How strange is it not to have non-English phonemes?

[Glenn]

Going back to the start of the thread for a moment:

Today's sf readers are far more sophisticated than a hundred years ago... I recently read one of Aliette de Bodard's books, which unapologetically uses Vietnamese names for every character, with all the correct diacritics. Let people wonder how it's pronounced, it won't hurt them.

I agree that this is something that seems to be changing in modern SFF writing; in addition to Aliette de Bodard’s works (which I have read a few of), I have seen a few other writers making use of more unusual and less Englishy phonologies and names, including the use of diacritics, which in the past were vanishingly rare in most English-language works.

[Linguoboy]

In trying to verify this online, I found that another “corrected” version some people have used is “Abd Al-Hazred,” which was translated as “slave of the ban/slave of the banned”.

"Ban" can be translated as ḥaẓara, but "banned one" is maḥẓūr. There are other derivations from the same root, but they suffer from similar issues.

Wikipedia suggests ḥaḍrāt "presences", which can be plausibly corrupted to "Hazred". (/ḍ/ is most often realised as [zˤ] in contemporary varieties and some Levantine dialects front /ā/ to [[ɛː] ~ [eː].) I think the Classical genitive singular ḥaḍrati is equally plausible here.

The same essay provided “explanations” for the names of several of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, etc.); since the Necronomicon was supposedly written in Arabic and later translated into Greek, then Latin, and then English, most of these are interpreted as the garbled results of actual words in Arabic, or sometimes, e.g., Latin or Ancient Egyptian.

It's an entertaining exercise. For a friend's campaign that located the Plateau of Leng in the Tibetan Plateau, I sat down with a dictionary of Classical Tibetan and set about finding "translations" for various Lovecraftian names. (Hopefully I still have my notes somewhere because I can't remember a single one now except for the fact that "byakhee" contained the element bya "bird" [Modern Lhasa Tibetan: [t͡ɕʰa˩˨].)

[bradrn]

Going back to the start of the thread for a moment:

Today's sf readers are far more sophisticated than a hundred years ago... I recently read one of Aliette de Bodard's books, which unapologetically uses Vietnamese names for every character, with all the correct diacritics. Let people wonder how it's pronounced, it won't hurt them.

I agree that this is something that seems to be changing in modern SFF writing; in addition to Aliette de Bodard’s works (which I have read a few of), I have seen a few other writers making use of more unusual and less Englishy phonologies and names, including the use of diacritics, which in the past were vanishingly rare in most English-language works.

Not to be ignored are developments in typesetting. Vernor Vinge had a story of wanting to use ⟨p̃ ṽ⟩ (I think they were) in some names, and being rejected because the magazine at the time had no way of typesetting those letters. So they ended up being changed to ⟨% #⟩ or something like that, which looked awful. I believe he was only once able to use the letters he wanted, and that required typesetting the entire story himself.

[malloc]

Not to be ignored are developments in typesetting. Vernor Vinge had a story of wanting to use ⟨p̃ ṽ⟩ (I think they were) in some names, and being rejected because the magazine at the time had no way of typesetting those letters. So they ended up being changed to ⟨% #⟩ or something like that, which looked awful. I believe he was only once able to use the letters he wanted, and that required typesetting the entire story himself.

How were those letters pronounced or did he never specify?

[bradrn]

Not to be ignored are developments in typesetting. Vernor Vinge had a story of wanting to use ⟨p̃ ṽ⟩ (I think they were) in some names, and being rejected because the magazine at the time had no way of typesetting those letters. So they ended up being changed to ⟨% #⟩ or something like that, which looked awful. I believe he was only once able to use the letters he wanted, and that required typesetting the entire story himself.

How were those letters pronounced or did he never specify?

I don’t have the book to check, but as I recall they were non-human phonemes — a nasal stop and fricative, IIRC. (Apparently he’d just taken a linguistics class.)

[foxcatdog]

Ironic since nasal fricatives are possible and nasal stops are just nasals.

[bradrn]

Ironic since nasal fricatives are possible and nasal stops are just nasals.

I managed to find the story again. His precise words were:

An aside: I’ve always had a weakness for unpronounceable names and oddball orthographies. The names in this story were a problem from the beginning. I had just taken a descriptive linguistics course, and I was enthusiastic: my aliens can close their noses—true nasal stops and fricatives were possible for them! In the version John W. Campbell bought around 1967, I represented a voiceless nasal stop by the letter “p” with tilde and a voiced nasal fricative by the letter “v” with tilde. John told me he didn’t think it would get past the typesetters. He was right. And even now, such oddball symbols can be hard to print. One editor, Jim Baen, kindly offered to accept photoready copy from me—so that I could set the type exactly as it should be. In this printing, I have chosen to represent the voiceless nasal stop as “%” and the voiced nasal fricative as “#”.

(This is taken from the introduction to this story, in his Collected Stories. The story itself is Conquest by Default.)

[zompist]

An aside: I’ve always had a weakness for unpronounceable names and oddball orthographies. The names in this story were a problem from the beginning. I had just taken a descriptive linguistics course, and I was enthusiastic: my aliens can close their noses—true nasal stops and fricatives were possible for them! In the version John W. Campbell bought around 1967, I represented a voiceless nasal stop by the letter “p” with tilde and a voiced nasal fricative by the letter “v” with tilde.

I think he's a little confused, but not very. As foxcatdog says, you can have a nasal fricative... though if you have it in English you'll be sent to a speech therapist.

What I expect he means is that his aliens have an articulator in the nose-- e.g. they can narrow or close the nostrils. For humans nasality just adds resonance-- it's not like a lot of air goes through the nose. So maybe they can close off oral airflow and direct all air through the nose (then impede or stop that).

Also-- experimenting a bit-- we can close our noses... it's what I'd call a snort.

[bradrn]

What I expect he means is that his aliens have an articulator in the nose-- e.g. they can narrow or close the nostrils. For humans nasality just adds resonance-- it's not like a lot of air goes through the nose. So maybe they can close off oral airflow and direct all air through the nose (then impede or stop that).

Yes, this is how I interpreted it too.

[Gareth3]

I've noticed more recent SF stories tend to make alien languages untranscribable noises that humans can't even parse into phonemes without computer assistance, much less write down in a human alphabet. So all the proper nouns are just borrowings or translations from English.

[WeepingElf]

I've noticed more recent SF stories tend to make alien languages untranscribable noises that humans can't even parse into phonemes without computer assistance, much less write down in a human alphabet. So all the proper nouns are just borrowings or translations from English.

This is a valid stance, I think. Alien languages will probably be very much unlike human languages. The aliens will probably not have human-like vocal tracts, and thus use completely different kinds of sounds, if they use sounds at all. Their grammars may lie outside the human typological range as well, though there will be some resemblances as some things are logically necessary to achieve the expressive power of a full-fledged language that fits the communicative needs of sapient beings.