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Michael Quinion runs the fantastic website, World Wide Words, you can read his full bio here.  In his new book, Gallimaufry: A Hodgepodge of Our Vanishing Vocabulary, he looks at the words disappearing from our language and opens a window into lives in days in gone by.  (In case you were wondering Gallimaufry means 1. a dish made up of leftovers, 2. a miscellaneous jumble or medley).  In the article below Quinion looks at how Science Fiction authors cross the language barrier between their human protagonists and aliens.  How would you talk to an alien if you met one?

“Take me to your leader!” When the antenna’d alien in pulp fiction hops down from his flying saucer and accosts an Earthman, nobody is too much surprised that he’s able to speak English. It’s just a convention.

In real life, so to speak, the alien and the human would be facing much intensive co-operative work to get a basic understanding of each other’s methods of communication, language and culture. Ask any field linguist who has encountered a previously unknown tribe just how difficult this can be, even when both parties are human. SF writers struggle with this problem every time they write a first-contact story.

However, few SF writers are linguists, matched only in lack of expertise by their readers. The solutions can seem to owe as much to the black arts as to science (but then, as Arthur C Clarke said, “any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic”). One solution, common enough to be a convention of the genre, like hyperspace, is the universal translator. The Star Trek series found it an invaluable time-saver, though a version of it appeared first in Murray Leinster’s story First Contact of 1945.

Even if it translates the words, it may not get the message across. Naomi Mitchison suggested in Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962) that trying to communicate with a five-armed starfish would show the extent to which our bilateral symmetry constrains us to a binary view of the world — true versus false, right versus wrong, black versus white. In The Mote in God’s Eye (1974), Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle imagine three-armed aliens, who argue not just “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”, but also “on the gripping hand”, a trilateral logic. C J Cherryh’s Hunter of Worlds (1977) presents the language of the Iduve, in which there’s “no clear distinction between noun and verb, between solid and action”, so that translation cannot be literal if it is to be meaningful. Jean-Luc Picard comes across something similar in Star Trek: The Next Generation when he encounters a race that speaks only in metaphor.

How much worse it is when the aliens aren’t around to help. Languages are locked boxes, with no way in unless you can find the key. Philologists needed the Rosetta Stone to understand ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs but to find the equivalent on an alien world would be highly improbable. H Beam Piper suggested a way out of the deadlock in his 1958 story Omnilingual: a team studying an extinct civilisation on Mars finds a drawing of the periodic table and realises that the Rosetta Stone for an advanced society is not linguistic but the laws of physics and chemistry. In Carl Sagan’s Contact (1985) a message comes in from space and Earth’s linguistic community sets about deciphering it; the task ought to be impossible but somehow they succeed.

Douglas Adams neatly satirised the universal translator with the Babel fish of his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe novels (1979 on), in which the fish sets up a telepathic link between minds. Telepathy is another solution to the language problem, one that goes back to the Mars stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and beyond, though this assumes that human and alien brains are sufficiently similar to allow it. H G Wells pointed out one limitation in Men Like Gods (1923): the members of a party transported to the distant future find that telepathic speech is heard differently by each person according to their existing knowledge and language skills. Another method, once fashionable, is a hypnotic trance; the hero of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel The Coming Race (1871) is taught the language of the subterranean master race in this way. The method was updated in the 1940s by hypnopedia, learning while asleep or under hypnosis.

Another possibility may be summarised in the old colonial maxim of making the natives learn English. This may be easier in an SF story because the aliens are often assumed to be more intelligent, or at least more advanced, than humans. Sometimes no other solution is possible, as Vernor Vinge’s child protagonist learns in A Deepness in the Sky (1999) when trying to converse with gestalt packs of dog-like creatures who natively communicate using ultrasound but who can utter English words.

Next time you meet an alien from outer space, be prepared for some hard work.

[Michael Quinion's most recent book, Gallimaufry, has just become available from Oxford in the US. He runs the World Wide Words website and e-magazine (http://www.worldwidewords.org), which recently topped the poll in the L-Soft LISTSERV Choice Awards 2008-09. His next book, which presents updated versions of 200 questions and answers from the site, is to be published in July.]

Elvim Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com.

In recent weeks, some political commentators have observed that Senator Barack Obama is all talk, but no substance. Where his supporters see an orator of the highest order, his detractors see only a smooth talker.

Flash back to the 1980s, and we had the same bifurcated response to Ronald Reagan. Whereas some saw profundity and deep meaning in his speeches, Reagan’s detractors heard only vacuous platitudes. Indeed, Reagan’s supporters even used the same words as some liberals do today to describe Obama’s “soaring oratory.” How did Reagan score with the Reagan Democrats? By being all things to all people. The Obamacans in this year’s elections are being swayed by a parallel strategy. Talk a lot, but mean nothing.

Consider Obama’s response this week in Georgia when he addressed charges that he had been “flip flopping” between his positions : “I’m not just somebody who is talking about government as the solution to everything. I also believe in personal responsibility. I also believe in faith.” the Senator sagely declared.

But who doesn’t believe in faith? Such rhetoric misses the point, ending rather than initiating debate - a strategy consummately deployed by President Bush in selling “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by exploiting our universal and creedal belief in liberty. The question is how we should balance our respect for the identity and autonomy of religious charities with our belief in the separation of church and state. And the question is whether freedom in Iraq can and should be bought with the sacrifice of our freedoms at home and the suspension of some of our constitutional principles. By design, Obama’s and Bush’s words elided these difficult, but pressing questions.

“I also believe in personal responsibility” are also coded words Obama’s speechwriters designed to woo conservative audiences without explicitly repudiating the liberal point of view that governmental programs are the other side of the rhetorical equation that ought to have been addressed. Reverend Jesse Jackson was understandingly aggravated. Yet while Jackson has apologized for his crude verbal gaffe, we have yet to take Obama to task for his rhetorical sleight of hand because this is what we have come to expect from political candidates seeking the highest office of the land.

We are not going to face the complex problems of our time if our would-be leaders continue to take the rhetorical path of least resistance, to buy our assent without any content. To say nothing even when one talks a lot is to fulfill the rhetorical formula for, literally, empty promises. There were times in this election season when Obama rose above the anti-intellectual fray, just like there were times when Ronald Reagan and George Bush used the bully pulpit to educate rather than to merely seduce the American people. This year, when conservatives see in a liberal political candidate the same rhetorical flaws as what liberals saw in Reagan and George Bush, perhaps we will come closer to recognizing a systemic flaw in our political system, and it is the Anti-intellectual Presidency.

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Not much to report today. The wife is down and out with back problems again. Things have slowed down a tiny bit as far as work goes, which has allowed me time to get some of my personal projects started...that, and lay around lazily. Nothing really changes around here.

I'm starting work on something new (that I can't really go into detail about just yet) and I decided to post one of my really early, really rough character sketches above.

Steve~

Thursday, March 6, 2008, 6:30-8:30pm
Location: GRAPHIC ARTISTS GUILD (www.gag.org)
32 Broadway, Ste. 1114 on the 11th Floor
MTA: #1,#2,#3,#4, #5, #9 to Bowling Green



TOPICS WILL INCLUDE: HNA happenings, the structure of HNA children's books, HNA submission procedures, HNA expectations from the submitting artist and/or writer, and the children's book industry in general. Agenda will provide one hour for guest speaker, limited question and answer, and allowance for three portfolio and/or dummy book critiques—selected by lottery—with constructive criticism of about 15 minutes per piece from the guest speaker

Happy Friday all. For the few of you who are actually in the office here is some Friday procrastination!

This link recommended by Mr. Atlas himself, Ben Keene.

Do women talk too much?

What is the greatest American book of all time?

Great lit lists.

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I attended a daylong workshop by Kathy Collins today. The day was great. Kathy is the author of Growing Readers, published by Stenhouse. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this book because it talks about teaching reading in the primary classrooms--she talks about the importance of not only teaching students how to make sense of text but to help them develop habits and behaviors as readers as well. Very clear that there is more to reading than level.


I just picked up another book today. It is called Comprehension Through Conversation: The Power of Purposeful Talk in the Reading Workshop by Maria Nichols. I've only read the first two chapters so far but I spent an hour or so skimming and previewing the rest of the book. It is not a huge book--only about 115 pages. The author does a great job of pulling together research about the importance of talk and really showing classrooms where talk is meaningful. She talks about purposeful talk and shares several classroom examples and insights about them. Nichols raises questions for teachers and makes the case for more talk that builds new meaning. It is in line with lots of work by Allington, Johnston and others who have studied exemplary classrooms. The fact that there is a book on this makes me happy. I think it is a huge piece of education that lots of teachers are not allowed to make time for lately because of the standards, etc.