ragged as I am, ever be mistaken for a rebel or terrorist?” Gangus grunted and stared up at the overcast sky. “True terrorists are clothed in clean, pressed uniforms. Yet no-one sees that.” He kicked at some dirt on the street, willing it to fly into the gutter. “People see with two eyes, do they not?”
“That Zetin high priest, Dnt’o-Kra’, had three, you know.” He chuckled to himself, then added in shy-toned English, “But he was still so blind.”
18 August 2011
Blogcation!
Stephen Swartz is taking a blogcation.
Contrary to rumors and major headlines, he has not (repeat: NOT) run out of things to blog. He will return shortly and his words will return shortly after that.
Expect a big announcement to follow.
Contrary to rumors and major headlines, he has not (repeat: NOT) run out of things to blog. He will return shortly and his words will return shortly after that.
Expect a big announcement to follow.
09 August 2011
It's all Ghoupallean (or Zetin) to me!
And now, without further adieu, the culmination of our three-part series on alien languages!
In the first post, I discussed reasons for using an alien language in a science-fiction or fantasy story as well as what others have said about the practice. I used the language of Klingon for several examples. In the second post, I got out the ol' grammar book and deconstructed the nature of language itself. At a minimum all languages need a few classes of words as well as a few rules to guide the construction of communication, no matter what the actual words are.
In this post I will use examples from The Dream Land trilogy to illustrate how alien languages can be used without becoming tedious to readers. (At least, I think what I've done is not tedious to readers.)
In The Dream Land (Book I: Long Distance Voyager), our hero, Sebastian Talbot (who has adopted the native name of Set-d'Elous) sets up shop in a city near a vast field of buried gemstones in order to mine them. He meets his neighbor, the golden haired Zaura-Matouszs, who reminds him too much of his long-lost high school sweetheart, Gina Parton.
In these two excerpts we can follow the protagonist as he encounters someone (the "alien" woman) speaking her native language. In the first excerpt, the reason is simple: the protagonist doesn't know what she is saying yet he hears the words. Writing out the alien language is a way to introduce the setting: a world where he doesn't understand the language. The paraphrase which follows offers a translation but does so in a non-intrusive manner--as part of the protagonist's "figuring it out." In the second excerpt, the use is more obvious and potentially distracting. And yet, it works to develop the protagonist's growing fluency--which will become important as the story proceeds. He needs to become fluent in order to be able to function fully in later adventures, of course. By juxtaposing the Ghoupallean phrases with the English equivalents we also can get a sense of the way the natives think, their customs, and what constitutes polite speech. Granted, some readers may still find it unnecessary or intrusive. I continue to believe a little use is not only permissible but does add to the texture of the story. The right place, for the right reason, and in the right portion is essential to getting away with this device!
Using an alien language in a more extensive dialog can be tricky, but the same reasons for use apply: texture, clarity, strangeness. Take this example, where our hero, Set-d'Elous asks a pair of old Zetin women where his wife and infant daughter have gone:
In the first post, I discussed reasons for using an alien language in a science-fiction or fantasy story as well as what others have said about the practice. I used the language of Klingon for several examples. In the second post, I got out the ol' grammar book and deconstructed the nature of language itself. At a minimum all languages need a few classes of words as well as a few rules to guide the construction of communication, no matter what the actual words are.
In this post I will use examples from The Dream Land trilogy to illustrate how alien languages can be used without becoming tedious to readers. (At least, I think what I've done is not tedious to readers.)
In The Dream Land (Book I: Long Distance Voyager), our hero, Sebastian Talbot (who has adopted the native name of Set-d'Elous) sets up shop in a city near a vast field of buried gemstones in order to mine them. He meets his neighbor, the golden haired Zaura-Matouszs, who reminds him too much of his long-lost high school sweetheart, Gina Parton.
He had to acknowledge her, not wanting to be rude, but his poor Ghoupallêan language came out as the mumbling of a child.
“Ghou’n däl-farnim mêtik?” she spoke. She was asking him if he had an illness.
He was too entranced to reply but she had smiled politely, bowing her head slightly in greeting or farewell, then moving off along the corridor with smooth, heavenly grace.
. . . and several paragraphs later . . .
She was always kind to him, and her soft, luscious invocations—even through such basic phrases as Daot-meju-mê (“Good day to you.”), or Uran-tem ben om-dakal (“What fine weather it is today!”), or especially Gur amannê-se Êr passouren-ga zoulêm pan (“I beg forgiveness for the interruption of your solemnity.”) when she had been noisy the previous evening—always melted the resilient anger tattooed on his soul from before, when he had left Gina back in Siti. He would never admit that Zaura had any passing resemblance to his former lover.
“How long ago did she leave?” he had asked the woman in his broken Zetin, seeing her becoming exhausted by his interrogation. But he had to know: “A month, two months—a year?”
“Xaa-jz,” she replied, shaking her head, her crumbling voice flowing unevenly in the rough Zetin tongue. Requesting a drink from her younger sister, wrinkled with age herself, she asked her about the date.
“Gsut dromru dot’, baxo’et zaxj’ st-raye dem tonn kaxj’,” the sister said. ‘I remember the cabin burning; it was a month after she left.’
Uz’a smiled then, satisfied her memory was still intact, then spoke in a stronger voice.
“Bax zaxj’ cinn-saz’az’,” she said to him. ‘It was ten years ago.’
First of all, the Zetin language is consonant-heavy; thus, I wrote it using small caps to approximate the rougher pronunciation compared with English or Ghoupallean. It may seem a petty thing to do, but it also helps distinguish Ghoupallean as a foreign language (thus in italics according to the rules of typography) and Zetin, the other foreign language that otherwise would have been rendered in italics. Try pronouncing the words one phoneme at a time: the XAA-JZ is the sound of the letter X (/ks/) followed by the sound of A (/ah/) and so on.
In this excerpt, I wanted to depict the realistic action of translation. That is what would happen, so as any good writer tries to do, I attempted to depict a believable scene. Our hero asks the old women: I say he said it in his imperfect Zetin as a way to introduce the fact that we are now stepping into Zetin. The women answer in their native language, Zetin, so readers "hear" what our hero hears; we experience it along with the character. It also, I believe, carries more emotional weight to have the crucial words spoken directly rather than offered to readers only as a paraphrased translation. (Yes, I include the translation in this case, but it comes after the crucial words; again readers experience the impact as the character does. At least, that was my intention.)
Another example comes only at the end of one chapter, when three Earth women accidentally fall through the interdimensional portal in pursuit of our protagonists only to find themselves lost in another world. Eventually they are found by nomadic merchants riding giraffe-like animals. The effect I wanted to create is to have the three women innocently believe they are being rescued, even as the opposite is true. They do not know what the nomads are saying to each other but the reader does:
The women, weary of their ordeal, drank down the water, tried the toop, and looked hopeful.
“A’ajahalomoha’emena’ahopefal’le’oha’ame’e,” the Rouê leader then announced in his native tongue, lowering his magal enough to display a mouth toothless except the four front incisors.
They must be Ghoupalle, he decided when they showed no response to his statement. He turned to his left and gave a command. One Rouê climbed down from his oñacha and removed from his saddle pouch a fine amber cloth. Stepping forward, he extended it to Donna Mae, motioning for her to cover herself.
Wilma bowed her head in thanks at their kind act, not knowing that what the Rouê leader had said was: ‘The old one we can sell to the villagers for a house servant.’
“O’olama’efe’ah’pehe’osama’ame’osama’bulo’egama’o,” their leader spoke then, as the other Rouê jumped down from their mounts. ‘The other two we’ll keep for ourselves until they no longer please us.’
The "funny" thing here is that the Roue language is very melodious, a language seemingly of pleasant tropical beaches; think Hawaiian. But the meaning of their nice-sounding words is actually crudely efficient. As I stated above, my intention was to juxtapose the innocence of the Earth women (not knowing the language) with what is actually being spoken and let readers feel the threat that the characters do not feel.
The final example of using languages does not actually use an alien language but the language known as French--which for some people is just as bad as an alien language. But the use of both French and Ghoupallean, along with English, again is intended to create a believable scene. What is written is what is spoken and heard, understood or not understood, and readers experience that effect as the characters do.
This example comes from the latter chapters of The Dream Land Book II: Dreams of Futures Passed. Because French is another Earth language like English, I did not italicize it in the text. I don't intend for readers to know French but simply to experience hearing French the same way our hero, Set-d'Elous (a.k.a. Sebastian) experiences it: half understood, half guessing. Then we come to understand that what he hears as French is actually spoken Ghoupallean, the "alien" language. (Yes, it's complicated, but it is also fun.)
She smiled warmly and her bare arm reached out from under the covers and brushed his cheek. He tried to smile but felt his lips stuck together. Suddenly, he could not speak.
“T’avez été habiles dans l'amour la nuit dernière,” she cooed, pouting.
He nodded, trying to retrieve some high school French from a locked vault deep in the basement of his mind.
“Tu n’êtes pas l'homme qui m’aime?” she said, giggling.
Again he smiled, hiding his linguistic terror, worried about revealing that in his three years of French classes his grades were never higher than B+.
She stretched up to kiss him and the sheet fell, leaving half of her chest exposed: the pale breast with its wide, brown aureole and large nipple. He recognized the breast. And yet, how could he, or any man, turn away from this stroke of divine luck? A naked woman in his bed! He laughed and she seemed momentarily offended.
“Pardonnez-moi,” he spoke. He was surprised at the words coming from his mouth. He smiled at the woman. “J’ai pensé,” he muttered, “que vous étiez habile, trop.” In his ears, the words sounded Ghoupallêan. And yet they clearly were not. He was speaking French. His lover was also speaking French. He must be in some fancy hotel in France, he considered, looking around the elegant room. Probably Paris. He had always wanted to visit. The room had a Louis-some-number appearance to it, stately and ornate, very old-looking yet in perfect condition.
Or it must be a dream, he decided.
“J’ai attendu pour tu, mais tu semblez n’apparaissent que dans mes rêves!”
“Huh?” He returned his attention to his mistress.
Our hero awakens and finds a woman speaking French to him. He half understands. I help the reader by having him think about his French class, so we know his level of fluency. The French helps sets the scene for both the hero and readers. Is he back on Earth in a hotel in Paris or is he dreaming it all or is he on another planet but strangely hearing the native language as French.
(I recognize this section is more challenging so I've included footnoted translations.)
He smiled to himself, remembering his sense of relief then, and the relief he felt as he watched his troops sail away on the freighter—
“Je pense que je voudrais que vous d’arrêter de parler français maintenant,” he said, now losing the caché of the exotic language and growing tired of having to translate everything in his head. "Et l'ensemble du personnel, aussi. Pas plus francais.”[1]
“Alors, comment devons-nous communiquer?”[2] asked his secretary, wondering how they would communicate with each other.
“Que diriez-vous de Ghoupallêan?”[3] he said, suggesting they continue in Ghoupallêan.
The secretary seemed surprised, his face pale.
“We are speaking Ghoupallêan, My Lord,” the secretary responded.
“We are?”
The man cleared his throat, then: “Zil, Kalmonê!”
Okay, that was Ghoupallêan, he recognized. Why had it all sounded French?
He gave an embarrassed smirk. There was a moment of pressure on his heart, like a fist squeezing out all of the blood, and just as quickly he was back to normal—or what passed as normal in this elaborate dream. He had now awakened enough to understand what was really happening, but he kept his expression in check so as to not let his personal secretary notice that he finally understood everything. He finally could see through the filmy beige curtains that had made everything so mysterious. In his gut, the world had broken wide open and the ancient microscope and modern telescope embedded there had shown him, at long last, the unbelievable yet unmistakable truth:
“I’m not in France,” he let slip out of his mouth.
The secretary inquired politely about his remark. Did he need anything?
“I must send a message,” he announced, clearly in Ghoupallêan.
[1] “I think I would like you to stop speaking French now. And the entire staff, too. No more French.”
[2] “Then how should we communicate?”
[3] “How about in Ghoupallêan?”
All right, it is tedious to have to look down at footnotes to figure it out. It may be fun to some readers but not to others. I'm still working on how best to present the scene. I want to keep the strangeness of it yet keep it real. Our hero thinks he is hearing French but his secretary is actually speaking Ghoupallean--and the silly narrator, your humble narrator, is using English.
The lesson of this post and perhaps all three of them is this: If at all possible, choose Earth as the setting of your science-fiction or fantasy story. Or, as Isaac Asimov and others have stated, keep it all in English and let readers imagine they are speaking some strange alien language to their heart's content. It's not as though we still read The Iliad and The Aenead in Greek and Latin today (other than the linguistic exercise of it)!
In closing, I'll leave my dear, patient bloggites with this thought, cleverly written in Romanized Danid: Kai tašiom xes, xet gel-ymazk.
In closing, I'll leave my dear, patient bloggites with this thought, cleverly written in Romanized Danid: Kai tašiom xes, xet gel-ymazk.
31 July 2011
How to Create an Alien Language
If you are writing a science-fiction or fantasy story and the setting is another world, whether on a different, physical planet or a world in imagination, it is likely that when your characters encounter intelligent life there, that intelligent life (we are the "aliens" there, of course) will have some system for communication: language. There are three ways to handle this situation.
1. You create that new and different language for those "others" to use (more on this below).
2. You have someone translate what they are speaking - but then you need a character established for that, and where does one get training in, ummm Martian or TXDFGYHUJ?
3. You render the "alien" language as paraphrase: Then the F'G'HiX told them where to find water.
While some authors have argued for the second or third ways as being "realistic" and/or easier on the reader (one that comes to mind is Isaac Asimov's introduction to the novel Nightfall, based on his 1941 story [link], where he states that to use "alien" terms would be ridiculous in context and an obstacle for readers; I mentioned this in the previous posting), I find the bafflement of a character who encounters a language unknown to him/her to be an essential part of the story. His/her confusion is what readers want and need to experience...to a degree.
Granted, I do not want to unduly tax my readers, yet I feel that having some "other-language" present in a relevant scene (not added willy-nilly) adds to the setting (some call it "flavor") and can also deepen the meaning of action in the scenes (e.g., our hero smells smoke, yells "Fire!" but none of the aliens understand him; one of the aliens, seeing his consternation, tells him not to worry because they are simply roasting a Dtguuuuggbi over a bonfire in his honor; yes, after the appetizer he will be the Huguyumm [= "main course"]!)
For me, the first way of solving the problem is the most interesting. As a professional linguist, I love studying languages and comparing them. Anyone who has ever taken a foreign language in school knows that what we learn as much as the language itself is how other people think. Language reflects how a culture thinks, how they see their world. And if a sci-fi/fantasy author is building a world, certainly the language of that world (or cultures there) is of primary importance. My formal language study began with French in high school and college. Then I went to Japan. Along the way I also dabbled in German and Russian. Indo-European languages had much in common compared to Japanese, so comparing all of them was an education. As my curiosity compelled me, I also found myself studying a host of other languages: Chinese, Icelandic, Italian, Irish, Korean, Turkish, Swahili, Sanskrit/Hindi, Thai, Arabic, Spanish, Finnish, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Quechua, Inuit, and Klingon.
There are several things you need to do to create a language.
First, choose the structure of communication, the sentence pattern. There are only three so this is the easy part, unless you wish to create a new one. The main two are:
Subject - Verb - Object is what we use in English, for the most part. ("I love you.")
Subject - Object - Verb is used in many European languages and sometimes in English ("I thee wed.")
A third pattern is:
Object - (particle) - Subject - Verb is what is used in Japanese. The particle is not a word but an indicator of function of the preceeding word in the sentence ("wo," "wa," and "ga"). ("[implied object, implied subject] aisteru" = "you I love.")
You could also employ Verb - Subject - Object ("okka debu sofak") or even Verb - Object - Subject ("okka sofak debu") but how will you keep the meaning clear? You can use those "particles" - like this: "okka debu ro sofak" so that "ro" indicates the one doing the action (the subject "debu" doing action "okka" to object "sofak"). Then you can switch the words around any way you like and still have it make sense. Supposedly.
Or, you could create something altogether different, depending on the kind of society of the language. For example, if it were to be a polyamorous society then singular verb forms would not exist, or would be considered rude. They might say: "We love us." There would still be a subject and an object, just not singular pronouns.
The next thing you need is a lexicon, sometimes called the vocabulary. (Many linguists declare that the grammar comes before the words but that is rather like deciding whether the chicken or the egg came first; in the end you need one in order to do anything with the other.) I went through a dictionary and made a list of all the words I wanted to use. I broke some words into several words (e.g., "fly" became "fly like a bird," "fly like on an airplane," and "fly like a rocket"), and combined other words.
Of course, this began with the words in a few phrases already in the story. I invented what was spoken in the story, then back-engineered the grammar. I foresaw the need to create new sentences for these "alien" characters, so I began my project. I chose the basic Subject-Verb-Object pattern for Ghoupallean, but to make it "seem" like a real language I added some quirky grammar rules and a huge list of very detailed and specific pronouns, a mind-boggling compendium of pronouns, such that a non-native speaker would never be able to get them correct beyond the most basic level of fluency. For the northern warrior race, the Zetin, I decided on a consonant heavy language, distantly imitating the grunts of military Klingon. To compensate for the difficulty of pronunciation, I made the grammar easy.
In the Dream Land trilogy, the southern desert race, the Roue, is an interesting case. For their language, I wanted something melodious so I modeled it after Hawaiian, very vowel-heavy with glottal stops, catches in the throat between vowels. But it becomes difficult when you realize that Roue is based on numbers and they use a base-20 system. In other words, instead of counting 1 through 10 and starting over with 11 through 20, and so forth, they go straight from 1 through 20 before starting over. It gets worse. They don't just say "I love you" - no, each word is a number on a master list of words! If the word "I" is, say, number 5 and the words "love" and "you" were numbers 11 and 9 respectively, then when they say "I love you" they would be speaking numbers "five-eleven-nine"! (Ah! But how would they distinguish actual numbers from the words? Fair question; clever answer: There is a "number" that designates that the numbers which follow are used as numbers rather than words. Follow?)
Anyway, the words. It's all about the words. Just make them up. However, like real languages, words tend to be related. Related words have related spelling and pronunciation. (We shall forego discussion here of the various written scripts that an alien society may use to share their communication.)
Notice how words are constructed in English. Take the car, for example. Car comes from carriage; a carriage is a type of wagon, a conveyance used in the era before the combustible engine. You see how the society's needs force the creation of new words to describe new things? Aliens do that, too; make your words fit. Another name for car is automobile. The automobile is a moving conveyance which can move on its own power, not pulled by polar bears or giraffes or tyggfix: autocar could work just as well, yet notice how the longer word automobile, made of a root word mobile and a prefix auto, gradually comes to be shortened to just auto. However, I've not yet heard self-propelled howitzer called a self.
Today the word "app" (short for "application"; I suppose in our quickened society we cannot be bothered with uttering a couple more syllables or we'd miss the next tweet from people we don't know) stands in as a whole slew of other words. The next generation will not know that "app" once meant "application," which is what other people call "software" or, when computers first became consumer devices, a "program." Words have history; they change; their usage changes. Build that in when you create your alien language.
In English we have several categories of words, based on what function each has in a sentence: nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs, interjections [chart]. In Ghoupallean, I simplified it down to four categories or "families": thing-family (nouns, pronouns), motion-family (verbs), flavor-family (adjectives, adverbs), and relational family (the helping words: articles, conjunctions, prepositions). You can decide what categories your alien language will have.
Next comes grammar. It's just a bunch of rules for putting the words together. Basically, it comes down to this question: Do the words change form or are they static? This mostly occurs with verbs, but also with other parts of speech when they must match the form of the verbs. In English, following the practices of languages that came before us, such as Latin, we tend to change the ending of a word to show a change in meaning. Take the verb "fly": depending on the situation, we can write or speak "fly" or "flew" or "flown," but we know it's the same word really. In your alien language, will you have similar changes (and the rules that keep it organized), or will you show the same changes perhaps by using other words (helper words)?
fly (present) - flew (past) - will fly (future)
In Ghoupallean we change the ending of the word to match the time (the ending en indicates a verb):
soren (present) - sorend (past) - ge-soren (future)
But if you did not want to have words change according to a pattern, then you need to have some way to indicate when the action occurs. Try some kind of particle:
Let's say that qu means the same as "fly" (what a bird does, not necessarily what an airplane does). Then you could have the following system:
qu (present) - iz qu (past) - me qu (future) ......or smash'em together: qu, iqu, mqu............
which is not too different from the Ghoupallean pattern. But suppose you changed the word completely just to show the change of time? You might then have something like:
qu (present) - fo (past) - vi (future)
which would be fine, except that as an author you'd never be able to keep it straight in your head. Keep it simple yet have a few strange rules (grammar) to make it feel real.
The last part is the pronunciation guide. How are these characters (granted, we must generally use the Roman alphabet in our stories) to be pronounced? Most phrase books will compare the sounds of the new language with English phonemes (a single vowel or consonant utterance). For example (using Ghoupallean):
For me, when this madness first began in childhood, I was limited only by what characters I could produce on a typewriter keyboard. I tried combining characters or using symbols as additional letters. When I upgraded to the IBM Selectric with the balls of typeface, I could switch them (to get different fonts, for one thing). I then had a vast library of letters to use. The computer and MS Word now allow me to bring in many additional letters and accent marks from languages used around the world.
But remember, an alien language is not very likely to use the Roman alphabet - unless you invent some causal explanation, such as long ago one of the aliens visited Earth and shared their language writing system with an old Phoenician scholar, etc. (Well, it could've happened!)
That's enough for now, perhaps forever. Grammar can be fun, especially if you get to make up the rules. Play around with your alien language, speak it aloud, invent a script (something like a secret code from childhood?), and have fun!
Rbfj[I nfadko[ jgvakoi koj nk nw guypphviphvi UHWE!
1. You create that new and different language for those "others" to use (more on this below).
2. You have someone translate what they are speaking - but then you need a character established for that, and where does one get training in, ummm Martian or TXDFGYHUJ?
3. You render the "alien" language as paraphrase: Then the F'G'HiX told them where to find water.
While some authors have argued for the second or third ways as being "realistic" and/or easier on the reader (one that comes to mind is Isaac Asimov's introduction to the novel Nightfall, based on his 1941 story [link], where he states that to use "alien" terms would be ridiculous in context and an obstacle for readers; I mentioned this in the previous posting), I find the bafflement of a character who encounters a language unknown to him/her to be an essential part of the story. His/her confusion is what readers want and need to experience...to a degree.
Granted, I do not want to unduly tax my readers, yet I feel that having some "other-language" present in a relevant scene (not added willy-nilly) adds to the setting (some call it "flavor") and can also deepen the meaning of action in the scenes (e.g., our hero smells smoke, yells "Fire!" but none of the aliens understand him; one of the aliens, seeing his consternation, tells him not to worry because they are simply roasting a Dtguuuuggbi over a bonfire in his honor; yes, after the appetizer he will be the Huguyumm [= "main course"]!)
For me, the first way of solving the problem is the most interesting. As a professional linguist, I love studying languages and comparing them. Anyone who has ever taken a foreign language in school knows that what we learn as much as the language itself is how other people think. Language reflects how a culture thinks, how they see their world. And if a sci-fi/fantasy author is building a world, certainly the language of that world (or cultures there) is of primary importance. My formal language study began with French in high school and college. Then I went to Japan. Along the way I also dabbled in German and Russian. Indo-European languages had much in common compared to Japanese, so comparing all of them was an education. As my curiosity compelled me, I also found myself studying a host of other languages: Chinese, Icelandic, Italian, Irish, Korean, Turkish, Swahili, Sanskrit/Hindi, Thai, Arabic, Spanish, Finnish, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Quechua, Inuit, and Klingon.
There are several things you need to do to create a language.
First, choose the structure of communication, the sentence pattern. There are only three so this is the easy part, unless you wish to create a new one. The main two are:
Subject - Verb - Object is what we use in English, for the most part. ("I love you.")
Subject - Object - Verb is used in many European languages and sometimes in English ("I thee wed.")
A third pattern is:
Object - (particle) - Subject - Verb is what is used in Japanese. The particle is not a word but an indicator of function of the preceeding word in the sentence ("wo," "wa," and "ga"). ("[implied object, implied subject] aisteru" = "you I love.")
You could also employ Verb - Subject - Object ("okka debu sofak") or even Verb - Object - Subject ("okka sofak debu") but how will you keep the meaning clear? You can use those "particles" - like this: "okka debu ro sofak" so that "ro" indicates the one doing the action (the subject "debu" doing action "okka" to object "sofak"). Then you can switch the words around any way you like and still have it make sense. Supposedly.
Or, you could create something altogether different, depending on the kind of society of the language. For example, if it were to be a polyamorous society then singular verb forms would not exist, or would be considered rude. They might say: "We love us." There would still be a subject and an object, just not singular pronouns.
The next thing you need is a lexicon, sometimes called the vocabulary. (Many linguists declare that the grammar comes before the words but that is rather like deciding whether the chicken or the egg came first; in the end you need one in order to do anything with the other.) I went through a dictionary and made a list of all the words I wanted to use. I broke some words into several words (e.g., "fly" became "fly like a bird," "fly like on an airplane," and "fly like a rocket"), and combined other words.
Of course, this began with the words in a few phrases already in the story. I invented what was spoken in the story, then back-engineered the grammar. I foresaw the need to create new sentences for these "alien" characters, so I began my project. I chose the basic Subject-Verb-Object pattern for Ghoupallean, but to make it "seem" like a real language I added some quirky grammar rules and a huge list of very detailed and specific pronouns, a mind-boggling compendium of pronouns, such that a non-native speaker would never be able to get them correct beyond the most basic level of fluency. For the northern warrior race, the Zetin, I decided on a consonant heavy language, distantly imitating the grunts of military Klingon. To compensate for the difficulty of pronunciation, I made the grammar easy.
In the Dream Land trilogy, the southern desert race, the Roue, is an interesting case. For their language, I wanted something melodious so I modeled it after Hawaiian, very vowel-heavy with glottal stops, catches in the throat between vowels. But it becomes difficult when you realize that Roue is based on numbers and they use a base-20 system. In other words, instead of counting 1 through 10 and starting over with 11 through 20, and so forth, they go straight from 1 through 20 before starting over. It gets worse. They don't just say "I love you" - no, each word is a number on a master list of words! If the word "I" is, say, number 5 and the words "love" and "you" were numbers 11 and 9 respectively, then when they say "I love you" they would be speaking numbers "five-eleven-nine"! (Ah! But how would they distinguish actual numbers from the words? Fair question; clever answer: There is a "number" that designates that the numbers which follow are used as numbers rather than words. Follow?)
Anyway, the words. It's all about the words. Just make them up. However, like real languages, words tend to be related. Related words have related spelling and pronunciation. (We shall forego discussion here of the various written scripts that an alien society may use to share their communication.)
Notice how words are constructed in English. Take the car, for example. Car comes from carriage; a carriage is a type of wagon, a conveyance used in the era before the combustible engine. You see how the society's needs force the creation of new words to describe new things? Aliens do that, too; make your words fit. Another name for car is automobile. The automobile is a moving conveyance which can move on its own power, not pulled by polar bears or giraffes or tyggfix: autocar could work just as well, yet notice how the longer word automobile, made of a root word mobile and a prefix auto, gradually comes to be shortened to just auto. However, I've not yet heard self-propelled howitzer called a self.
Today the word "app" (short for "application"; I suppose in our quickened society we cannot be bothered with uttering a couple more syllables or we'd miss the next tweet from people we don't know) stands in as a whole slew of other words. The next generation will not know that "app" once meant "application," which is what other people call "software" or, when computers first became consumer devices, a "program." Words have history; they change; their usage changes. Build that in when you create your alien language.
In English we have several categories of words, based on what function each has in a sentence: nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs, interjections [chart]. In Ghoupallean, I simplified it down to four categories or "families": thing-family (nouns, pronouns), motion-family (verbs), flavor-family (adjectives, adverbs), and relational family (the helping words: articles, conjunctions, prepositions). You can decide what categories your alien language will have.
Next comes grammar. It's just a bunch of rules for putting the words together. Basically, it comes down to this question: Do the words change form or are they static? This mostly occurs with verbs, but also with other parts of speech when they must match the form of the verbs. In English, following the practices of languages that came before us, such as Latin, we tend to change the ending of a word to show a change in meaning. Take the verb "fly": depending on the situation, we can write or speak "fly" or "flew" or "flown," but we know it's the same word really. In your alien language, will you have similar changes (and the rules that keep it organized), or will you show the same changes perhaps by using other words (helper words)?
fly (present) - flew (past) - will fly (future)
In Ghoupallean we change the ending of the word to match the time (the ending en indicates a verb):
soren (present) - sorend (past) - ge-soren (future)
But if you did not want to have words change according to a pattern, then you need to have some way to indicate when the action occurs. Try some kind of particle:
Let's say that qu means the same as "fly" (what a bird does, not necessarily what an airplane does). Then you could have the following system:
qu (present) - iz qu (past) - me qu (future) ......or smash'em together: qu, iqu, mqu............
which is not too different from the Ghoupallean pattern. But suppose you changed the word completely just to show the change of time? You might then have something like:
qu (present) - fo (past) - vi (future)
which would be fine, except that as an author you'd never be able to keep it straight in your head. Keep it simple yet have a few strange rules (grammar) to make it feel real.
The last part is the pronunciation guide. How are these characters (granted, we must generally use the Roman alphabet in our stories) to be pronounced? Most phrase books will compare the sounds of the new language with English phonemes (a single vowel or consonant utterance). For example (using Ghoupallean):
S s Sounds as [s] in “sassy” in all positions; when doubled and between vowel phonemes, it sounds as [ss] in “scissors”; when written with [h] in this dictionary transcription sounds as [sh] in “shoe” or “mesh”.
Š š (Sh) Sounds as [sh] in “shoe” or “mesh” in all positions.
sz Sounds as [s] in “has” or [z] in “buzz”; only found in final position.
szs Sounds as /zh/ in “azure” or the French word “menage”; only found in final position.
For me, when this madness first began in childhood, I was limited only by what characters I could produce on a typewriter keyboard. I tried combining characters or using symbols as additional letters. When I upgraded to the IBM Selectric with the balls of typeface, I could switch them (to get different fonts, for one thing). I then had a vast library of letters to use. The computer and MS Word now allow me to bring in many additional letters and accent marks from languages used around the world.
But remember, an alien language is not very likely to use the Roman alphabet - unless you invent some causal explanation, such as long ago one of the aliens visited Earth and shared their language writing system with an old Phoenician scholar, etc. (Well, it could've happened!)
That's enough for now, perhaps forever. Grammar can be fun, especially if you get to make up the rules. Play around with your alien language, speak it aloud, invent a script (something like a secret code from childhood?), and have fun!
Rbfj[I nfadko[ jgvakoi koj nk nw guypphviphvi UHWE!
21 July 2011
Saying "To Be or Not to Be" and Meaning It
People say I am clever in certain ways--clever perhaps meaning smart in nefarious situations. Others don't know me so well and thus believe I am innocent of all wrong doing. Still others would blame me for any hesitancy in the spin of the Earth, much less the various quirks of life that ruin their quirky lives. But one thing I do that tends to infuriate people around me is talk about language. More precisely, talk about inventing languages.
When it comes to science-fiction or fantasy, we often find ourselves in worlds new and different from our own (for most of you, that's a reference to Earth). Such new places will naturally have their own cultures, much of that based on the particular geography, history, and environmental factors of the place (for example, the floating mountains in the film Avatar). A monster part of any culture is language. It's needed to express everything in that culture, so how the language is born from the culture and how the culture infuses the language with meaning has always been a prime concern of mine as I read and write in these genres.
Which brings me to Star Trek. First the movies then the subsequent new television series made use of alien languages, especially Klingon. That was what intrigued me most when I saw the film: seeing Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon speaking the lingua franca of Kling! Then, for those who demanded it, a dictionary and phrase book was published for Klingon devotees around the universe. (There are now "institutes" of Klingon language study (here's one). My study of language* since then, however, has revealed to me that Klingon is essentially Greenlandic Inuit, the language spoken by the native inhabitants of Greenland**. Though no creditation is given (look here), it became apparent only through my studies. James Doohan is credited with originating a few basic phrases and Marc Okrand is credited with the subsequent development of the full-scale language. One significant feature of both languages is the way meaning is constructed through a root word with countless prefexes, interfixes, and suffixes to create huge words--like saying a whole sentences worth of meaning in a single 20-syllable word. Forget Klingon (for now).
By the time I first heard Klingon, I had long been at work on the languages used in The Dream Land trilogy (to catch you up, check this earlier blog post of mine here). Some critics (here's one) have slammed the use of "alien" languages in science-fiction and fantasy novels, but I believe they are crucial to the weave of the landscape setting of such stories. Use of alien languages, like the use of foreign phrases in literary or other genre fiction, is a device best used sparingly lest it tire the reader. (I, however, love the use of such phrases so I would be a reader who was not made tired by its use.)
The use of alien languages is appropriate in the following cases:
1) In dialog, when the character is speaking it. Why wouldn't a native speaker of Danid speak Danid? But then it is best to slip into a paraphrase of what is said rather than write it all out in the alien language.
2) To describe or refer to something for which English has no effective word, or when English cannot render the idea as subtly or with appropriate nuance as the foreign/alien word or phrase. As a writer, you could have another character or the narrator point out that the meaning is such that it needs to be uttered in the nuances of that language; English would not have a suitable equivalent. This is the case for alien flora and fauna, as well as distinctly alien customs which would take several paragraphs to explain.
3) To add to the soundscape of the setting. In this case, if my hero were on another world, he would hear people of that world speaking their own language. If he does not know the language himself, or knows it imperfectly or incompletely, he could only guess at the meaning. In that way, the reader can experience the hero's disorientation along with the hero. Again, don't tax your reader's patience by going on too long; learn the fine art of the paraphrase. Start the spoken alien language, then switch to the paraphrase or summary of what was said. Point out subtleties in meaning where appropriate. (Examples to follow next blog post.)
And so we see/hear that there are useful uses for alien tongues (besides mopping in the corners of the kitchen floor). Now, how in the alien world do we create one?
Study all you can at one of the Klingon institutes for one example. Or wait until I find the time to scribble out another bloggette and I shall take you step-by-step through the process I used to create the principal language of Ghoupallesz! (Meanwhile, brush up on your grammar terminology, especially the parts of speech! Try here.)
So, the fateful question is rendered "taH pagh taHbe'!" in Klingon.
(According to Klingon sources, everyone knows that Shakespeare was half-Klingon. Check out the Klingon Hamlet here.)
_______________________________________
* In my day job I am expected to expound profoundly on the structure of language, with particular emphasis on Engish. Although I have formally studied only French, Japanese, and a bit of German and self-studied a dozen more Earth languages, I seem able to become fully fluent only in my first-language, American English. To compensate for such linguistic irony, I have developed the ability to speak English in 12 distinct accents.
** My study of Greenlandic comes from a project in a sociolinguistics course during my doctoral program a few years back, and not as preparation, some might guess, for my recurring role as one of the husbands in the Desperate Housewives of Nuuk television drama, which was just picked up for a second season.
When it comes to science-fiction or fantasy, we often find ourselves in worlds new and different from our own (for most of you, that's a reference to Earth). Such new places will naturally have their own cultures, much of that based on the particular geography, history, and environmental factors of the place (for example, the floating mountains in the film Avatar). A monster part of any culture is language. It's needed to express everything in that culture, so how the language is born from the culture and how the culture infuses the language with meaning has always been a prime concern of mine as I read and write in these genres.
By the time I first heard Klingon, I had long been at work on the languages used in The Dream Land trilogy (to catch you up, check this earlier blog post of mine here). Some critics (here's one) have slammed the use of "alien" languages in science-fiction and fantasy novels, but I believe they are crucial to the weave of the landscape setting of such stories. Use of alien languages, like the use of foreign phrases in literary or other genre fiction, is a device best used sparingly lest it tire the reader. (I, however, love the use of such phrases so I would be a reader who was not made tired by its use.)
The use of alien languages is appropriate in the following cases:
1) In dialog, when the character is speaking it. Why wouldn't a native speaker of Danid speak Danid? But then it is best to slip into a paraphrase of what is said rather than write it all out in the alien language.
2) To describe or refer to something for which English has no effective word, or when English cannot render the idea as subtly or with appropriate nuance as the foreign/alien word or phrase. As a writer, you could have another character or the narrator point out that the meaning is such that it needs to be uttered in the nuances of that language; English would not have a suitable equivalent. This is the case for alien flora and fauna, as well as distinctly alien customs which would take several paragraphs to explain.
3) To add to the soundscape of the setting. In this case, if my hero were on another world, he would hear people of that world speaking their own language. If he does not know the language himself, or knows it imperfectly or incompletely, he could only guess at the meaning. In that way, the reader can experience the hero's disorientation along with the hero. Again, don't tax your reader's patience by going on too long; learn the fine art of the paraphrase. Start the spoken alien language, then switch to the paraphrase or summary of what was said. Point out subtleties in meaning where appropriate. (Examples to follow next blog post.)
And so we see/hear that there are useful uses for alien tongues (besides mopping in the corners of the kitchen floor). Now, how in the alien world do we create one?
Study all you can at one of the Klingon institutes for one example. Or wait until I find the time to scribble out another bloggette and I shall take you step-by-step through the process I used to create the principal language of Ghoupallesz! (Meanwhile, brush up on your grammar terminology, especially the parts of speech! Try here.)
So, the fateful question is rendered "taH pagh taHbe'!" in Klingon.
(According to Klingon sources, everyone knows that Shakespeare was half-Klingon. Check out the Klingon Hamlet here.)
_______________________________________
* In my day job I am expected to expound profoundly on the structure of language, with particular emphasis on Engish. Although I have formally studied only French, Japanese, and a bit of German and self-studied a dozen more Earth languages, I seem able to become fully fluent only in my first-language, American English. To compensate for such linguistic irony, I have developed the ability to speak English in 12 distinct accents.
** My study of Greenlandic comes from a project in a sociolinguistics course during my doctoral program a few years back, and not as preparation, some might guess, for my recurring role as one of the husbands in the Desperate Housewives of Nuuk television drama, which was just picked up for a second season.
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