[166/365] linguistbabble

[cosmolinguist]

It's been so long since the first season of Strange New Worlds that I forget that now Star Trek has Linguistbabble in the same way it has Technobabble.

"It's an obscure dialect, but I can work out the syntax..."

I wish I could be a science-ficitony linguist, where you just hear or see some language and stare into the middle distance for the briefest of moments, maybe mutter to yourself slightly, and then you speak unfaltering full sentences, in perfect idiomatic English, which probably further the plot in a dramatic way.

(And, as a friend of mine pointed out when I complained about this, the sentences often rhyme! In English!)

There's a tumblr screenshot I'll never find again that does a great job of depicting what linguists are actually like. I think they're deciphering some archeological inscription in this case and it's all mumbling and ellipses and "the-man-he-walks-to...wait, this language doesn't distinguish verbs and adjectives does it...this word means 'thousand'...unless it's 'cake'..."

Basically, if you do a month of Duolingo and then try to read a newspaper in that language, it should feel more like that.

Comments

[packbat]

Tumblr tagging system powers: activate!

There were probably other versions but this is the one I could find on my old Tumbls.

[conuly]

(And, as a friend of mine pointed out when I complained about this, the sentences often rhyme! In English!)

And they all have the same puns we do!

[liv]

Did you see Arrival? A large chunk of the plot is about how understanding alien language is actually incredibly hard. They also put thought into the idea that assumptions based on human languages (even as far as you can generalize) would not be applicable for actual aliens.

[momentsmusicaux]

My linguistbabble annoyance is Darmok. Which I love as an episode, but how does language acquisition work with that species? To be able to speak in metaphor, you need to first know what the individual words mean!

[silveradept]

If we have terrible with our own languages, even when we get lucky and someone left us a translation key somewhere, a completely alien language and it's own referents would be fantastically difficult to achieve without serious computing power and a willing and patient alien to tell us when our LLMs were spitting out at least plausible-sounding things.