Starfish Language: Difference between revisions

[[First Contact Math]] is one method of ascertaining the intelligence of Starfish Language speakers.

 

 

{{examples}}

* The Nna Mmoy of Ursula K. Le Guin's ''[[Changing Planes]]'' have a totally nonlinear language. One character actually uses the metaphor of a starfish to describe it (for comparison, English is a snake). Also, it shorts out a [[Translator Microbes|"translatomat"]]. The same character hypothesizes that their language evolved this way {{spoiler|to counter the severe homogenization of their plane by [[Precursors]] - the Nna Mmoy's home plane is ''incredibly'' boring, with only a small number of species, all of which are useful and harmless to humanoids.}}

* Unicorns in the ''[[Apprentice Adept]]'' series understand human speech just fine, and can speak it when in human form (those that bother to learn, anyway). In their natural state, they use "hornspeak", communicating through musical notes blown through their horns. (In Phaze, unicorn horns are hollow and produce sounds similar to musical instruments.)

* The language of the Knnn race in ''[[Chanur Novels|The Chanur Saga]]'', which consists of whale song-like vocalizations. Their language is so alien as to be completely incomprehensible to oxygen breathers, and even the methane-breathing T'ca and Chi have trouble with it. The T'ca and Chi are ''themselves'' only half comprehensible in turn- the T'ca, most comprehensible and friendly of them and unofficial go-betweens for Oxy and Methane, speak in "matrix sentences" of words arranged two-dimensionally with no particular reading order or discernible grammar.

* The Chur, from Katherine Kerr's ''Snare'', typically speak at a frequency so low humans cannot hear it, and also have their own well-defined body language.

* The Graycaps in Jeff VanderMeer's ''[[Ambergris]]''-books speak mostly in rapid clicks and whistles that sounds vaguely insectoid to human listeners, who have mostly concluded that their language must be too degenerate to properly deserve the title - as it turns out, it's in fact far more complex than any human language and utterly impossible to translate accurately. They understand human speech perfectly, but only begin to use themselves it in the third book, ''Finch''. They are also implied to communicate by breathing spores of their symbiotic fungi on each other.

* The aliens in the [[Isaac Asimov]] short story ''Playboy and the Slime God'' (a.k.a. ''[[What Is This Thing You Call Love?|What is This Thing Called Love?]]'') communicate by changing their color.

* In ''[[Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell]]'', two dead soldiers who are reanimated can communicate only in hideous screams, which are identified by their animator as ''the language of Hell''.

* Inverted in ''[[Terry Pratchett|The Bromeliad Trilogy]]'', in which the tiny nomes can't understand humans because our speech is too slow and deep for these fast-living creatures' miniscule inner ears to make out. They refer to the sounds made by humans as "mooing".

** ''[[Star Trek: Enterprise]]'' had an episode where Hoshi Sato and friends tried to translate a tough alien language. She never succeeded. The Enterprise was about to just give up when it turned out that the spacefaring aliens had been spending that time learning English.

** A number of ''[[Star Trek]]'' episodes have overlapped this trope, with languages so alien that the translators took some time to figure out, usually just as long as [[Rule of Drama|drama required]].

* The Vorlon language in ''[[Babylon 5]]'' sounds like nothing spoken by humans; it consists of a series of musical chords. It's translated into English via machines built into the Vorlons' encounter suits, but even then, the translation is often so opaque as to be incomprehensible to humans.

** Actually the incomprehensibility of Vorlon speech had more to do with Kosh being deliberately obscure and metaphorical, the better to obfuscate everyone. It was also useful as intimidation. When the new Vorlon arrives, he is very clear when he speaks. He has nothing nice to say.

** Saurials are described as having a language that is outside the range of human hearing, so either subsonic or ultrasonic, and also having a component based on chemical scent emissions.

** Illithids are telepathic, so they have no spoken language, but when they need to write something down (say, to leave a message for another illithid), they have a written language called Qualith. This arrangement of lines and slashes (similar to braille) is read by an illithid's tentacles. Qualith is written in four-line stanzas, each stanza influenced by the other three in some way, and is so alien in construction that non-illithids need magic to interpret it.

* ''[[Mage: The Awakening]]'' has the High Speech, which may or may not be the same as Atlantean. It is, as far as most mages can determine, a language which accurately describes the fabric of reality itself and is used to empower spells by more precisely defining their parameters. [[Muggles|Sleepers]] [[Weirdness Censor|cannot perceive it at all]] in either its written or spoken forms, and other supernatural creatures can perceive it for what it is but not understand it. Even most Mages only know enough to empower their spells - only a select few obsessives even know enough of it to hold a basic conversation. Mages theorise the language may be "broken", missing some essential component.

* The alien race called Kyz from ''[[GURPS Supers|GURPS International Super Teams]]'', use a language that is a mix of of sounds and empathic projections.

* In the second episode of ''[[Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People]]'', the insane non sequiturs of Homsar ("Pucker up, Dice Man! I'm as upholstered as I wanna be!") are implied to be a form of this.

* The [[Starfish Aliens|Septen]][[Eldritch Abominations|triones]] in ''[[Devil Survivor 2]]'' speak in a very cryptic language portrayed in the textboxes as a bunch of symbols.

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Otherness Tropes]]

[[Category:Language Tropes]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]

[[Category:Fantastic Sapient Species Tropes]]