Strange Syntax Speaker: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

 

Critical concept: attending audience ''can'' clearly surmise sense after attaining strange syntax's prime principles. Axiom acclimation therefore turns into intriguing core component of overture.

 

 

When wacky rules run obscenely obtuse, strange speaker can commonly appear as [[Cloudcuckoolander|cloud cuckoo lander]], laughed at and/or otherwise made misunderstood. Regular recurring scenario sets protagonists pursuing education, enlightenment of obscure syntax system for finding important information.

Zestful? [[Intentional Engrish for Funny|Zero Wingrish]] would compare concepts.

 

== Comic Books ==

* In ''[[League of Extraordinary Gentlemen]] Black Dossier'', the character Galley Wag is from a dark-matter dimension and speaks in a bizarre slang like "Bread and Tits!" and "Huff yer oyver in all you'm tick senned such a plumious sparktackle?" While the statements make sense in context, the human Mina can understand Galley Wag and provide translation.

* Amatsu-Mikaboshi in ''[[Incredible Hercules]]'' speaks purely in haiku. It's oddly unnerving once you notice it and very poetically intimidating.

** The Scissormen's speech is made even better by the fact that they speak in gibberish and anagrams simultaneously.

** It doesn't help that half the time {{spoiler|she's talking to her invisible friend Cipher}}

* The 2011 ''[[Teen Titans (Comic Book)|Teen Titans]]'' revamp featured Thrice, a team of three metahuman brothers with powers that involve merging into one body and splitting apart. The combined form always uses first person ''and'' first person plural pronouns, possessives, etc., referring to "I/We", "me/us", and so on.

== Fan Works ==

* [[Nobody Dies]]: Arael's speech can be... interesting to try to decipher:

"I have done (created [brought the {saved us all} next age] wonders) the impossible." }}

 

* In ''[[Star Wars]]'', [[Badass Grandpa|Yoda]] usually speaks with a [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002173.html Object-Subject-Verb word order]. His strange syntax is a defining characteristic, and often parodied.

** He was much less rigid with this in the original trilogy, and could sometimes even turn an eloquent phrase here and there ("Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny!"). In the prequels it's [[Flanderization|Flanderized]] and he almost never speaks in any other order, regardless if horribly butchered the resulting language becomes ("Not if anything to say about it I have!").

* Played for comic effect in ''[[Airplane!]]!'' with [[Jive Turkey|Jive]].

* ''[[V for Vendetta]]'': V's vernacular vigilantly vexes viewers via very variant vocabulary.

'''V:''' I am sure they will say so. }}

** Also from the movie, [[The Scrappy|Wheelie]] speaks entirely in rhyme.

'''Wheelie:''' "Picture you got, now fool you not!" }}

 

 

== Literature ==

* Jeanne from Charles Baxter's ''Shadow Play'' invents her own language, with words like "corilineal", "zarklike", "descorbitant", "housarara". And it's just a small part of her [[Cloudcuckoolander]] madness.

* Arguably, ''[[Finnegans Wake]]'', though [[Your Mileage May Vary]].

* ''The Book of Dave'' by Will Self has a [[Con Lang|futuristic language]] called Mokni, a phoneticized form of Cockney mixed with bastardized London cabbie slang.

* The Chur, from Katherine Kerr's ''Snare'', typically speak at a frequency so low humans can't hear it, but can speak human languages if they strain. When doing so they use then-now-next strange grammar, including giving verbs a suffix indicating time ("they say-then", "we go-soon"), and presenting alternatives when asking a question or when uncertain ("We know-not if you lie not lie", "You understand not-understand?").

** Interestingly, the last two examples are very similar to how a native Mandarin speaker would speak English, since that is almost exactly the way it is said in Mandarin ("we not know" rather than "we know-not").

* Mr [[Con Man|Jingle]] in ''[[The Pickwick Papers]]'' - strangely incoherent speech - talks like a telegram - rum fellow - very.

** Carrot's... let's call it "idiosyncratic" approach to punctuation (basically a grammatical equivalent of [[Spray and Pray]]) makes his writing a bit of this.

* Manny in ''[[The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress]]'' speaks (and narrates the entire novel) without using articles or other "nulls" (what he considers meaningless words), as well as Russian and Australian slang.

** Justified in that the PRC now has an empire which includes both Australia and much of the Asian part of the USSR, and has shipped a lot of 'undesirables' off to the moon.

*** Also by the fact that Russian lacks articles.

** The representativeness of the Groaci. To begin all sentences with either abstract nouns or verbs in the infinitive.

* Herald Alberich from [[Mercedes Lackey]]'s [[Heralds of Valdemar]] series routinely speaks Valdemaran with Karsite word order. He was born and raised in Karse and only ended up in Valdemar after being kidnapped/rescued by a [[Intellectual Animal|Companion]], who eventually psychically fed Valdemarian vocabulary into his head... and ''only'' vocabulary, leading Alberich to use Valdemarian words with Karsite grammar.

* In [[Kurt Vonnegut]]'s ''Deadeye Dick'', Haitian Creole is said to only have a present tense, leading to some very odd grammar. Of course, it's implied that the Haitians simply don't bother trying to teach the American proper grammar.

* The cockroaches from ''[[The Underland Chronicles|Gregor The Overlander]]'' tend to mix up verb and subject placement as well as using repetition of certain sentence elements, such as "Do it, I can, do it," or "be small Human, be?"

* The first book from the [[Eisenhorn]] trilogy gave us the alien Saruthi, who did this when they spoke <s>English</s> Gothic. Ironically, that was probably the [[Starfish Aliens|least strange]] thing about [[Eldritch Abomination|them]]

* Jaqen H'ghar of ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' has an odd type of [[Third Person Person]] in which he never uses "I", but instead will use "A Man". So like instead of saying "I'm called Jaqen H'ghar" he would say "A man calls himself Jaqen H'ghar". This may be because he belongs to a cult of shapeshifting assassins whose members give up their personal identities, although it seems more like an individual [[Verbal Tic]] (and he talks normally in other identities).

* The Trofts from ''[[The Cobra Trilogy]]''. [The noun, they place it first].

 

== Live Action TV ==

* ''[[The Twilight Zone]]'' (1985) episode "Wordplay" is based on this trope. A man has an unusual experience: The people around him are suddenly using words incorrectly, ''e.g.'', saying "dinosaur" when they mean "lunch". More and more words get replaced, until other people's speech becomes complete gibberish to him. He ends up having to re-learn the meaning of words out of a children's book.

** The man had a very convenient form of aphasia, which makes this a [[Curse of Babel]] plot.

'''The 456''': Return...soon. }}

* In an episode of ''[[Titus]]'', Christopher knows Erin is hiding something because, when she's lying, words not flow from her mouth good.

'''Christopher Titus''': (pause) Something from me hiding you are? }}

* Michael Harris in ''[[Newhart]]'' speaks in alliteration.

Jack: Following. You. Still. Not. }}

 

== Music ==

* Eric Idle's ''Rutland Weekend Television'' had the host of a short chat show and his guest talking like this.

 

 

== Theatre ==

* ''Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth'' by [[Tom Stoppard]] features a language consisting of the same words as English, but with different meanings (so that, for instance, "useless" means ''afternoon'', and "afternoon" means something dreadfully insulting). Stoppard got the idea from an essay by the philosopher Wittgenstein, who pointed out that in such a circumstance, two people might interact without ever realising that they're speaking two different languages, and illustrated with a hypothetical conversation that gets reprised in the first act of the play.

 

 

== Video Games ==

** ''[[Star Control]]'''s Daktaklakpak provide a similar challenge -- their language is so mathematical and formulaic that initially the tech teams don't even think they're ''sentient.'' Once you obtain a translator their speech remains formulaic and stilted: "Statement: Daktaklakpak are superior to Humans. Interrogation: What are Humans doing in our space?"

* The Orz from ''[[Star Control]] 2'' have [[Starfish Alien|thought processes so alien]] that the best translators cannot fully process their language. Translations end up using a combination of best guesses and mixed metaphors for the unknown words.

** More relevantly, their lines use very idiosyncratic grammar.

* G-man from ''[[Half-Life]]'' places emphasis on unusual syllables and pauses for breath in all the wrong places, though his diction is perfect and his vowels are never mispronounced. All of this is used to suggest that he's some sort of [[Eldritch Abomination]] making a [[Uncanny Valley|less-than-perfect imitation of humanity]].

** The Vortigaunts on the other hand, pronounce words fairly clearly but use strange word orderingand exhibit a few quirks such as placing "the" in front of someone's name. When speaking in their own language, both participants speak simultaneously, so they also step on the ends of each other's sentences in English every now and then.

** They talk like that with non-elcor because they express emotion through pheromones, subsonics, and extremely subtle body language that most other species can't detect.

*** It's implied that the rendering of the emotional prefix statement is due to the [[Translator Microbes]], as when a certain elcor is asked by his asari colleague if he had hacked his translator unit in order to 'speak' exactly how he wants, he replies, in an utter monotone, with: "[[Suspiciously Specific Denial|With a sincerity such that scepticism would be deeply insulting:]] ...no."

** Another example would by the hanar, who cannot speak as humans do at all; their translators/synthesizers render their bioluminescent language into spoken words. Either for this reason or some quirk of culture, all their translated speech is exceedingly polite, avoids reference to personal pronouns like "I" and they will rarely use their names unless introducing themselves, preferring "it" or "this one", i.e. "This one hopes that we will converse again soon." They have two names, in fact; a Face Name (for public use) and a Soul Name (for family and very close friends).

* The Dangling Participle in ''[[King's Quest VI]]''.

* Thorn of ''[[Final Fantasy IX]]'' uses inverted sentences, like Yoda (and usually says the same thing Zorn says, except Zorn doesn't invert them.)

* The Emps from ''[[Ultima VII]]''; passive voice seems to be what is always used by them.

** Also, the gargoyles. At one point in ''U7'', it is mentioned that they speak in "Gargish syntax" to preserve their cultural ties.

* The Chiss bartender Baldarek on Nar Shaddaa in ''[[Dark Forces Saga|Star Wars: Jedi Outcast]]'' has problems speaking Basic and constantly confuses singular and plural nouns.

* The people of Xian (a [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]] version of China) in ''[[Golden Sun]]'' use some strange sentence structures (though not nearly as strange as some fanfic writers portray it), presumably to show that they normally speak a different language from the heroes. This is present even in the Japanese versions, as references to it are made in the ''4koma Gag Battle'' doujinshi.

** Curiously, Xian's successor-nations in ''Dark Dawn'' are filled with people who speak normally.

* ''[[Terror Island]]'' applies alliteration when [http://terrorisland.net/strips/148.html flaunting flashbacks.]

* In ''Neurotically Yours'', the character Piltz-E the squirrel speaks in this manner.

* "[[Starslip]]": after a conversation with Mr. Jinx about how laughably simple human languages are, a fellow Cirbozoid speaks with total disregard for word order.

* [http://www.neorice.com/aptgg_215 Lacey] from ''[[A Path to Greater Good]]''. Later subverted when he no longer has to impress people and speaks normally instead.

 

== Web Original ==

 

 

== Western Animation ==

'''Rodimus Prime:''' "We're gonna get killed." }}

* Ed on [[Ed Edd and Eddy]] was known for this.

'''Ed:''' Do not adjust your set! (''runs after Edd'') }}

 

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Translation Tropes]]

[[Category:Dialogue]]

[[Category:Language Tropes]]

[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]