Posts tagged language
Let's say that in an alternate universe, humans developed on a relatively small supercontinent, so their languages and cultures were somewhat similar. After a while, all of the nations merged into ...
A group of English-speaking settlers travel to the Earth-like exoplanet of Rataan, which is 5 light years away. They board the generation ship Genesis that will reach Rataan in 200 years (0.25% of ...
For the purposes of this post, "word" is defined as a unit of language such that Has some meaning on its own, often relating to the real world. Complex utterances can be formed simply by transmit...
Imagine a race of humanoid alien living somewhere in the universe evolves weird sensory organ which can only picks up frequency of light ranging from 800MHz up to 2.5GHz which is in the microwave s...
One thing that nearly every multi cellular organism and complex thinking species is communicate, either it be pheromones, chemicals, chirps and sounds, symbols and shapes, to even complex sentences...
I have a very simple question regarding a small problem I cannot find a single satisfying answer to. I am trying to create a country with a prominent Slavic culture. In my story, an alien world has...
When designing a world it is convenient to decide how places will be named: Elements like the continents and the oceans. However, it is likely that the different cultures of the world will not ag...
Let's say you are creating secret instructions for a new, very dangerous weapon. You have decided to encrypt the instructions. But you do not want anyone to guess that these notes are encrypted! S...
1350 AD. A secret society is recruiting adepts in Rome, Florence, Paris, Wien, Prague and London; well-educated people in high ranks of nobility, catholic church, engineers, professors and knights....
So let's consider a species of blind, sea dwelling, squid-like aliens. They are sentient, intelligent and highly social. As their societies develop and their available knowledge increases they req...
In my world, officials dealing with sensitive information have their tongues amputated. Naturally writing and a special, government-only sign-language are the main forms of communication, but crea...
Every single depiction out there seems to think that animal teeth and/or mouth are no problem for a perfect speech-therapist approved pronunciation. For instance the Cat People. They never have an...
TL;DR - I want my angelic race to have the ability to speak in a way in which up to three sentences are communicated at the same time. (Assume English for the sake of simplicity. I want physiolo...
In my world, humans encounter an alien species. They want to communicate verbally with each other, so I'd like to know what sounds could be shared by both species. The species has no/very thin li...
I've been working on a fantasy race recently of sentient bipedal salamanders (sorta) and was talking with a friend about them until one of us realised that since they're amphibians they would breat...
My Calisota, which is located in the north of what we know as California and largely resembles the universe seen in German-language Disney comics (Lustiges Taschenbuch), except for the absence of a...
The Background I have a species of intelligent humanoids roughly modelled after bears. They're hulking great grizzly-sized solitary mesocarnivores. Genus Homo and descended from H. sapiens, but si...
Robots (intelligent machines using some form of artificial intelligence), are central to the plot in a snippet I'm working on. These robots do not have to interact with humans on a regular basis: m...
I'm worldbuilding for a story in which a certain portion of the population relocates to a slightly habitable planet due to the complete inhabitability of Earth. It takes place several generations a...
Human civilization really took off when individuals started to interact with each other, in language and trade and settlements. The transition from stone age to our space faring civilization of tod...
There is a community of androids living in the ruins of Fresno after the apocalypse. They trade with the local humans for fusion batteries which they need for power. It is essential that they are a...
So I'm creating an original world with a number of creatures, and original peoples. One of the peoples has a two-speak language. One element, the base of the language, is based off of local mytholo...
Language revolving around the Sun would probably not be used on a planet with a different star, right? For example, if a planet was orbiting Sirius, "siriuslight" or "siriusburn" seems a tad clunky...
I've read several of the questions about language shifting and diffusion here, and it has unfortunately left me more unsure of things than I was before. Situation: Colonists on an arid planet s...
Pssst! Come here! Imagine an ecosystem where animals have evolved highly developed mimicry of each other's calls (perhaps they have the universal vocal apparatus discussed in earlier question...
We know from the International Pronunciation Alphabet (IPA) and the research that gave us the IPA, what sounds typically used in human speech (certainly not all sounds that can be made). This is al...
I am currently in the early stages of mapping out a conlang for a race of boar-people. I was stumped trying to think of what limitations, if any, having pronounced lower tusks would have on the de...
My space colonists (160 people) are mostly scientists with at least two advanced degrees and some research experience. They all speak English because it is a language of science today. However, the...
What kinds of abstract colors, shapes, and other compositional elements could be used to indicate various emotions? My story features an artificial intelligence that's embodied in an industrial pr...
Human (spoken) languages have a great variety in terms of grammar and what the basic elements are, but they have essential features in common in terms of being a time sequence of phonetic primitive...
In the answers to this question I learned that some cephalopods communicate via color: Some cephalopods are capable of rapid changes in skin color and pattern through nervous control of chromat...
Suppose they have non-flexible beaks, but they still posses vocal cords and a tongue capable of producing the same sounds as humans. Variation of these bird-people are as follows: What types of ...
The Question: So, in my fantasy world, I have a race of human-like creatures that can talk to any land animal. The basic question is what kind of and how many voice boxes would this race need to be...
A bit of background on what I'm developing: I'm trying to develop a language for an alien race with completely different biology to humans. It's still in the very early stages, so the exact form is...
A quote from Story of Your Life (the short novel that Arrival movie is based on) Colonel Weber frowned. "You seem to be implying that no alien could have learned human languages by monitoring o...
On the Life Ball of my fantasy stories, a particular species of delphinidae- I call them black dolphins- have evolved and advanced at least as much as humans and other intelligent races. A prior q...
In my setting the known worlds have recently begun coming out of a medieval stasis after about two thousand years; the lucky worlds at least. Prior to the event that destroyed their technology and ...
A common problem I have with modern science fiction and fantasy (Halo, Mass Effect, Narnia etc) is that the aliens and animals are somehow able to speak in perfect human speech. How does an alien o...
Suppose human beings have evolved markings covering the face and hairs. The cells contain a colony of bacterium capable of producing multiple arrays of visible light. Each bacteria reacts differen...
I'm writing a story about an alien race that is blind and deaf: They communicate based on touch and scent, and have a tech level generally similar to us. I'm assuming that they can measure frequen...
So say we discovered aliens through a wormhole near Saturn (Interstellar anyone?). Congratz to us! But we have a bigger issue in trying to communicate with them. They developed in a completely dif...
So, I just had an idea inspired by This question here while simultaneously listening to a video about language... Could we make a sort of International Phonetic Alphabet for Emotions and States of...
I've seen the terms posthuman and transhuman used in fairly generic ways. But given a setting with several types of beings, what consistent naming convention could be used? I suppose the vulgar ter...
Assuming human-style vocal cords, what phonemes would a snouted animal be able to produce? I'm looking at developing a conlang (or several) for a setting, and it has several humanoid species with p...
On Earth today, even though most people speak some English, there is seemingly no reason to believe that future generation's main language will be the same in decades/centuries to come (i.e., we'll...
The following post is copy-pasted from a similar question on Reddit: Apparently, I already started work on the story and it turns out, that I have Ganymede speaking a fictional Russian dialect ca...
Inspired by this question: Talking animals in a parallel universe I wonder, would it be possible, if there were more species which created their own abstract means of communication, would they b...
Our war with the plants has been unending for thousands of years. And we don't even know it exists. Plants strategize, doing their best to survive, but the humans are relentless. Constant removal ...
Imagine for a few moments that despite the difficulty a race has evolved in space, away from any atmosphere (perhaps a species of space jellyfish). This race exists in a fairly 'noisy' nebula, but...
