Re: Heyas all!

Trace Erin Kern <tracefox@...> wrote:
[snip]
> My mistake. I misquoted his advice. He was giving that advice not in the
> construction of their language, but rather their names. That a
> militaristic society would likely have shorter, rank driven names. While
> a more relaxed species might have softer, perhaps longer names.
I think that is a good approximation, but not totally convincing.
Indeed, orders and commands are likely to be short, so that they
can be shouted and understood quickly :) But you could also have
people talk fast. Look at Japanese... Japanese words (especially
verbs) tend to be long, names are often three or four syllables long,
but the Japanese presumably manage to communicate at the same speed
as English speakers do (using a lot of monosyllabic words). Japanese,
with long long words spoken at a terrible speed, could be a good
model for a "militaristic" language -- yet slow Japanese is rather
"sweet" judging from what I've been able to hear.

>
> But again, biology plays a big part in what a species can and cannot
> pronounce. I've often gotten sick at reading otherwise very fine
> sci-fi/fantasy, but the aliens ability to speak perfect Terran allways
> nixed me. Yes they may be using translator technology, but with some
> species, they won't be *capable* of reproducing the same sounds a human
> could.
Yeah, I agree on that. In fact, I don't like humanoid aliens (who
of course can perfectly speak human languages) unless there's a reason
why they are humanoid. Evolution can't produce them by chance. For
my stories I usually resort to the Hainish-type ancient species whose
members sowed different planets with proto-hominid colonies...


--Pablo Flores

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