Re: NonVerbal Conlang?

Hi, Dan, nice to see you!

I knew Charles Sheffield when he was married to Nancy Kress.  Too bad he
died such an untimely death (brain cancer).  Meanwhile, what interesting
stories and cultures, both of them.

I've always thought that aliens in most science fiction spoke languages that
were much too similar to Terran languages.  I'm glad to see writers
experimenting with new semiotic modes.  It challenges our notion of what a
"word" is.  A single sign for a single referent?  Or could it be a complex
and multiple sign that points ambiguously at several referents?  And the
communication of emotion among the Cecropians.... I wonder if that is
considered part of the language proper or metalanguage.

Interestingly, we too react strongly to fellow humans who don't give off the
right "pheremones."  If we suspect that someone's emotions are peculiar, or
that they contradict their language, we punish them.

Or we praise them for their wit.

Sally

----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan Sulani" <dansulani@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, June 25, 2006 11:01 AM
Subject: Re: NonVerbal Conlang?


> On 24 June, Chris Peters wrote:
>
>> David Weber's "Honor Harrington" series features a (minor player) alien
>> race, called the Medusans, that does just that.  In one of the later
>> books, a human character is describing the difficult process of learning
>> to communicating with them.
>>
>> Their language is actually comprised of three components:  sound,
>> gesture,
>> and scent emissions.  The sound portion was rather difficult to deal
>> with,
>> since these aliens could speak and hear in frequencies outside of the
>> normal human range.  Gesture was even more problematic, because that race
>> happened to have three arms ...  then of course smell couldn't really be
>> dealt with at all for any human speakers, but the aliens used it for
>> emphasis only.
>
>    Reminds me of the "insectoid" race described by Charles Sheffield
> in "Summertide":
>
>    " They did it [communicated] chemically, "speaking" to each other via
> the transmission of pheromones, chemical messengers whose varying
> composition permitted them a full and rich language. A Cecropian not only
> knew what her fellows were saying; the pheromones also allowed her
> to _feel_ it, to know their emotions directly ... And to a Cecropian, any
> being that did not give off the right pheromones did not exist
> as a communicating being.
> They could "see" them all right, but they could not feel them.
> Those nonentities included all humans."
>
>
> Dan Sulani
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> likehsna    rtem  zuv  tikuhnuh  auag  inuvuz  vaka'a.
>
> A word is an awesome thing.
>

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