DeConstructing the Language of Sebbou

My latest novel is out now. THE MASTERS' RIDDLE is a science fiction epic in which an alien being is captured by members of a mysterious race. The bulk of the novel is this alien's attempts to return home...to his home planet of Sebbol. Although the novel is in English, of course, there are moments when the alien speaks - which I do partly for flavoring the scene, partly for expressing emotion, partly for fun. I like alien languages.

I first encountered alien languages in my science fiction trilogy, THE DREAM LAND, set partially on the planet of Ghoupallesz. There I had the principal language most residents used, plus three languages used by peripheral societies. With a background in linguistics, I relished the opportunity to create full-functioning languages (and even included some quirks so they were not so perfect...like real languages). (Read more about inventing languages here.) I used them where relevant whenever we have:

1) the names of things with no equivalent word in English;

2) the phrases spoken by the native speakers;

3) the phrases spoken in reply by Earth characters who know the native language;

4) the words/phrases which are added here and there to help lend authenticity to the scene.

I recognize that having extensive passages in other-than-English is tedious for a reader. Thus, I try to limit myself to following a few rules when writing with alien languages (or Earth languages other than English, for example the Hindi spoken by Indians in my India novel about tiger hunting).

Rule 1. When the character hears spoken words which happen to be in the other language, I write out some of it. This is literally what the character hears, even if he doesn't understand it.  I can then explain what it means, as appropriate to the scene. For example, an announcement over a loudspeaker.

Rule 2. When a character literally speaks in a language other than English - because the character does not know English or chooses to speak in another language - I either provide a simple unobtrusive translation or otherwise tell the reader what was said. I do not want to give up the authenticity of the scene by avoiding the foreign language. For example, whenever it is vital that the character speak his own native language (which I give at least a clue as to what it means).

In THE MASTERS' RIDDLE, there are intelligent beings from several worlds. I give each its own language although for the most part I tell the story in English. How can they communicate with each other? An advanced species would have elevated means of communication. First, there is vocalization...which is not going to be understood no matter how well heard. Next is the attempt to communicate visually with facial expressions, hand gestures, and making marks on a surface or circumscribing designs in the air. I have them doing the 'Vulcan mind-meld' in some instances, where one being touches the other and through that neural network connection they can communicate. And a few other clever methods.

But what do they communicate? Not a system of language which one of them would not know. They can only communicate raw ideas - simple ideas, basic information without nuance. No metaphors, idioms, or slang. Even when two beings knowing different languages communicate through telepathy (no physical contact; mind to mind) the effect can only be this fundamental level of ideation: e.g., 'Go, sit, there.' rather than 'Would you please step over to that rock and have a seat there?'

When I worked on Ghoupallean, the main language used on Ghoupallesz, I devised the complete grammar and lexicon, made a thick dictionary of the language, learned to speak some of it - to the dismay of people around me in public venues. For THE MASTERS' RIDDLE I held back. Sure there are a few phrases our hero speaks in Sebbou, the native language of Sebbol, described variously as chirps, squeaks, and squeals. Not a commanding language at all. It is difficult for this alien to lead the ragtag gang of other species but he possesses a unique feature which gives him an advantage: his inner Ru. 

The inner Ru is a homunculus-like entity inside the mind, a miniature man, which both advises and translates. I imagined this little being much as I pondered the drawings of Plato's allegory: a cave with someone writing on the walls. Much of the writing was actually drawing, a visual language, thinking in images rather than abstract marks that made up a formal script to represent the phonetics.

Therefore, Sebbou takes the form in the novel mostly as category 1 above: things which do not directly translate into English, primarily the names of flora, fauna, and geologic features of planet Sebbol. There are a few direct phrases which help show the way of thinking of the Aull who live on Sebbol, the way myth informs their society.

In one scene of instruction, the mentor speaks a Sebbou phrase taken from our hero's mind:

“The Process is what you do with your mind to tear space apart and project body through tangent opening. Do with power of mind, which can be greatest force in the universe. Bio-chemical, electro-chemical energies created in the brain of an advanced creature, applied to engineering problems, can move mountains—sometimes planets. Or, as you say on your world, to ‘raise the stars’.”

Toog’s face flashed bronze. “^sT’_n Ra’_q.”

“You remember expression from childhood? Took from your mind, from memories of childhood training, so can understand. Is true. This power, when focused on right spot and increased to right magnitude can rip curtain between two sides of universe. At such a moment, while rending this curtain, step through to other world.”

The phrase is a common expression and means something significant to our Aull friend and it makes him press on with his lessons. The initial /s/ is a polite hiss which initiates all speech in Aull society. The /T/ with apostrophe represents /t/ with a trailing vowel huff. The falling /n/ is a gutteral utterance. The /R/ is a strong consonant followed by a longer vowel represented by /a/ and the same apostrophic huff. The final /q/ is an emphatic grunt which acts as a conclusion in Sebbou. Therefore, 'Tin rai q'  means “raise the stars”. 

Let's try it:  s (high-pitched hiss) T (with a huff) n (deep in throat) R (almost trilled) a (normal vowel, add huff) kh (unvoiced growl)

Not bad. It's easier if you have the oral apparatus of the Aull throat and mouth. They are, after all, descendent from amphibians. If you can't do it, don't worry. You got the idea. (A glossary is included at the end of the book, if you're curious about Sebbou.)

I wanted to get on with the story rather than indulge in linguistic play, so these kind of direct expressions of Sebbou are kept to the minimum. I tell what they all say, as they communicate mostly through mind-meld or telepathy. The languages are not the main point of the story but are something real that needs to be accounted for in the story. We cannot pretend beings from different planets can all speak the same language. That would not be realistic. I am not a member of Starfleet and I do not possess a handy communicator device (although the Masters in one scene do employ a similar machine). 

But supposing these various characters happened to be in this setting with this problem? How would they communicate with each other in order to solve their problem? That's the point we have to operate with throughout the book. It's all about what's real.

NEXT: Summer vacation reading list.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2021 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

The Deep Dark Secret Truth

Lots of people ask me why I write and how I write. Well, I can never seem to understand exactly what is going on behind the scenes but I'm glad the muses are hard at work on my behalf. I think it all began with the first sparks of a story in my childhood which became, in 2012, my second published novel The Dream Land. As the story continued through a trilogy, this first volume was re-titled Long Distance Voyager, or The Dream Land Trilogy Book I: Long Distance Voyager ...if you want to be accurate. Just this week I happened to pull a copy of it off my shelf and began reading it for the giggles. Nostalgia, I suppose. I am rather enjoying reading it, amazed at my youthful self and the strange stuff I thought up back then. 

The Dream Land Trilogy began as a simple YA story, safe and innocent for adolescents. It was a tale of a boy who was visited one day by "aliens" - the aliens in the story resembled mice, or perhaps, the hamster he once had as a pet. In actuality, the boy was me and I was not actually visited by alien mice. 

Well, that's one of the secrets. What that boy did do was to take some pipe cleaners and yarn and make some play creatures that looked like mice: clawed feet, fuzzy bodies, tiny ears sticking up out of their fur, and a yarn tail. Evolution then caused them to gain clawed hands and lose the tails. The boy's mother told him that his story was like one she had read long ago: The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. The boy had never read it - and refuses to read it or see the film version even today as an adult, chiefly for political purposes - because he feared people would say he was just copying the idea.

As the boy grew, he kept the story secret, lest anyone steal his idea or accuse him of stealing someone else's idea. And as he grew into a high school student, the alien mice further evolved into more human-like beings, though still small in stature, something akin to child-sized adults. They described their world to him and explained all of their customs, and this allowed the boy to create maps of their world and flags of their nations. He was even able to design football helmet logos for their football teams - which was a shocking development inasmuch as they did not play the sport on their world.

And speaking of their world, the boy-turned-teenager somehow heard the name incorrectly from the alien mice visitors, something like "Gupal". He used the word to indicate the visitors themselves ("I played with the Gupals all afternoon.") and their planet ("My friends all came from the planet Gupal.") and so on. In high school, however, as the teenager was becoming more widely read (but never The Hobbit!) he began to decypher the language of his Gupal friends. His more sophisticated understanding of linguistics allowed him to be more correct, more precise in his construction of the language. Thus, "Gupal" became the significantly cooler word "Ghoupalle" and the planet whence his companions originated became "Ghoupallesz" and their language was "Ghoupallean."

Then, one dark and stormy night, a story began. It was years later and he was a working adult, far from his stories. While home for Christmas vacation from his job teaching English in Japan - after high school, after college, after a few years working at a dead end job (during which he continued to develop the world of Ghoupallesz and its features, including beginning a bright colorful new map series and creating dictionaries of Ghoupallean and other languages of the world) - he had a dream. 

He had long wanted to tell the story of his Ghoupalle friends and their adventures, of course. Yet as the boy turned into an adult, his interests also changed. Now the adventures of Ghoupallesz consisted of political intrigue, wars, magic, and sex. There was no longer a YA planet to write about. Prior to that dream - of course, that is the origin of the series title - he had been looking for a starting point to get into the story, a story he already was expecting to be a series of books, each about a separate adventure his alter ego would partake of.

In that dream, he saw a Zetin maiden riding the kind of horse-like creature (the "Jepe") that they have on Ghoupallesz, high in the mountains (well, that's where Zetin people live, as opposed to the Ghoupalle people living down along the coast) and she caught him watching her. The image stuck. Back in Japan, he set out writing the story, beginning with that scene on the mountain. That was something new, he realized, something that was not part of the adventures of the earlier mice-like Gupals. Instead, he was inventing new adventures...which eventually allowed him to introduce the "original" story, not of alien mice visiting a boy on Earth but of a well-intended teenager and his girlfriend finding a portal, an invisible doorway, through which they stumble quite surreptitiously and thus discover a new world.

Thus began The Dreamland, as it was originally titled, was completed in 1993 and sent out to a few agents. Shockingly, they all rejected it. A couple of them did add handwritten notes of encouragement. One even said it was "well-crafted" while another said the protagonist was not sympathetic. Because the protagonist was based on the teenager-turned-adult himself, that hurt. He understood the reason: the protagonist is a quiet, anti-social fellow but I did not reveal why he was that way. 

So he set about recrafting the story to make the hero more likeable - and more distinct from the author. Since the hero suffers many tragedies in the course of his adventures, the tragic qualities of the hero needed to be introduced closer to the beginning. But how does one get to know a character who is aloof, private, solitary? Lightbulb! Have his co-workers talk about him, speculate about his life, and even tease him!

As the rewriting continued, another heartbreaking discovery was made: "The Dreamland" was already being used as the title of a book about Area 51, the infamous location of alien crash victims. So he reluctantly changed the title to The Dream Land - which meant changing that phrase everywhere it appeared in the novel. Instead of the characters saying Ghoupallesz is the Dreamland, they had to say, in order to be politically correct, Ghoupallesz is the Dream Land. It was a big hassle. But he finished a major edit of the novel and was so excited that he rushed right into the next novel: The Dream Land II. 

The second book picked up right where the first ended: Did our hero safely escape back to Ghoupallesz through the interdimensional portal, or did he actually catch a bullet from the pursuing police and fall into a coma? Fifty or so single-spaced pages in and he ground to a halt. A plot conundrum stopped him cold. He was becoming busy with other matters of an adult life, anyway, and eventually the second book - and the first book - were left to languish on a dusty shelf somewhere in his computer. 

The boy-turned-adult went away to graduate school and became a professor who was tasked with teaching college students how to write essays and research papers. He still enjoyed creative writing - he had picked up an MFA degree by producing a slew of short stories with contemporary settings and a thesis consisting of a novel about a doomed campus romance (A Beautiful Chill). He dreamed of getting back to The Dream Land.

So he encouraged his students to write whatever they were interested in, something about their lives. One student happened showed him a story that superficially reminded the boy-turned-professor of his Dream Land story. Not too much, however, just enough to cause the professor to be curious and search for it on his computer. He read through what he had written of The Dream Land II, then continued writing right where he had left off ten years before. The plot conundrum that had stopped him now was cleared. He marched on to the end of the novel - all the while conducting research and writing his Ph.D. dissertation.

He managed to get the first book published. As he prepared the second book for publication, he immediately started writing the third book. The idea arrived fully formed in his head one bright afternoon. Like all good sci-fi Book III would not only wrap up the loose ends of Book II (Did he die again or survive?) but also deal with the universal question: What to do about an approaching comet that is likely to hit our planet? He also had grown as a writer, confident enough to let his female protagonist, who had major but short-lived appearances in the first two books, take the stage solo to answer this great question.

That brings us, humbly, up to the present era. Being busier than ever before with life and all its coquettish foibles, he turned to trying once again to deal with a publishing world that had changed so dramatically he no longer recognized it, nor knew what to do to get the first two books published. Good friends and their advice helped and the encouragement provided has sustained him. Book III practically wrote itself. The interdimensional portal still exists, however, and as the hero of The Dream Land ages, he has taken on a protege who can lead readers through the third novel of the series and perhaps into a fourth book. The universe is endless, after all - at least, according to the rules of the Dream Land. Imagination is the key...and the map...and the compass!

Note: I have not actually traveled through an interdimensional doorway of any kind, although some people I know suspect I have, I am quite familiar with theories involving the phenomena. I attempt to education the public about interdimensional doorways via this Facebook page. Thanks for your support.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2017 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Having Dreams about the Reality of Dreams

Some bloggers blog about life in their lives. Amazing lives they lead, where everything goes right or everything is a maze of frustration and confusion. Blogs about the writing life, the editing life, the life of the well-published author-about-town, the hell of grammar and the pit of typo sins. Blogs about dogs, cats, rabbits, zombies, vampires, and tacos. Blogs advertising pet projects, pets, or projects related to advertising. Or blogs doing double-duty as typing exercises. And then there are blogs which purport to offer wisdom, trendy trends for trendsetters, or fashionable fashion advice. Or blogs in which the blogger attempts with all sincerity to demonstrate just how utterly clever he/she can be with wordplay, rhetoric, and the dance of fingers lightly across a keyboard. The possibilities are endless.

An artist's [mis]conception of an interdimensional doorway.
Actual tangential doorways are not generally visible.

And then there is the Dream Land, a topic for which many have confessed confusion, consternation, or constipation. It is perhaps my fault. I have walked the fence between keeping it mysterious and letting it all hang out. Well, I don't like being kept in the dark past dawn, either. So allow me to answer your questions and alleviate any fears you may have by attempting to incorporate all current blog themes into a single post. (By the way, the Earth is not scheduled for destruction any time soon, so you have plenty of days and weeks to read all of your favorite books!)

Is the Dream Land a story of people who dream?

Kinda, in a way, it is. People do dream and they often remember them when re-entering a conscious state. Sometimes people are driven to act or refrain from acting based on what occurred in that dream. Thus, the aspect of dreams and dreaming referenced in The Dream Land  is no greater than that of real life. Said another way, "In space, no one can hear you dreaming!"

Is the Dream Land a science fiction novel?

Because humans function better when items are classified, I have been compelled to likewise assign a category to this book. Therefore, a long list of characteristics have been compiled from its pages and then cross-referenced with the ten most typical texts of the genre. A positive correlation of 72% was found. Thus, most people most of the time would consider The Dream Land to be a science fiction novel.

Is the Dream Land an epic fantasy tale?

There are some readers, well versed in the fantasy literature, and others who are well-versed in the science fiction literature who have doubts about its classification. The degree of science embodied in its pages is less than many other works labeled as science fiction. For that reason, the Dream Land could be labeled as epic fantasy. Given the scope of two worlds and the universe between them, given the range of years covered, and given the size of the refrigerator used by the cast and crew, it certainly could be called 'epic' and 'fantasy'.

Is the Dream Land an example of Steampunk culture?

As the adventures occur in settings of a global society prior to modern science, much of the cityscapes and transportation devices are typical of those in Steampunk literature. There are airships, for example; yet designs for jet aircraft exist but are deemed too harmful to the environment to be allowed into production. The architecture reflects a more decadent world view. The citizens are equally conscientious of fashions which, to the eyes of many readers, resemble those of Steampunk culture.

Is the Dream Land a scientific manual on interdimensional travel?

In some ways it is. There are descriptions of entrance and exit, a listing of symptoms of "voyager" disorder, and certain specifications on quantum physics. However, these items were recorded by lay people and so do not hold up to the rigor of scientific inquiry. In fact, the principle recorder, while an avid voyager himself and trained in physics, prefers to focus on the human effects of interdimensional travel rather than the causes and connections.

Is the Dream Land a memoir of a select few interdimensional voyagers?

It certainly could be considered that way. The volume includes descriptions of many encounters a few voyagers experienced during their careers as interdimensional voyagers. However, no attempt has been made to be all-inclusive or to present the information in any organized manner other than to mention the highlights of major trips. The details are left to the reader's imagination and scientific record in local archives.

Is the Dream Land something scribbled on a legal pad in the dark upon awakening from a nocturnal drama?

Critics have made the claim that the Dream Land is something less than literary. The most critical of these reviewers accuse the authors and other contributors of engineering a hoax whereby readers may believe they too can travel interdimensionally via "tangential" transfer points. The science supports the possibility but also the rarity of such locations. Those interested in interdimensional travel are urged to contact one of the participants via the Tangential Books link in the book. In addition, plans are underway to produce a stage play enabling an audience to experience the interdimensional travel tangentially through song and dance.

Is the Dream Land real?

Even the ephemeral is real. In as much as a thought is a biological activity where electrical pulses leap from neuron to neuron, a place based on a dream state may be presumed to be un-real. Yet in its state of un-reality it is itself a real entity. In other words, the abstraction of the dream is marked as a noun, a thing of invisible existence rather than mere rhetorical hyperbole. The idea of a dream is real; hence the dream itself is real. Reality is based not solely upon the physical tangibility of a thing. Furthermore, one person's dream may yet be another person's reality, and vice-versa.

Is reality a dream or is dream a version of reality?

Yes.


Those who wish to know more are encouraged to study further and make inquiries of the main text via Amazon.com and other fine interdimensional nodes.

Disclaimer: The interdimensional travel you undertake is subject to your own intelligent choices; participants in The Dream Land project accept no responsibility or liability for what may occur by following what may on surface seem to be viable instructions for interdimensional travel yet which are actually limited to a traditional form of literary entertainment intended for the couch-bound or various electronic readership devices. If success should occur, handle with utmost caution.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2013 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.