It's raining and miserable outside; typical North of England November day. So I'm sitting at the kitchen table with a nice cup of tea working on an old idea - the Yellow City Trade Tongue. Here's an introductory primer.
The Trade Tongue arose out of the need for a common language which could be spoken by both humans and slug people. Slug people, lacking teeth and having only a rudimentary palate, cannot form many sounds which humans find easy to produce. Humans, on the other hand, cannot produce the pheromones which slug people use to augment their spoken language. This created a need for a simple language accessible to both races, and over centuries the Trade Tongue has evolved as a means to fulfill that need.
Consonants
There are ten consonants in the Trade Tongue, corresponding to the sounds p, b, q, g, ɸ, ʝ, χ, ɰ, l, and h. In the roman alphabet these can be reproduced as, approximately, p, b, k, g, f, y, x, w, l and h. x is never produced as in 'xylophone' or 'extra', but always like the French r, the Spanish j, or the Portuguese rr. f is extremely light and is pronounced only with the use of the lips, not the teeth.
Vowels
There are fuve vowels - a, i, u, e, and o, almost identical to the Spanish equivalents. These can be elongated, commonly represented as á, í, ú, é, and ó, but also sometimes transcribed aa, ii, uu, ee or oo. When elongated, vowel sounds never mutate - thus e as in 'exit', é as in 'air', but never as in 'feed'.
Sound Structure
The Trade Tongue has a highly regimented consonant-verb-consonant-verb pattern. Two consonants are never found together. It also has a strict kind of vowel harmony which means that vowels are either regular or elongated in one word, but never both. Thus aa, ii, uu, ee and oo can be found in the same word together but are never found in the same word as a, i, u, e or o, and vice-versa.
Grammar
The Trade Tongue is an agglutinative, SOV language. All the verbs are regular, and distinguished by having three past tenses (last night, yesterday, general past) and three future tenses (tonight, tomorrow, general future). Nouns and verbs are not gendered and do not inflect according to gender.
[Next step is to begin constructing the vocabulary.]
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Saturday, 21 November 2009
Friday, 10 July 2009
Fin de XXe Siècle Bastardising Geekism and the Poor Apostrophe
I'm reading House of Chains, one of Steven Erikson's 'Malazan Book of the Fallen' saga. (It's the first one I've read but happens to be the fourth in the series. I chose it more or less at random; my English bookshop in Tokyo has a haphazard approach to stocking fantasy series in any sort of order.) It's... a qualified 'good'. I loved the first 200 pages or so, which was a fine romp of purely distilled ultraviolence and general mayhem. But as it's gone on it has become insanely complicated and over-elaborate, and the tone of the writing has become increasingly overwrought and precious. It's gripping, but has none of the emotional investment of, say, A Song of Ice and Fire.
Two things chiefly interest me about it:
1) It's very much a product of that nameless phenomenon which we'll call for the sake of argument "Fin de XXe Siècle Bastardising Geekism". What I mean by this is the tendency for late 20th/early 21st century geek culture to grab references from genre fiction, films, comics (Western and Japanese), computer games, TV series, D&D and real-world mythology, then mash them all together into an incoherent and unholy mix, and let it loose on an unsuspecting world.
House of Chains is a classic example. The characters all sound like Conan when they talk; they fight like the far-too-big-sword-wielding waifs of the Final Fantasy series of video games; many are vaguely reminiscent of figures from Greek and Norse myth; they are all 'teh awesome' to some degree; most of the female characters are of the "I can fight just as well as a man and also I'm really hot like Buffy" variety; it has that obsession with the minutiae of the setting which categorises all geek pursuits from Star Trek to Dragon Ball Z and which sometimes feels like stamp collecting; there is no cultural coherence to the setting, but elements of European, Mesoamerican and Asian cultures seem to have been thrown together in an ad hoc manner to create something altogether mongrel; there is no real moral compass except for a vague understanding that the 'heroes' aren't quite as nasty as the villains (for example, the 'heroes' might kill innocent people at random, but hey, at least they don't perform genital mutilation on pre-teen girls).
Which isn't to say it isn't an enjoyable read - rather, I would say it is amusingly representative of a noticeable cultural trend. You can see this trend, of course, in D&D; most of the above remarks about 'The Malazan Book of the Fallen' seem like a great fit for the general ethos of 4e (though of course not all 4e campaigns), and I wasn't at all surprised to find out that the series is all based on a long-running GURPS Fantasy campaign that Erikson participated in.
2) Erikson is described in the liner notes as a man who spent "nearly" twenty years as an archaeologist and anthropologist. What he certainly doesn't seem to be is a linguist.
Mark Rosenfelder makes the interesting point in his language construction kit that:
To elaborate: monolingual people by definition don't have a conception of how speakers of other languages produce sound. Their experience and knowledge of language is limited to their own. This is perfectly fine and natural, but it means that if they ever try to come up with new words and new languages, they have a dearth of knowledge from which to draw, and their creations have a consequent dearth of interest. This remark could almost have been tailor written for the world of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Because for all of the much-trumpeted depth of its setting it is shockingly English in its vocabulary and lexicon. The place and character names just don't sound credible; they are the product of an English speaker trying to sound exotic, not of a different tongue.
Many fantasy authors are well aware of this problem and try to compensate in various ways. Erikson is no exception. In his case it has led to two things:
a) Lazy shorthand references to the real world. For example, an area of the Malazan world is called "Darujistan". It's vaguely Central Asian in flavour and a bit desert-y and exotic, so hey, stick -stan on the end and everybody gets that flavour immediately, right? Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Waziristan, Darujistan... Except here's the thing. The suffix -stan comes from a real world language or group of languages (the Indo-Aryan group). The suffix would therefore hardly exist in the world of the Malazan Book of the Fallen as a means of identifying a place or region, unless the author would have us believe that Indo-Aryan languages are spoken there. So it doesn't make any internal sense.
Now, I can hear the argument already forming on somebody's lips: Who cares? Because although this lazy shorthand (-stan = desert-y Central Asian place, so there's no need to bother coming up with a proper flavour for it) doesn't make sense, at least it works for the English-speaking reader. They get the drift, and that's all that matters. Well yes, I'd agree, except that when reading this series one gets the overriding sense that both publisher and author seem to be playing up the sheer depth and quality of the feat of world building that the books represent. If you're going to take that angle you'd damn well better follow up on it by actually producing a great feat of world building. Using "-stan" to represent generic desert-y Central Asian place doesn't cut it.
b) Abuse of the apostrophe. N'ow, th's 'is a com'mon pheno'men'n in much crappy fantasy lit, frequently encountered whenever an author is trying to make names seem exotic. But by Christ does Steven Erikson use it a lot. T'lan Imass. 'Siballe. L'oric. Sha'ik. Ah, the words just roll of the tongue don't they? Don't they? No, they fucking don't. They are a pain in the arse to read, an even worse pain in the arse to try to imagine the sound of (how in God's name does one prounounce 'Siballe and how is it different from Siballe?), and a constant annoyance which trips up the flow of the writing.
The abused apostrophe is the last resort of the English monolingual who is trying to create exotic sounds. Another lazy shorthand. I find it unusual, however, not to say astounding, that a qualified anthropologist would use it. The one thing you would expect from such a person would be a credible looking language, right?
In any case, this is not to say that the reading experience is not enjoyable. House of Chains is a genuine page-turner. It's also a cultural artefact which in a hundred years will I'm sure be seen as exemplary of certain trends within the arts during our era. What it isn't is a "a fantasy world as rich and detailed as any you're likely to encounter", which is what it says on the tin.
Two things chiefly interest me about it:
1) It's very much a product of that nameless phenomenon which we'll call for the sake of argument "Fin de XXe Siècle Bastardising Geekism". What I mean by this is the tendency for late 20th/early 21st century geek culture to grab references from genre fiction, films, comics (Western and Japanese), computer games, TV series, D&D and real-world mythology, then mash them all together into an incoherent and unholy mix, and let it loose on an unsuspecting world.
House of Chains is a classic example. The characters all sound like Conan when they talk; they fight like the far-too-big-sword-wielding waifs of the Final Fantasy series of video games; many are vaguely reminiscent of figures from Greek and Norse myth; they are all 'teh awesome' to some degree; most of the female characters are of the "I can fight just as well as a man and also I'm really hot like Buffy" variety; it has that obsession with the minutiae of the setting which categorises all geek pursuits from Star Trek to Dragon Ball Z and which sometimes feels like stamp collecting; there is no cultural coherence to the setting, but elements of European, Mesoamerican and Asian cultures seem to have been thrown together in an ad hoc manner to create something altogether mongrel; there is no real moral compass except for a vague understanding that the 'heroes' aren't quite as nasty as the villains (for example, the 'heroes' might kill innocent people at random, but hey, at least they don't perform genital mutilation on pre-teen girls).
Which isn't to say it isn't an enjoyable read - rather, I would say it is amusingly representative of a noticeable cultural trend. You can see this trend, of course, in D&D; most of the above remarks about 'The Malazan Book of the Fallen' seem like a great fit for the general ethos of 4e (though of course not all 4e campaigns), and I wasn't at all surprised to find out that the series is all based on a long-running GURPS Fantasy campaign that Erikson participated in.
2) Erikson is described in the liner notes as a man who spent "nearly" twenty years as an archaeologist and anthropologist. What he certainly doesn't seem to be is a linguist.
Mark Rosenfelder makes the interesting point in his language construction kit that:
If you don't know another language well, you're pretty much doomed to produce ciphers of English...If all you know is English, you'll tend to duplicate the structure and idioms of the English vocabulary....
Non-linguists will often start with the alphabet and add a few apostrophes and diacritical marks. The results are likely to be something that looks too much like English, has many more sounds than necessary, and which even the author doesn't know how to pronounce.
To elaborate: monolingual people by definition don't have a conception of how speakers of other languages produce sound. Their experience and knowledge of language is limited to their own. This is perfectly fine and natural, but it means that if they ever try to come up with new words and new languages, they have a dearth of knowledge from which to draw, and their creations have a consequent dearth of interest. This remark could almost have been tailor written for the world of The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Because for all of the much-trumpeted depth of its setting it is shockingly English in its vocabulary and lexicon. The place and character names just don't sound credible; they are the product of an English speaker trying to sound exotic, not of a different tongue.
Many fantasy authors are well aware of this problem and try to compensate in various ways. Erikson is no exception. In his case it has led to two things:
a) Lazy shorthand references to the real world. For example, an area of the Malazan world is called "Darujistan". It's vaguely Central Asian in flavour and a bit desert-y and exotic, so hey, stick -stan on the end and everybody gets that flavour immediately, right? Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Waziristan, Darujistan... Except here's the thing. The suffix -stan comes from a real world language or group of languages (the Indo-Aryan group). The suffix would therefore hardly exist in the world of the Malazan Book of the Fallen as a means of identifying a place or region, unless the author would have us believe that Indo-Aryan languages are spoken there. So it doesn't make any internal sense.
Now, I can hear the argument already forming on somebody's lips: Who cares? Because although this lazy shorthand (-stan = desert-y Central Asian place, so there's no need to bother coming up with a proper flavour for it) doesn't make sense, at least it works for the English-speaking reader. They get the drift, and that's all that matters. Well yes, I'd agree, except that when reading this series one gets the overriding sense that both publisher and author seem to be playing up the sheer depth and quality of the feat of world building that the books represent. If you're going to take that angle you'd damn well better follow up on it by actually producing a great feat of world building. Using "-stan" to represent generic desert-y Central Asian place doesn't cut it.
b) Abuse of the apostrophe. N'ow, th's 'is a com'mon pheno'men'n in much crappy fantasy lit, frequently encountered whenever an author is trying to make names seem exotic. But by Christ does Steven Erikson use it a lot. T'lan Imass. 'Siballe. L'oric. Sha'ik. Ah, the words just roll of the tongue don't they? Don't they? No, they fucking don't. They are a pain in the arse to read, an even worse pain in the arse to try to imagine the sound of (how in God's name does one prounounce 'Siballe and how is it different from Siballe?), and a constant annoyance which trips up the flow of the writing.
The abused apostrophe is the last resort of the English monolingual who is trying to create exotic sounds. Another lazy shorthand. I find it unusual, however, not to say astounding, that a qualified anthropologist would use it. The one thing you would expect from such a person would be a credible looking language, right?
In any case, this is not to say that the reading experience is not enjoyable. House of Chains is a genuine page-turner. It's also a cultural artefact which in a hundred years will I'm sure be seen as exemplary of certain trends within the arts during our era. What it isn't is a "a fantasy world as rich and detailed as any you're likely to encounter", which is what it says on the tin.
Thursday, 16 April 2009
We do not know what thing the universe is
The Ipogo school of philosophers divide all life into the following categories:
p) those that belong to the emperor;
b) embalmed things;
k) those that are trained;
g) innumerable ones;
f) mermaids;
j) fabulous beings;
x) those that are drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush;
w) those that are not included in the other categories;
l) those that tremble as if they were mad;
h) those that at a distance resemble flies.
From this categorisation, they have developed an 'analytical language' which aims at creating the true name for every living thing - by dividing and subdividing each category and allocating a separate letter to each one. Thus, the true name of a kraken is formed by taking j (for a fabulous being), à (for the subdivision of fabulous being which lives in the ocean), w (for the subsubdivision of ocean-dwelling fabulous being which destroy ships), and è (for the subsubsubdivision of ocean-dwelling fabulous being which destroys ships and has a beak) - thus making jàwè. On the other hand, the carefully preserved corpse of the oligarch Suyong-bui 9's favourite midget, which sits before the stairs to the Old Temple in Silaish Vo, has the true name bàfolì. This is taken from its categorisation as an embalmed thing which was once owned as a slave, which had never known the physical act of love, which had lost a digit, which had given pleasure, and which was stunted.
True names necessarily change according to cirumstance. For example, if another item which resembles that currently known as bàfolì should be discovered, this would necessitate a further subdivision - for example, the first bàfolì might become bàfolìp, distinguished by being male, and the second bàfolìj, by being female.
The Ipogo keep a vast library in their palace in the Yellow City, containing all the true names of everything that is known to them. The philosophers spend their entire lives cataloguing the various specimens and reports that are sent to them by their field workers and underlings scattered throughout Yoon-suin. It is their belief that their analytical language will some day supplant all existing tongues, as it will communicate intrinsic meaning as well as mere signifiers - making it superior in efficiency.
However, their great terror is the universe itself, which defies all attempts at categorisation. The phrase "We do not know what thing the universe is" has become a mantra for its members and a saying in the Yellow City used to illustrate futility. Even in the crowded markets of the city you can hear it, as a man gives up his search for the latest shipment of opium and throws up his hands in frustration, or as a girl turns to her consort to explain that she no longer loves him. We do not know what thing the universe is. So that is that.
[This entry is almost entirely stolen from The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, by Borges - thankfully now out of copyright.]
p) those that belong to the emperor;
b) embalmed things;
k) those that are trained;
g) innumerable ones;
f) mermaids;
j) fabulous beings;
x) those that are drawn with a very fine camel's-hair brush;
w) those that are not included in the other categories;
l) those that tremble as if they were mad;
h) those that at a distance resemble flies.
From this categorisation, they have developed an 'analytical language' which aims at creating the true name for every living thing - by dividing and subdividing each category and allocating a separate letter to each one. Thus, the true name of a kraken is formed by taking j (for a fabulous being), à (for the subdivision of fabulous being which lives in the ocean), w (for the subsubdivision of ocean-dwelling fabulous being which destroy ships), and è (for the subsubsubdivision of ocean-dwelling fabulous being which destroys ships and has a beak) - thus making jàwè. On the other hand, the carefully preserved corpse of the oligarch Suyong-bui 9's favourite midget, which sits before the stairs to the Old Temple in Silaish Vo, has the true name bàfolì. This is taken from its categorisation as an embalmed thing which was once owned as a slave, which had never known the physical act of love, which had lost a digit, which had given pleasure, and which was stunted.
True names necessarily change according to cirumstance. For example, if another item which resembles that currently known as bàfolì should be discovered, this would necessitate a further subdivision - for example, the first bàfolì might become bàfolìp, distinguished by being male, and the second bàfolìj, by being female.
The Ipogo keep a vast library in their palace in the Yellow City, containing all the true names of everything that is known to them. The philosophers spend their entire lives cataloguing the various specimens and reports that are sent to them by their field workers and underlings scattered throughout Yoon-suin. It is their belief that their analytical language will some day supplant all existing tongues, as it will communicate intrinsic meaning as well as mere signifiers - making it superior in efficiency.
However, their great terror is the universe itself, which defies all attempts at categorisation. The phrase "We do not know what thing the universe is" has become a mantra for its members and a saying in the Yellow City used to illustrate futility. Even in the crowded markets of the city you can hear it, as a man gives up his search for the latest shipment of opium and throws up his hands in frustration, or as a girl turns to her consort to explain that she no longer loves him. We do not know what thing the universe is. So that is that.
[This entry is almost entirely stolen from The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, by Borges - thankfully now out of copyright.]
Monday, 6 April 2009
The Hobby of Map Making and Setting Design
At Valley of the Blue Snails, Canecorpus discusses setting design as a hobby. It's something I can identify with. I enjoy role playing and I enjoy setting design, and sometimes I enjoy them entirely separately from one another. In fact I might go so far as to say that I like setting design even more than I like gaming. It's a great way to express creativity, especially if like me you are a terrible artist (regular readers will attest to this) and cursed with a flea-like attention span (precluding novel-writing); moreover I would call it a pure hobby in that there's no way that a setting-designer can possibly be in it for the money. You don't sell stuff like Yoon-suin on its own, at least not in numbers. It's a labour of love, and that's that.
Today I had a godawful hangover and crippling aches and pains from playing football last night, so I spent most of the day making maps. For inspiration I visited the Cartographer's Guild, and from there came across the amazing Sorol, a one-man effort to collect the "accumulated knowledge about the planet [Sorol], its inhabitants, and its history". The creator is not a role player and as far as I can discern just makes it all up for fun. (He makes, quite simply, the best maps of nonexistent places that I've seen.) It's good to know one is not alone, and even better to know that there are people out there with such skill, energy and motivation. It serves as a kick up the backside.
Of course, world creation is a venerable practice. Tolkien originally made up Middle Earth as a hobby and a way of providing a history for his created languages. The tradition continues to this day: one of the most interesting modern examples of world creation, Ill Bethisad, has similar origins. First created as an alternative history to explain the existence of Brithenig (a made-up language based on the premise that Latin in the British Isles did not die out), it is now a highly detailed world all of its own, with several constructed languages and a complicated political structure. Believe you me, if I had the linguistic knowledge I would also be making up languages myself - probably right this moment.
Beats watching TV anyway, right?
Today I had a godawful hangover and crippling aches and pains from playing football last night, so I spent most of the day making maps. For inspiration I visited the Cartographer's Guild, and from there came across the amazing Sorol, a one-man effort to collect the "accumulated knowledge about the planet [Sorol], its inhabitants, and its history". The creator is not a role player and as far as I can discern just makes it all up for fun. (He makes, quite simply, the best maps of nonexistent places that I've seen.) It's good to know one is not alone, and even better to know that there are people out there with such skill, energy and motivation. It serves as a kick up the backside.
Of course, world creation is a venerable practice. Tolkien originally made up Middle Earth as a hobby and a way of providing a history for his created languages. The tradition continues to this day: one of the most interesting modern examples of world creation, Ill Bethisad, has similar origins. First created as an alternative history to explain the existence of Brithenig (a made-up language based on the premise that Latin in the British Isles did not die out), it is now a highly detailed world all of its own, with several constructed languages and a complicated political structure. Believe you me, if I had the linguistic knowledge I would also be making up languages myself - probably right this moment.
Beats watching TV anyway, right?
Friday, 3 April 2009
Words that I like: "Sorcerer"
I do love the word 'sorcerer'. Say it with me now. Roll it around in your mouth. 'Sorcerer'. A fun word to say, don't you think?
I was thinking about it today while I listened to Jacques, Marc Almond's very odd but oddly brilliant tribute to Jacques Brel. One of the lines on the English version of the song 'The Lockman' - about a man operating a lock on a canal - describes the main character as "half sorcerer, half drunkard," which I just love, and which got me thinking about the word 'sorcerer' itself. It has such different connotations to 'wizard', 'mage' or 'warlock', I think - a hint of mystery and darkness that those words don't conjur up as strongly.
This is confirmed by a brief search in my wife's electronic Oxford English Dictionary and a quick look at dictionary.com. The Oxford Modern Usage describes 'Sorcery' as "magic that uses evil spirits"; Eston's Bible Dictionary describes a 'sorcerer' as "In Dan. 2:2, [a] rendering of the Hebrew mekhashphim, i.e., mutterers, men who professed to have power with evil spirits." Meanwhile, the American Heritage Dictionary tells us that the English root is sortiārius, or "one who casts lots".
I like this. Somebody who casts lots, then summons evil spirits to explain to him the meanings. Or, somebody who summons evil spirits to do his dirty work, and casts lots to make it appear that he is just a harmless seer. Don't you think the designers of 3rd edition D&D missed a trick in making a sorcerer...er, a wizard who doesn't use a spellbook? Snore.
Yoon-suin is going to have proper sorcerers.
I was thinking about it today while I listened to Jacques, Marc Almond's very odd but oddly brilliant tribute to Jacques Brel. One of the lines on the English version of the song 'The Lockman' - about a man operating a lock on a canal - describes the main character as "half sorcerer, half drunkard," which I just love, and which got me thinking about the word 'sorcerer' itself. It has such different connotations to 'wizard', 'mage' or 'warlock', I think - a hint of mystery and darkness that those words don't conjur up as strongly.
This is confirmed by a brief search in my wife's electronic Oxford English Dictionary and a quick look at dictionary.com. The Oxford Modern Usage describes 'Sorcery' as "magic that uses evil spirits"; Eston's Bible Dictionary describes a 'sorcerer' as "In Dan. 2:2, [a] rendering of the Hebrew mekhashphim, i.e., mutterers, men who professed to have power with evil spirits." Meanwhile, the American Heritage Dictionary tells us that the English root is sortiārius, or "one who casts lots".
I like this. Somebody who casts lots, then summons evil spirits to explain to him the meanings. Or, somebody who summons evil spirits to do his dirty work, and casts lots to make it appear that he is just a harmless seer. Don't you think the designers of 3rd edition D&D missed a trick in making a sorcerer...er, a wizard who doesn't use a spellbook? Snore.
Yoon-suin is going to have proper sorcerers.
Monday, 10 November 2008
Languages; or, why we shouldn't be able to speak Dwarven
[I was going to begin a series about demigods, but after reading posts at Jeff's gameblog and Sword & Shield, I felt inspired to scrawl something about linguistics and role playing settings.]
I'm a professional translator, so I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about languages (obviously Japanese and English in the main, as they are the languages I work with, but I have a general interest in linguistics). One thing I've noticed is just how different languages can be, especially those from unrelated language families - and I don't mean different in the naive sense that English doesn't sound much like Chinese. What I'm talking about is how languages that have evolved in completely different cultural surroundings to each other have also evolved highly different modes of expression.
An example: Japanese, like most aspects of Japanese culture, is highly minimalist, especially in its most casual forms. Consider the English expression: "How have you been?". The equivalent Japanese expression is simply "Saikin do?", literally translated as "Lately how?". (Sometimes this is abbreviated to simply, "Do?", or "How?".) Similarly, when two Japanese friends meet, they'll typically ask each other, simply, "Genki?" ("Healthy?") rather than the comparatively flowery English "How are you?" (three words to accomplish what the Japanese manage with one).
Another example: one of the most common utterances in Japanese is the phrase yoroshiku onegaishimasu (or variations thereof). Non-Japanese speakers visiting the country come to recognise those words because you can hear them everywhere. It is often translated in phrasebooks and the like as "Nice to meet you" or "How do you do?", but in fact it means no such thing - literally translated it goes something like "Please behave well". It is rendered "Nice to meet you" in phrasebooks because it is often uttered when two people first meet, but it is also used in a whole variety of other situations - at the end of letters, when making a request, when complaining, when asking for something, when signing something, essentially whenever a polite turn of phrase is considered necessary. That English simply has no equivalent phrase hints at a huge cultural difference; English speakers presumably do not and never have felt it necessary to exhort each other to "Behave well", whereas for the Japanese it is so common that it has evolved to ubiquity. Why this should be is a question for the armchair anthropologist, and beyond my capability to answer, but that a big difference in our cultural foundations exists is indisputable.
Another example: Japanese colours are different to English ones; aoi, which describes the colour we know of as blue, is also used by the Japanese to refer to the colour of fresh grass, green apples, and the green on traffic lights. Do Japanese and English speakers see colours in different ways? Who can say?
All this is a roundabout way of saying, languages which have been separated by many thousands of years of evolution are not just different in terms of the way the words sound; they are also based around fundamentally different cultural interpretations of the world.
Now, take that thought, and try transferring it to two cultures that don't just belong to two very slightly different types of human being; try transferring it to two cultures that belong to different species. Imagine the difficulty in understanding a dwarven worldview for a human - the huge matrix of assumptions, expressions and ideas which just aren't shared. It's difficult enough for an English speaker to learn Japanese and vice versa; how much more amplified would that be for a human being trying to speak a language of dwarfs? (Let alone orcs, giants, dragons...) It would not involve merely learning a new grammar and vocabulary. It would also require huge mental effort to come to grips with such an exotic way of viewing the world. Wittgenstein famously remarked that if a lion could talk, we could not understand him - the same must surely also be true of a goblin, Klingon or troll.
Would it spoil players' fun to tell them that, no, they can't communicate with other races/species except perhaps through sign language and monosyllables? I'm not sure, but I'd like to try it.
I'm a professional translator, so I tend to spend a lot of time thinking about languages (obviously Japanese and English in the main, as they are the languages I work with, but I have a general interest in linguistics). One thing I've noticed is just how different languages can be, especially those from unrelated language families - and I don't mean different in the naive sense that English doesn't sound much like Chinese. What I'm talking about is how languages that have evolved in completely different cultural surroundings to each other have also evolved highly different modes of expression.
An example: Japanese, like most aspects of Japanese culture, is highly minimalist, especially in its most casual forms. Consider the English expression: "How have you been?". The equivalent Japanese expression is simply "Saikin do?", literally translated as "Lately how?". (Sometimes this is abbreviated to simply, "Do?", or "How?".) Similarly, when two Japanese friends meet, they'll typically ask each other, simply, "Genki?" ("Healthy?") rather than the comparatively flowery English "How are you?" (three words to accomplish what the Japanese manage with one).
Another example: one of the most common utterances in Japanese is the phrase yoroshiku onegaishimasu (or variations thereof). Non-Japanese speakers visiting the country come to recognise those words because you can hear them everywhere. It is often translated in phrasebooks and the like as "Nice to meet you" or "How do you do?", but in fact it means no such thing - literally translated it goes something like "Please behave well". It is rendered "Nice to meet you" in phrasebooks because it is often uttered when two people first meet, but it is also used in a whole variety of other situations - at the end of letters, when making a request, when complaining, when asking for something, when signing something, essentially whenever a polite turn of phrase is considered necessary. That English simply has no equivalent phrase hints at a huge cultural difference; English speakers presumably do not and never have felt it necessary to exhort each other to "Behave well", whereas for the Japanese it is so common that it has evolved to ubiquity. Why this should be is a question for the armchair anthropologist, and beyond my capability to answer, but that a big difference in our cultural foundations exists is indisputable.
Another example: Japanese colours are different to English ones; aoi, which describes the colour we know of as blue, is also used by the Japanese to refer to the colour of fresh grass, green apples, and the green on traffic lights. Do Japanese and English speakers see colours in different ways? Who can say?
All this is a roundabout way of saying, languages which have been separated by many thousands of years of evolution are not just different in terms of the way the words sound; they are also based around fundamentally different cultural interpretations of the world.
Now, take that thought, and try transferring it to two cultures that don't just belong to two very slightly different types of human being; try transferring it to two cultures that belong to different species. Imagine the difficulty in understanding a dwarven worldview for a human - the huge matrix of assumptions, expressions and ideas which just aren't shared. It's difficult enough for an English speaker to learn Japanese and vice versa; how much more amplified would that be for a human being trying to speak a language of dwarfs? (Let alone orcs, giants, dragons...) It would not involve merely learning a new grammar and vocabulary. It would also require huge mental effort to come to grips with such an exotic way of viewing the world. Wittgenstein famously remarked that if a lion could talk, we could not understand him - the same must surely also be true of a goblin, Klingon or troll.
Would it spoil players' fun to tell them that, no, they can't communicate with other races/species except perhaps through sign language and monosyllables? I'm not sure, but I'd like to try it.
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