Analyzing Vulcan Language Sample

[Salmoneus]

I actually liked Enterprise when it was on. Not enough to not get lost and give up somewhere in the second season, but quite a bit. But recently I tried to rewatch it and it was barely watchable. A shame, because the concept is a good one.

Drydic: a lot of it did, yes, but some parts of Voyager were actually really good. Unfortunately, the good bits are neither at the end (where people might remember them easily) nor at the beginning (where newcomers might encounter them) but buried in the middle...

[Drydic]

I only ever saw them randomized in syndication so there was no rhyme or reason, bad mediocre bad mediocre mediocre ok good mediocre mediocre bad bad bad, etc.

[vec]

I actually liked Enterprise when it was on. Not enough to not get lost and give up somewhere in the second season, but quite a bit. But recently I tried to rewatch it and it was barely watchable. A shame, because the concept is a good one.

Drydic: a lot of it did, yes, but some parts of Voyager were actually really good. Unfortunately, the good bits are neither at the end (where people might remember them easily) nor at the beginning (where newcomers might encounter them) but buried in the middle...

Seasons 4–6 of Voyager were excellent. Season 4 of Enterprise was also excellent.

[Gray Richardson]

I must protest! The last season of Enterprise was wonderful! There was some amazing storytelling in that last season. That last season makes Enterprise worthwhile.

And in the mirror universe 2 parter, the ship's linguist outfoxes everyone to become Empress of the Terran Empire. That alone has got to earn them some props.

[CatDoom]

And in the mirror universe 2 parter, the ship's linguist outfoxes everyone to become Empress of the Terran Empire. That alone has got to earn them some props.

I did think it was cool that they had a linguist on board for first contact type situations. Most of the time I'm willing to just go with the premise that everybody in the Star Trek universe(s) has access to magical (and apparently invisible?) universal translators that can instantly decode totally unfamiliar languages with 100% accuracy, but sometimes it just gets too irksome to ignore.

I was watching the episode of DS9 earlier with "Tosk," the first native of the delta quadrant that the federation make contact with. Chief O'Brian befriends him, but at least initially can't figure out if "Tosk" is his individual name, the name of his species, or the name of his occupation. We find out later that "Tosk" means "the hunted," which would have totally blown the lid off the mystery that much of the episode is built around.

So why the heck didn't the computer translate that? In fact, considering the number of different contexts in which proper names get used, it seems like a lot of them would wind up getting "translated." I can't help but think of some rather poorly translated bootleg Naruto DVDs my brother used to have, where the name "Orochimaru" was uniformly represented in the subtitles as "Snakemaru."

I'm not sure why that particular episode bugged me; the universal translator has always been a pretty much nonsensical plot contrivance. I guess I just think that it would have been more interesting if they had established some consistent limitations for the thing. Heck, one of the best episodes of TNG was based more or less entirely around figuring out a language that the universal translator was unable to decode. Hoshi was one of the cooler characters on Enterprise, and I wish they had given her a little more linguist-y stuff to do, but then, I guess I'm kind of biased.

[sangi39]

I'm not sure why that particular episode bugged me; the universal translator has always been a pretty much nonsensical plot contrivance. I guess I just think that it would have been more interesting if they had established some consistent limitations for the thing. Heck, one of the best episodes of TNG was based more or less entirely around figuring out a language that the universal translator was unable to decode.

Darmok was by far one of the best episodes of ST:NG I absolutely loved that episode when I first saw it and it's one of those episodes that, when it's on, I can't not watch it.

[Drydic]

[Gray Richardson]

Sadly, Hoshi's skills as a linguist were mostly wasted. They set her up to be so cool as a linguist, and then never really used her to full advantage. Although they did establish that she invented something important called "linguacode" that improved the universal translator. (Linguacode is described as a "translation matrix" used in first contact situations.) But there were a handful of episodes now and then where she got to really shine.

But few writers in Hollywood have any linguistics knowledge. So, of course Star Trek missed opportunities to explore that facet of exploration, or treat it with any realism. And audiences would probably have been bored if they had. Well, except that is the job of a good writer, I suppose, to make such details interesting and vital to the plot. But at least we got a few episodes where they touched on linguistics. Shows like the Darmok episode are real standouts because of it. (Even though I've heard linguists quibble about that one too.) So I guess, as little as Star Trek touched on linguistics, it probably still dealt with the topic more than any other show on TV that I can think of.

[Drydic]

Sadly, Hoshi's skills as a linguist were mostly wasted. They set her up to be so cool as a linguist, and then never really used her to full advantage. Although they did establish that she invented something important called "linguacode" that improved the universal translator. (Linguacode is described as a "translation matrix" used in first contact situations.) But there were a handful of episodes now and then where she got to really shine.

Linguacode is the universal translator. The precursor of the TOS/TNG UTs.

But few writers in Hollywood have any linguistics knowledge. So, of course Star Trek missed opportunities to explore that facet of exploration, or treat it with any realism. And audiences would probably have been bored if they had. Well, except that is the job of a good writer, I suppose, to make such details interesting and vital to the plot. But at least we got a few episodes where they touched on linguistics. Shows like the Darmok episode are real standouts because of it. (Even though I've heard linguists quibble about that one too.) So I guess, as little as Star Trek touched on linguistics, it probably still dealt with the topic more than any other show on TV that I can think of.

The only one I can think of which even tried was Stargate, and its writers recognized they didn't know what the hell they were doing, so in their awesome/eyerolling way they lampshaded it in a 1st season episode, they go to a planet, hostile natives appear, O'Neill says "Daniel, any chance of finding a language we can communicate with these guys with?" And the native leader answers him in English. Subsequently everyone just speaks English. I'm sure some get butthurt over that, but realistic first contact situations get entirely too boring for audiences to pay attention to, short of having a gimmick like the UT.

[KathTheDragon]

They did a decent "What language are these guys speaking?" in the first movie, and the first episode of SG1.

[Abi]

The only one I can think of which even tried was Stargate, and its writers recognized they didn't know what the hell they were doing, so in their awesome/eyerolling way they lampshaded it in a 1st season episode, they go to a planet, hostile natives appear, O'Neill says "Daniel, any chance of finding a language we can communicate with these guys with?" And the native leader answers him in English. Subsequently everyone just speaks English. I'm sure some get butthurt over that, but realistic first contact situations get entirely too boring for audiences to pay attention to, short of having a gimmick like the UT.

Actually there was a series of episodes with a character that spoke no English. By the end of the ark an attentive viewer didn't need subtitles for the language (albet it was very simple 4 word sentences if I recall correctly).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CDwfX66 ... lpage#t=41

[CatDoom]

It might be kind of a cool gimmick for a semi-comical sci-fi series to have an imperfect Universal Translator. Instead of coming up with full-on alien languages, each race could have a distinctive "accent" based on the particular kind of trouble that the translator has with their language. Like, maybe one race could have really complex syntactic rules, so the translator would periodically (though not constantly) come up with the wrong word order, while another might have no marking for articles, tense, or number and no personal pronouns at all, so they always sound like Jaqen H'gar in the Game of Thrones TV series. "A man sounds rather strange, always speaking this way."

[Gray Richardson]

It might make for an interesting script to have someone sabotage the universal translators (with a computer virus perhaps) to interpret things subtly off, cause insult, or outright lie—but maybe only regarding a very narrow topic.

For instance, my friend got a GPS for his car that had optional voices you could download. One of the selections was the voice of GlaDOS from the game Portal, a very pleasant computer personality that is known for lying in increasingly less subtle fashion as the game progresses. One of the quirks of this particular voice he downloaded for his car was that it had been programmed to say "Turn left" in place of the "Turn right" prompt. However, the "Turn left" prompt was just as normal. So no matter what direction you were supposed to go when you approached an intersection, you would always be prompted in a sweet but urgent voice to "Turn left."

There were other amusing quirks programmed into that particular voice; although, my friend never used it more than a couple of times on a lark, because, other than for entertainment while driving, she was totally useless for helping you to find your destination. But the first few times she said "Turn left," it was very believable, and even when we figured it out, you couldn't just do the opposite, because half the time she was telling the truth. Even when you knew the trick, it was easy to forget and start to turn the wrong way before remembering to correct.

But the interesting thing to note is that the GPS computer wasn't lying. It was giving the correct prompts. It was just the voice software that was saying the wrong thing because the software had mapped the correct information to a false output.

I don't know how I would write an episode like that, but a spy, or economic competitor species, or an alien with an odd sense of humor might be interested in altering the universal translators to "confound the tongues" to serve their own interests, and that could make for some very good stories.

[Gray Richardson]

I just remembered there was a Monty Python sketch like that. Something along the lines of a Hungarian to English phrasebook that translated innocuous practical questions to "My hovercraft is full of eels" and similar phrases that led native Brits to be very confused or upset with the unsuspecting tourists.

[CatDoom]

One issue is that most if not all other languages on earth contain words for which there is no simple, one-word translation in English. Plus you've got idioms that are easy to misinterpret. It's already become a bit archaic, but not so long ago in American English "bad" could have a number of positive connotations, to the point that it could almost be used as a synonym for "good." Then, of course, you've got homophones to deal with, but hopefully a future-tech translator would have some ability to interpret context.

The universal translator in Star Trek apparently worked by reading brain wave patterns or something, but one that actually worked by interpreting spoken or written language could lead to all sorts of amusing/interesting "Darmok" type situations. If you're defusing a bomb and you ask your alien friend if you should cut the blue wire or the green wire, you might be in trouble if his language has only a few basic color terms and the translator spits out "blue/green" or, worse, "black."

Ooh, now there's an idea! Do you think a species with a more developed sense of smell would have basic scent terms? I'm sure they use some kind of standardized nomenclature in perfuming, but most of the time in English one is reduced to comparing smells to other things that smell similar. Just like you wouldn't normally say "looks like grass" for green, I bet a scent-sensitive species would develop abstract benchmarks for describing the smell of different things. Now that would be hard to translate! It's probably be a pain to get directions from those guys, too.

"Hey, which house belongs to Kleeborg?"
"It's the one that smells blueish."

[Gray Richardson]

That's actually a very cool idea. Would also be interesting trying to translate words for sensory perceptions that humans do not possess at all. For instance, fish have a sensory system called "lateral lines" that gives them an acute 3-dimensional awareness of water pressure, turbulence, motion and vibration in their vicinity. Birds have an awareness of magnetic fields. Surely there are alien species that would have exotic senses involving a rich descriptive vocabulary that would be, well, completely alien to us.

For instance, Vulcans are supposed to be psychic. I have no idea how this "sense" is processed biologically, what organs or structures that would entail, but I imagine that Vulcans would have some amount of vocabulary peculiar to that sense involving the presence or absence of sensory input received from a subject, the strength or amplitude of the stimulus perceived (light or dark, loud or soft), and the quality of it (akin to flavor, hue, texture or tone).

[Gray Richardson]

By the way, on the subject of smell... you remind me of this cool article I read last month that scientists claim to have isolated the 10 basic scents or categories of odor that humans can detect/discern. It occurred to me that this information might be useful for conlanging, for those looking to add words to their lexicon describing the "spectrum" of smell. The 10 basic odors they determined were "fragrant, woody/resinous, fruity (non-citrus), chemical, minty, sweet, popcorn, lemon and two kinds of sickening odors: pungent and decayed."

Here's a summary for the layman: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 180425.htm

Here's the original scientific article: Categorical Dimensions of Human Odor Descriptor Space Revealed by Non-Negative Matrix Factorization: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Ad ... ne.0073289

[Drydic]

And there was a guy in the near past (somewhere in the 20th century) who came up with 7 categories, and smellologists (read whatever the fuck they're called) basically tarred, feathered and burned him at the stake.

[Gray Richardson]

Are you saying they turned their nose up at his research?

[Drydic]

More like picked it apart and shot holes in his methodology.

[Gray Richardson]

Really, people shouldn't pick their noses.

[Drydic]

What about sniffing them?

[shanoxilt]

If you wish to learn more about Vulcan culture and language, visit Korsaya.