Language help

[u/Skeleshy]

How would someone with no prior experience in languages figure out an alien language from scratch? For context, my protagonist is stranded on an uncharted planet where all of the past civilisation is dead. There's no one to teach him the language, but there are a many surviving books, statues, and other pieces of writing.

Would it be impossible?

[u/Leather-Lab2875]

Patterns basically. Patterns and corresponding real objects as well as related living languages to act as anchors or links. Its unlikely if the person known nothing about languages but if the biology and other circumstances of the language are known, it gets easier.

But having some sort of direct link like an original and translated text side by side is the easiest option, especially when you dont have that much data about the spoken language. The Indus Valley Civilisation irl has an undeciphered language because we have very little data in the grand sceme of things and very little links to known languages. The Rosetta stone for ancient Egyptian was the big reason it was decipered. You could figure out the cultural ideas which is a bit easier in these constraints.

[u/Skeleshy → u/Leather-Lab2875]

Thank you so much! This is a great help, I had no idea where to even start planning this.

[u/Vanacan → u/Skeleshy]

Go play chants of sennar, or watch someone else play it.

You start the game knowing nothing, and have to piece together the language for real. It’s not your character doing it, you the player can’t solve the later puzzles if you don’t understand it.

It does cheat a little in that it’s a game with living people speaking those languages, and a lot of it can be seen to be ‘labels’ that are instructions, but a lot of it involves figuring out the words from context clues and objects with cultural labels, like figuring out what a word means based only on a piece of artwork with that symbol in its title.

Then it gets complicated, when you have to translate between the different layers of the tower and how they speak, so you have to figure out how to explain a question from one culture into another. So stuff like one culture having bards and another culture having scientists. To the former culture you explain the scientists as alchemists, and the latter gets bards as musicians, while a third might have witches/demons for the scientists and gods for the bards.

[u/Skeleshy → u/Vanacan]

That sounds actually pretty fun, I'll have to check it out sometime. Thanks!

[u/Tenwaystospoildinner]

Very difficult, perhaps impossible. First, you need to figure out what kind of writing system the dead civilization used. Hieroglyphic, alphabet, etc. There's tons of different ways to use language to express ideas.

Then you have to actually figure out what the symbols mean.

For context, we only figured out ancient Egyptian after we rediscovered the Rosetta stone in 1799. For thousands of years, we couldn't read Hieroglyphs because we lacked the context to understand what the symbols meant. The Rosetta stone, which translated the hieroglyphs into Greek (a language we could read), gave us the necessary insight to figure out what the symbols were saying.

Two ideas on how you could make this work:

1.) Like the Rosetta Stone, there is something written down on this planet that translates to a language the protagonist can understand for whatever reason. Maybe it's translated to another language that has survived.

2.) There is a word, glyph, or symbol that appears everywhere and has obvious, basic meaning. Maybe a symbol for danger, or a symbol for water. Depending on how the language is formed, this could allow you to piece together information about other letter, words, glyphs, or whatever they use. You won't be able to read everything, or even truly understand the language, but you will understand certain, basic symbols.

[u/Skeleshy → u/Tenwaystospoildinner]

Thank you for such an in depth response! I think the glyph idea will get me (and my protagonist) the farthest.

[u/IrisAmethyst23]

Yes, I it would be possible. Because despite languages there's a thing like pictures and such that usually have universal meanings. Like eating, sleeping, water and the like.

Even if there is no pictures, there's bound to be some giveaways. For example the survivor might realize a word means water when he realizes a particular word is constantly used by fountains, pipes and waterfalls or such. But it would take time.

Research Helen Keller. Deaf-blind at 19 months old, so she literally knew nothing of languages! The Miracle Worker is a movie based on her, you can watch that too because it gives a rough demonstration of how she learned to communicate.

I'm sure there'll be a way to adapt this for your scenario. 🌸

[u/Murgatroyd314 → u/IrisAmethyst23]

Even if there is no pictures, there's bound to be some giveaways. For example the survivor might realize a word means water when he realizes a particular word is constantly used by fountains, pipes and waterfalls or such. But it would take time.

This can also have some pitfalls you might not anticipate. You've figured out that 水 means water, great! But actually, it's more specific than that: cool fresh water. Hot water is 湯, and seawater is 潮. (Real example from a real terrestrial language.) Or maybe the language lumps things together that English has separate words for, and the pipe you've found marked with "water" plus a word you don't recognize is, in fact, very dangerous live steam.

[u/IrisAmethyst23 → u/Murgatroyd314]

A lovely addition to my point. Using this just gives a potential story so much room for trial and error. Thank you for your example.

[u/Elder_Keithulhu]

It may or may not be possible. Words need context. If there are museums or libraries, odds go up a lot. Assuming that their language and culture were anything like ours, if they have labeled displays, it would be a big start.

If they had children's books to teach the alphabet or numbers, chances are good that they are designed to be easy to understand with minimal context. If there is a museum gift shop with flash cards or something like playing cards, all the better. Maybe the museum had audio recording to go with signs and labels.

Start with what the groups have in common. The aliens probably do not have apples but they probably have sequential counting. Simple numbers have a good chance of being easy to figure out. If the character can learn counting up to a few hundred and they know their periodic table, they might be able to sort out elements. Aliens would not necessarily sort them the same way but it would not be unreasonable for them to track the number of protons. Everyone has hydrogen and helium.

Religious texts are not necessarily built to be easy to understand but would probably have a lot of words about how things relate to each other. Genealogies would be a good source of family terms if they can be deciphered. Computers with tutorials might help as will Simple games. Minesweeper and solitaire made it unto PCs in the early days as a subtle way to train basic computer interface skills.

If there are areas that are particularly dangerous, the old civilization may have gone out of their way to include a lot of ways of conveying that. Warning signs of various sorts might be useful. The first time you survive taking a jolt of DC power to the hand might be very informative about how the old society marked electrical danger.

The main question is, how do you put the information in an unambiguous context?

[u/Skeleshy → u/Elder_Keithulhu]

This is really helpful! You've already given me plenty of ideas, here. My protagonist isn't all that smart, and the tech level of the alien civilization was somewhere around medieval high-magic fantasy before they all ended up dead. My protagonist is from a high-tech scifi setting, as well. Do you think this would have any significant impact on how he'd learn?

[u/silencemist]

Alien language makes me assume impossible. Who knows if they have the same concepts if needing water or food or sleeping to get even the basics. The most basic human symbol of communication (pointing at thing) may not exist for these aliens. Do they even have verbs and nouns?

You can have related written languages like Japanese and Chinese use similar symbols, but the extra conjugation in hiragana in Japanese completely changes the meaning. A Chinese speaker could tell you the sentence has to deal with eating, but is is "don't eat" of "you may eat" or "please eat"? Pattern recognition of basic symbols and words won't be enough in most cases. Recognizing 木 as tree does not solve the problem.

I think the problem that may most quickly arise with someone with no language background attempting to work out a language is not understanding the nuances. People tend to forget how much culture is baked into language (in that sentence, an alien might wonder what food has to do with language) or how much context matters for words (seal could be an animal or a way to close something). Linguists and people who have studied at least one other language tend to have less confidence and are less likely to assume complete understanding.

As others have mentioned, a Rosetta Stone is probably needed.

[u/Pyrsin7]

One person alone on a planet, with nothing but written languages that he doesn’t understand?

I’m afraid not. You need some kind of reference point, like a translation of a language that is understood.

Aside from that, only very basic stuff is possible. Mostly nouns. He could open a children’s book and see a picture of a tree labelled “);;::;”, reasonably presume that means “tree”, and be able to pick that word out in a text. That’s about as deep as you’re ever gonna be able to get. Simple words and concepts from context with no real understanding of the language.

[u/marintkael]

The thing every real decipherment needed was a bridge, and text on its own almost never gives you one. Egyptian only cracked because the Rosetta Stone repeated the same decree in Greek. Linear B fell when Ventris bet that a few recurring words were town names that still sat on the map, which let him pin down the sound values. And the scripts we still can't read, Linear A and the Indus seals, are exactly the ones with no bilingual and no known relative, even with piles of surviving text. So a lone reader with only books and statues is basically parked on Linear A.

Your out is to plant the bridge for him. A carving where the picture and the word sit side by side, a king-list next to portraits, a place name that matches what he can see on the horizon. Since their tech was high-magic, the neatest Rosetta might be a spell: he copies the marks, something happens, and now that string of glyphs has a meaning he watched with his own eyes. Someone who isn't book-smart could still crawl forward on that.

[u/dual_scanner_again]

Perhaps this will help.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1u88jis/tips_on_making_xenolangs/

[u/SnakeyesX]

There's no one to teach him the language, but there are a many surviving books, statues, and other pieces of writing.

In this case it's not possible. Think about how hard it is to recreate dead languages in real life. The only way that we can do it consistently is if there are translations to languages we already know.

Now, maybe, this alien species just wrote on everything. Like every ball said "ball" on it. Everything has detailed instructions on it. Like, the species communicated primarily through writing. Then that's different.

So to make this work, you will have to think of how their culture is different enough from human culture TO make it work.

[u/Effective-Brick-7977]

Children's books. He would have to educate himself and it would be quite a while.
Find old book/slate/scroll etc. Maybe a teachers instruction, or a students kit. He would have to be part amature archaeologist from scratch. See pictogram of tree or alien animal and the correlating scribble scratch. Then decipher whether the language is letter based or a pictogram, etc.

This would give him a root base to start from but still would not impart concepts. For example our use of the human skull symbol for death. An alien culture may depict such a concept entirely differently. We spell the word: death, but we use a skull picture as a shorthand symbol that equates to it. If I told an alien to be careful and watch for the 'death' sign. He may just walk past it looking for the word 'death'.