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kingofthewilderwest · 7 years ago

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I felt like talking about how science fiction alien names tend to contain underlying English sound patterns. So I did! Below, a transcript of what I basically said in the video:

One of the fun things about science fiction, fantasy, and other forms of fiction is the ability to create new worlds – and with it, new cultures. This often means creating new languages or at least new names for people, places, and special items. Something I’ve noticed from observing created names or alien languages… is that, even though they’re meant to sound “different” than English, they nevertheless retain a lot of innate principles and rules from the English language. Linguistic elements of the English language almost always seem to slip into these “different” alien words.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining. I’m not even criticizing. I’m just observing, amused, as a linguist, what I see and hear. I don’t expect people to be accurate in how languages actually work when creating new, foreign names. In fact, it’s true that names are often modified by speakers of different languages to conform to their own language’s characteristics. English speakers say “France,” Tajik speakers say “Faronsa,” Khmer speakers say “Barang,” Amheric speakers say, “Ferenisayi,” and Nepali speakers say “Phrānsa.” Based upon the characteristics of each person’s language, how the word “France” is spoken by the French speakers gets modified into the new tongue. Languages that don’t have an “F” sound aren’t going to have an “f” at the start of their word for France. That’s how it works. So it’s not too terrible if a science fiction name has English characteristics; you could blame it on the “translation” from the alien language to how English speakers would pronounce it themselves.

However, if you happen to be curious about the discrepancies between how people create languages and names for their stories… versus what is linguistically accurate… I’m happy to share some of the common inaccuracies I’ve observed. You’re free - if you wish - to try to apply some of my commentary to your own worldbuilding to make your names feel more linguistically “realistic.” But I’m mostly just writing this for the fun of showing how a person’s innate, subconscious understanding of their native language (in this case, English) can influence how writers try to make alien names… and turn up just reproducing lots of the familiar rules from their native tongue. The internal grammar structure of English just keeps slipping in!

To make the content of this post more manageable, I’m only going to talk about inaccurate sound properties of science fiction names (that is, their phonetics and phonology). I don’t have time to talk about sentence structure or other linguistic elements. We’ll focus just on sound patterns here!

1. Stress systems identical to English

In English and many other languages, some syllables are stressed - or pronounced louder/longer/etc. - in words and sentences. For instance, the first syllable in “butter” is stressed and the second syllable in “computer” is stressed. Languages often have rules about what syllable gets stressed within a word and/or within a sentence, and it can admittedly get complex. Language stress systems vary pretty widely between languages.

But almost all science fiction and fantasy names I’ve come across use the exact same syllable structure as English. Somehow, though all the aliens you’ve met come from another solar system, their names reproduce the exact syllable structure as we hear in English. Whether it’s Kallo Jath or Kif Kroker or Mordin Solus or Garrus Vakarian or Ahsoka Tano or Gasgano or Jyn Erso or Yoda, I know immediately how to stress these “alien” words perfectly… because it’s how I’d naturally do it in my native language. English syllable rules reign supreme in all these names.

If you’re wondering why a name might sound “familiar” even if you made it up to sound alien, you could perhaps play with where you place primary stress. It doesn’t have to be complicated - some languages simply stress the final syllable of each word, for instance!

Let’s say I named a character “Matatari.” You probably automatically read the name to have the stress on the penultimate syllable. But you could test to see how it sounds with each of the different syllables stressed. The second-to-last syllable for English speakers might sound the most natural and “familiar” - but what happens if I made her name “MAtatari” or “matataRI”? Mátatari and Matatarí escape the rules of typical English stress.

2. Sound inventory identical to English.

All languages contain a finite set of sounds that combine into words. These sound units are called phonemes. A phoneme is like the b, e, and t sounds that combine to make the word “bet.”

Now, languages don’t all share the same phonemes, and they most certainly don’t have the same composite phonemic system. That is, languages might share some of the same sounds, but languages don’t have the entire same sound inventory. Think of a Venn diagram for two languages - some sounds will be in common in the center of the diagram, while other sounds will only appear in one of the languages.

When I hear people pronounce the names of their own alien languages, I hear… the phoneme system that English has. People just pick and use the sounds that are in the language they speak, whereas in truth, it’s most likely going to be the case that a foreign language lacks some of the sounds we have, and has some sounds we lack.

3. Use of cross-linguistically uncommon sounds.

Continuing off of #2… it turns out that some phonemes are more statistically likely to occur across all the world’s languages. How common a phoneme is cross-linguistically depends upon many factors, like how audibly discernible the phoneme is from other phonemes, how loud/quiet it is, and how easy it is to physiologically produce with our human anatomy (we tend to like to make sounds that are easy to make with our mouths, unsurprisingly). I’m not going to labor into the details of how something is common or how it isn’t, but I’m happy to list off some common and uncommon sounds cross-linguistically.

For one thing I notice in fantasy and science fiction names is the repeated use of sounds that are in English, but are actually very rare across the world’s languages. The sounds /f/ as in “fight” and /θ/ as in “thing” are very rare because they’re so quiet. They might be sounds in English, but most languages don’t have “f” and “th”! You’re also very unlikely to hear /ɛ/ as in “bet,” /ɪ/ as in “fish”, /l/ as in “lime,” and /ɹ/ as in “right.” (If you want an r sound, a rolled r is far more common - not that weird thing we have in English). I wouldn’t recommend /dʒ/ as in “jump” either.

So it’s actually slightly odd to see a bunch of characters named things like Worf or Kif or Sarek or Groot or Allura or Quark or Kit Fisto.

If you’re curious about sounds that are common, those are things like /k/ for “king,” /t/ for “tall,” /n/ for “no,” and actually a bunch of vowels that aren’t in English. If you know Spanish, think of the five main vowels a (as in “gato”), e (as in “tres”), i (as in “si”), o (as in “solo”), and u (as in “tu”). These vowels are the most common vowels cross-linguistically, and it’s actually pretty common for these to be THE five vowels in a language (with maybe a few diphthongs or something thrown in there). There’s also the schwa sound that you hear at the end of words like “para” - that baby gets heard a lot, too, for a variety of reasons.

4. Identical phonotactics.

Whether or not an individual sound is in a language is important. What also makes languages distinct is what sounds are “allowed” to be put next to each other. The rules for what sounds can go where in a word… is called phonotactics. What sounds are okay to put next to each other in one language might be entirely different in another language.

For instance, in English, there is no problem whatsoever with words like “string,” “sixths,” and “sounds” - words which have three or more consonants next to one another at the start or end of a syllable. However, having three consonants grouped together like s, t, and r in “string” might not be okay in another language. There are some languages, in fact, which don’t allow two consonants to be next to one another - you always have to have a vowel between consonants. This is why the word “Christmas” in English turns into “Kurisumasu” (クリスマス) in Japanese. The Japanese loan word takes the word “Christmas” and inserts vowels in between consonant clusters. And similarly, in English, we might have problems pronouncing some of the consonant clusters in Khmer words like “khnom” and “chngang.”

But we’d be very hard-pressed to find character names that flout the rules of English phonotactics.

Another thing to consider with phonotactics is where in the syllable a sound is “allowed” to occur. Sometimes there are different rules for what can go where depending upon whether it’s at the start of a syllable before the vowel (onset) or the end of a syllable after a vowel (coda). In English, we have the sound “ng”, like in “song” or “thing.” However, we cannot put “ng” at the start of a syllable in English. We can say “song” but not “ngos.” But, other languages like Vietnamese or Khmer have no problem putting the “ng” at the start of a syllable. Consider the common Vietnamese surname “Nguyen.” There’s that “ng” right at the start! Different languages have different rules.

And there’s all sort of variety: some languages only allow consonants at the start of a syllable but not the end of a syllable, some languages only allow certain consonants at the end of a syllable or a word, and some languages have specific restrictions about what consonant clusters are allowed. In general, it’s rare for long consonant clusters to be allowed (the word “sixths” in English is really unusual for what it allows).

I could probably keep going, but I imagine this gets the point across well enough. Again, this is not meant to be a criticism or evidence of shortcoming for writers. I don’t expect anyone to be experts in linguistics, and there is something to be said about readers getting frightened of printed words that look unpronounceable to them. Viewers also probably want to have an easy time pronouncing the names of characters they hear on screen. People are probably going to be happier to meet an alien named “Zarkon,” “Groot,” or “Morbo” than “Ng!lieng” or “O’kktroxnuo Khlebrrotk.”

However, I am writing this from an amused linguistic ramble about how our own native language’s rules seep into the subconscious. Even when people try to create “alien” names and words, we often find something far closer to home.

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