I have been meaning to write various posts to do with structuralism, post-structuralism and language for quite some time, but haven't quite got round to any of them yet. They're brewing. But in that vein, a word about fantasy languages generally.
People in the Anglo-Saxon world tend not to learn other languages, and if they do, it's usually French or Spanish. This gives them a very skewed and narrow perception of the relationship between objective reality, "meaning", language and thought.
Let me give an illustration. In English, we distinguish between different circumstances in which the subject gets the object to do something. "The postman let the dog go for a walk" is different from "The postman made the dog go for a walk", which is different again from "The postman had the dog go for a walk", which is different again from "The postman got the dog to go for a walk". The distinction between "letting" and "making" is obvious. The differences between "having" and "getting" a little less so, but there are nuances of usage - if I "have you" read something, it has the connotation that I'm in charge, whereas if I "get you" to read something, it has more a connotation of persuasion.
In Japanese, there is no difference between any of these things. The sentence "The postman let the dog go for a walk" and "the postman made the dog go for a walk" (or "the postman had the dog go for a walk" or whatever) is exactly the same: 郵便配達員が犬を散歩させた. It's all in how you conjugate the verb, and the conjugation takes the same form for all those different situations set out above, in which English carefully discriminates.
Native English speakers find this odd: how do Japanese people tell the difference between "making" somebody do something and "letting" them do it? One answer would be, they get it from context. (And you can make it clear with judicious use of an adjective here or there.) But that doesn't actually capture the fact that the two languages are doing something fundamentally different. English distinguishes rigorously between the concepts of "letting" and "making"; Japanese doesn't. So, saying that Japanese speakers "get the difference from context" is a very English-speaker way of thinking about things: in Japanese there actually isn't a difference. This is not because Japanese people can't understand the difference between "letting" as in allowing and "making" as in forcing, but because the Japanese concept which is translated into English as "letting" or "making" means neither of those things. It means its own thing which is roughly approximate to both English "letting" and "making".
This is why people who are fluent in more than one language will often tell you that they actually think differently - and even have different personalities - when switching from one language to another. It's because a language is actually a structure which mediates between reality and abstract thought, and there is no direct connection or way for thought to interface with reality other than through it (I snuck a bit of post-structuralism in there after all).
Be that as it may, what would it mean to learn an orcish, elf, or dwarfish language?
An orcish language that exists as "ug" means "me", "bork" means "you", "ufufu" means "tree" has zero interest except perhaps something to pass the time. What's more interesting is reflecting on how playing around with concepts could pave the way to thinking about monsters in new and creative ways.
One simple way of doing this is merging concepts. What if, for example, in orcish, there's no distinction between "causing happiness" and "causing sorrow" - they're the same word, roughly meaning to "cause a strong reaction"? If that were the case, how would a human being communicate to an orc that being tortured causes a different experience to, say, sexual pleasure? To the orc, causing intense pain and pleasure are identical - or, to put it another way, to the orc, neither of those concepts exists as distinct from the other.
What if in dwarfish there's no distinction between avarice and prudence? What if in elven there's no distinction between nature and the self? What if for gnomes there's no distinction between gift-giving and theft?
As is often the case, these things can seem spurious at first glance but get interesting if you take the connotations seriously and extrapolate from the initial premise. What it? What then?
On the other hand, dwarfs have sixteen different words for "gold" ...
ReplyDeleteAnd halflings sixteen different words for breakfast.
DeleteI think this is the sort of thing that is interesting but hard to make game-able. Have you used this in your games?
ReplyDeleteNo, but I might do. Just something I've been thinking about lately.
DeleteMaybe it's just a little thing like -2 to rolls to be dismissive of your mother in Mandarin and +2 to make demands in English or Dwarvern or whatever.
DeleteI personally do use these concepts in my games. And though players don't catch the nuances of what I'm doing they engage better with the world when I take the time to add details like this.
DeleteI'm starting to award xp for their characters engaging with the languages, such as using correct titles, or writing down and using greetings.
Interesting stuff. I totally agree that learning languages in rpgs doesn't map to the mindbending experience that it is in reality.
ReplyDeleteThe particular language/culture/ideology rabbit hole I've been going down is translation, specifically the translation of picturebooks in English and Japanese (which I wrote my Master's dissertation on a few years ago, but haven't been able to expand on since, what with teaching and having a 3 year old).
On an unrelated note, I was hoping that you'd post something today. I was wondering if you'd write another post that mentioned 3/11. I don't remember where you said you were, but I think you said that you were close to people who were affected by it. I was living in Sendai at the time. As messed up as it sounds, I look back fondly on that time and in many ways it was easier for me than my workaday life is back here in the States. Let me know if you'd like to talk more by e-mail or something like that.
Thanks for the comment, David. You know, it might sound like a cowardly thing to say but I actually still find it hard to think about or process that day and that period in my life, and certainly to write about it. When I look back now it's like before and after the tsunami. In a lot of ways I don't really want to conjur up the demon again, if you know what I mean by that?
DeleteI can certainly respect that. Sorry for bringing up a difficult topic.
DeleteI've struggled with feeling longing for a time that was devestating for so many. It wasn't until I read Sebastian Junger's "Tribe" that I started to understand why.
手短くに言えば、団結心と居場所がなければ、社会からの疎外感がつらい。
I sincerely hope that you have had an easier time reintegrating than I have. I really admire your work and I'm amazed that you manage to produce so much with a little one running around.
Thanks very much. I try to spend an hour a day doing something creative. It's amazing how that all adds up over the course of a year or whatever.
DeleteThe Junger book is interesting and there's a good interview with him on Econtalk.
I witnessed a Chinese friend, while talking to his mother, switch from Mandarin to English in the middle of the conversation. She kept talking to him in Mandarin and spoke to her in English. Later, I asked him why he switched over. He told me that there's no way to be dismissive of your mom in Mandarin.
ReplyDeleteHaha. I bet you can be but it just "feels" wrong. A lot of businesspeople fluent in English and Japanese will tell you that it's better to use English when wanting to issue a demand or make a robust point because in Japanese, while you can do it, it just comes across poorly.
DeleteAt least in Korean the rules for different levels of formal are a lot clearer than in English so if you want to be dismissive or demanding it's a lot more blatant than in English where it comes down to context and word choice.
DeleteStrangely this is one of the things that seems to crop up a lot in fantasy languages. You get a bunch with grammatical modes for different levels of formality while other language issues don't seem to crop up much.
Same in Japanese and a lot of other Asian languages, but also in a lot of European ones as well - think of tu/vous in French. I think that might be why English-speaking fantasy writers find it easy to get their heads round and reference in a fantasy language.
DeleteWe've played around with this idea in our Pathfinder games, which is a thing that happens when the player pool has seven philologists and a translator. One of the PCs owns a ship and the first mate is a dwarf who only speaks Dwarven - which, obviously, is a language without seafaring vocabulary, so he refers to the masts as trees and the sails as sheets and so on.
ReplyDeleteInteresting example. Sounds like a fun group!
DeleteI object to the 'strong' version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, purely on the grounds that it doesn't make sense for a language to develop if our thought processes were determined by language. How did we come up with the term 'blue' (or the proto-proto-indo-european equivalent) if we had no conception of 'blue' as an idea?
ReplyDeleteThere's a fun idea that the ancient greeks couldn't see the colour blue (which is why Homer described a 'wine-dark sea'), but there are all kinds of frescoes from the period that use the colour, so that's something of a bust.
The 'weak' version is far more defensible though, and obviously it's all good as a thought experiment.
So how about this: Dwarves don't differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. The old hammer is experienced. The western mountains are generous with their riches. That stone that fell out of the tunnel roof and hit your head was malicious, and honestly the whole mine has been working against you since you dug shaft 13.
Perhaps most other races consider the idea laughable, until they've spent some time underground and realise just how reliant you are on your tools and how capricious the terrain seems to be.
I love your example.
DeleteOn the Sapir-Whorf thing... well, it's a hard one. What I suspect (as a total layperson just interested in the idea as a language learner) is that language developed in tandem with the evolution of modern humans, so there were never modern humans who were pre-language, so to speak - making it literally impossibly to actually separate modern human thought processes from language.
That said, blue is an interesting example and pertinent to this post, because in Japanese people will say something is "blue" when an English speaker would call it "green". To Japanese speakers, grass can be and often is blue. Whether this means they actually objectively see the colour of grass differently is one of those imponderables, but it's an interesting case study. It suggests to me that at some point our proto-human ancestors would have felt the need to differentiate colours in a certain concrete context (for instance, to tell a child it's safe to eat the blue berries but not the red ones or whatever) and once that had happened the concepts became ingrained - suddenly something else that is the same colour as the blue berry becomes known as being "blue" and then the next thing too...and then we suddenly get "blueness" as a concept where it didn't exist before.
So far as I know there are no theories stating that humans in other ages couldn't *see* blue, (EDIT - looks like there are), but there does seem to be a semi-regular pattern in which colour words are added to the language and it seems to relate partly to the emotional power and significance of the colour (red almost always seems to come first) and to the ability and necessity of the society in utilising that colour as a seperate element.
DeleteThere are very few blue things in nature and even fewer times when colour alone it the thing separating a blue thing from a similar thing of different colour, so if you need to tell the difference between lapiz lazulai and a bluebell, you don't really need a seperate word to do it.
I think the usual order is Red, then Green/Yellow, then Blue, then it gets more random between cultures.
- Ok after reading up it there's a massive shit fight about what exactly 'seeing' is and in what way the colour words you know interact with how you 'see' things. It does look like humans tend to perceive the same wavelengths through their eye-holes but what exactly they do with this information can get a bit complicated.
I suspect the redness thing is to do with fruit ripening, which is useful information to have.
DeleteThe interesting thing here is the point that I was trying to make earlier: language and human thought co-evolved so there were never modern human beings who were prior to language.
One of the first things I noticed on Tokyo subway map after arriving there is number of train lines with colors in the blue-green range. I could visually distinguish between them, but they weren't colors that I could easily name in English.
DeleteThe interesting thing is that the "green" lights on traffic lights and pedestrian crossings in Japan are almost exactly half way between green and blue. In the UK they are much more definitely "green" but my wife still insists they are blue.
DeleteIn Korea you gets kids coloring the sun orange or even red while American kids uniformly color it pretty pale yellow so obviously some of this color vocabulary stuff is actually affecting how people see things.
DeleteWhat I recalled for the Greeks is that they knew about colors just fine it's just that things being bright/dark/pastel was something they cared about more for whatever reason. Just like we know that there are all kinds of shades of red but don't really care that much since when we see them we think of "red" first not "bright" first.
Yes, it definitely does actually affect how people see things at some level, I think.
DeleteNeat article about how Greeks described color - things like shimmer and movement played a role too.
Deletehttps://aeon.co/essays/can-we-hope-to-understand-how-the-greeks-saw-their-world
You can go the reverse route... Portuguese (my mothertongue) have more than one translation to the "to be" verb. "estar feliz" and "ser feliz" are both translated to "to be happy" but one means to be happy right now (estar feliz) and the other means to be a happy person (ser feliz).
ReplyDeleteI think that understanding is what made Tolkien much better than a lot of people writting fantasy languages. He knew many languages and incorported those very different features to create unique languages.
Yes, we can use these in our games.
Yes, although I've never made the effort to get to know much about Tolkien's languages - maybe one day.
DeleteMy grad research was in the cognitive neuroscience of language, so I'm always interested in thinking about how to apply linguistic and psychological concepts to tabletop.
ReplyDeleteI think some of what you're saying borders on a hard linguistic determinist stance that is generally not supported in the cognitive neuroscience community, but within the context of different fantasy species, the "hard-coded" differences in cognition as reflected by language between the species is an interesting thing to explore.
All I can say from my own experience is that phenomenologically it definitely feels like speaking and thinking in a different language changes the way you think.
DeleteSee Jack Vance's "The Languages of Pao" for a fun and thoughtful treatment of this.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff - Adding this into a game wouldn't be a task for the faint-hearted DM, but you could have an NPC that the PCs can't understand, even with magic, because the language is so different. The NPC could have info the party needs, so they become a kind of living puzzle to solve. The only way to make this manageable for the DM would be to have a pre-prepared vocabulary to refer to. *cough*Darmok*cough* Idea 2: A plane/location the PCs visit that embodies these differences, so if, in this orcish realm, the word for pain and for pleasure is the same, that's what the PCs experience when they are hurt/pleasured. Perhaps spells resolve in unexpected ways, if the concepts of friend and foe are merged, or air/water, life/death etc. Again, this framework could be used to devise puzzles, add challenge to combat encounters etc.
ReplyDeleteYes, there are lots of possibilities the more you get thinking about it. I like these ideas a lot.
DeleteI studied German in high school but never visited or lived in Germany, or even delved into the culture in any meaningful way, really. I was always intrigued by their (and other European languages') concept of gendered nouns, even for inanimate objects. Now I'm wondering what kind of subtle effects, if any, it has on their perception of things like gender and identity.
ReplyDeleteMy friend who's been speaking Spanish for about 8 years now introduced me to the idea of dreaming in another language. It sounds fascinating, and makes me regret not sticking with it. How old were you when you started learning Japanese? Maybe there's still time.
I was 21 when I moved there and didn't know a word of it. It took 3 years living there to be really fluent, and that was with a lot of studying in my spare time as well. I am crap at learning languages without the exposure of being in the environment - I think as a native English speaker you really have to move to another country and be forcibly immersed.
DeleteAs a native speaker of one of these languages with gender, I can tell you that putting gender in inanimate objects gives it more characteristics the more symbolic that object is. In latin languages the Moon is female and the Sun is male but in germanic langues the Moon is male and the Sun is female (except english probably a burrowing from french).
DeleteNote that grammatical gender merely describes a noun class that shares an inflection pattern that usually forms an agreement system with pronouns/adjectives/articles/etc. The classes are referred to as feminine and masculine because the common words for females and males belong to different classes, but there are languages where the distinction is different (animate vs. inanimate or common vs. neuter) or use more than three genders (such as Polish and Swahili).
DeleteOn a more limited version of this I ran a dungeon in which the PCs were trying to follow maddeningly vague directions in order to get out and them parsing every single word and slowly figuring out more and more of the context of those words was a lot of fun (at least for me).
ReplyDeleteThanks for this great post. I'm usually allergic to anything resembling Gygaxian Naturalism as applied to creatures from fairy tales, but a couple of years ago I did start down a chain of thought on how one might make the different "metahumans" in a Shadowrun analogue more interesting and less blatantly based on icky real-life racial stereotypes. I also wanted to create mechanics for them (I think this was a The Shadow of Yesterday hack I was working on) that would make them feel different in play instead of just humans with funny ears.
ReplyDeleteRather than language, my stepping-off point was social psychology and animal behaviour: I tried to back-form a plausible social-psychological explanation for the social dynamics of each strain.
Orcs were probably the best-developed, and the picture of them that emerged was surprisingly admirable (surprising because my intent hadn't really been to rehabilitate the reputation of the Orc). Orcs weren't wired for in-group loyalty to nearly the same degree as humans, which resulted in social dynamics that humans would read as constant low-level intra-group conflict, parental neglect, inability to organize into stable institutions, disdain for religious or political ideology, insubordination in the workplace, and so on. It also meant that Orcs were much more likely than humans to be honest, act on principle, and stand up to authority, and that they were almost incapable of organizing (or being effectively employed by) large-scale (or even medium-scale) violence or authoritarianism. It also meant that Orcs would perceive other strains as being weak-willed cowards unable to speak their minds or stand up for themselves or the things they cared about.
Trolls were neurologically much less sensitive to stimuli, including threatening stimuli (physical or social), and more capable of focused concentration, leading to human perceptions of trolls as stupid, ponderous, oblivious, and callous. But of course this all meant that trolls were deep thinkers (if not always skilled at articulating their thoughts) who were slow to anger and perceived the other strains as being pathetically manic and hypersensitive.
Elves were obsessive-compulsive perfectionists fixated on passive-aggressive status competition, but also on holding themselves to very high standards. They tended to be very good at their chosen vocation, but without much psychological (or physical) resilience in the face of setbacks. They of course perceived the other strains as hopelessly sloppy and lazy.
Dwarves, finally, were sort of the anti-orcs insofar as they tended to identify almost completely with their ingroup. This meant that dwarves were perceived by outsiders as standoffish, greedy, and hard-hearted, but within the group they were capable of not only tremendous warmth and generosity but also incredible feats of group coordination: teams of dwarves could work together like a machine, capable of unmatched productivity and precision, whether in crafting objects, fighting, labouring, running a business, performing acrobatics, or whatever. (Of course occasionally a dwarf would bond with one or more non-dwarves, exhibiting with them a lessened but still impressive degree of group coordination -- dwarves would make good team leaders as long as they could keep a lid on their frustration with the chaotic idiots in their charge).
One of the insights to emerge from this is that it provided a natural explanation for why each strain might appear obnoxious to the others while exhibiting a healthy, stable set of social dynamics within their own communities. This went a long way toward explaining why, in the world of 2050 or whatever with human teenagers suddenly growing fangs and horns, these different strains would tend to naturally group into communities of their own despite being raised by humans. But that common bond of being brought up in human culture would also free many of them up to bond with mixed groups.
[Anyway, sorry, long self-involved rant. I don't think I ever posted my thoughts on that anywhere.]
That's great stuff.
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