Month: December 2016

Building aliens: sentience and sapience

Creating aliens is fun and all, but why do we do it? Mostly, it’s because those aliens are going to have some role in our stories. And what kind of organism plays the biggest role? For most, that would be the intelligent kind.

Sentient aliens are the ultimate goal, thanks to a lifetime of science fiction. Yes, the discovery tomorrow of indisputably alien bacteria on Mars would change the entire world, but we’re all waiting for the Vulcans, the Mandalorians, the asari, or whatever our favorite almost-human race might be.

Mind over matter

It’s hard to say how plausible sentience is. We’ve only got one example of a fully intelligent species: us. Quite a few animals, however, show sophisticated behavior, including dolphins, chimps, octopuses, and so on. Some are so intelligent (relative to the “average” member of the animal kingdom) that authors will draw a line between sentience (in the sense of feeling and experiencing sensation) and sapience (the higher intelligence that humans alone possess). For aliens, where even defining intelligence might be nearly impossible at the start, we’ll keep the two concepts merged.

A sentient alien species remains a member of its home biosphere. We’ll always be evolved from our primate ancestors, no matter what the future holds. It’ll be the same for them. Their species will have its own evolutionary history, with all that entails. (Hint: I’ve spent quite a few posts rambling on about exactly that.) The outcome, however, seems the same: an intelligent, tool-using, society-forming, environment-altering race.

We don’t know much about how higher sentience comes about. We don’t even know what it means to have consciousness! Let’s ignore that minor quibble, though, and toss out some ideas. Clearly, intelligence requires a brain. Even plants have defensive mechanisms activated when they feel pain, but it takes true brainpower to understand what happens when inflicting pain upon another. Sentience, in this case, can be equated with the powers of reasoning, or an ability to follow logical deduction. (Although that opens the door to claiming that half of humanity is not sentient. Reading some Internet comments, I’m not sure I would disagree.)

Other factors go into making an intelligent alien race, too. Fortunately, most of them default to being slightly altered expressions of human nature. Sentient aliens usually speak, for example, except in some of the more “out there” fiction. Even in works like Solaris, however, they still communicate, though maybe not always through direct speech. Now, we know language can evolve—I’m writing in one of them, aren’t I?—but it was long thought that humans were the unique bearers of the trait. Sure, we had things like birdsong and mimicry, but we’re the only ones who actually talk, right? Attempts at teaching language to “lesser” animals have varied in their efficacy, but recent research points to dolphins having at least a rudimentary capacity for speech. That’s good news for aliens, as it’s a step towards disproving the notion that language is distinctly human.

What else do humans do? They form societies. Other animals do, too, from schools of fish to beehives and anthills, but we’ve taken it to new extremes. Sentient aliens probably would do the same. They may not follow our exact trajectory, from primitive scavengers to hunter-gatherers to agrarian city-states to empires and republics, but they would create their own societies, their own cultures. The shapes these would take depend heavily on the species’ “upbringing”. We’re naturally sociable. Our closest animal kin show highly developed social behaviors—Jane Goodall, among others, has made a living off researching exactly that. An alien race, on the other hand, might develop from something else; imagine, for instance, what a society derived from carnivorous, multiple-mating, jungle-dwelling ancestors would look like.

Likewise, the technological advancement won’t be the same for aliens as it was for us. Some of that could be due to basic science. An aquatic species is going to have an awful time crafting metal tools. Beings living on a higher-gravity world, apart from being generally shorter and stouter, might take much longer to reach space, simply because of the higher escape velocity. A species whose planet never experienced an equivalent to the Carboniferous period could be forced far sooner into developing “green” energy.

Differences in advancement can also stem from psychological factors. Humans are altruistic, but not to a fault. We’re basically in the middle of a spectrum. Another race might be more suited to self-sacrifice (and thus potentially more amenable to socialist or communist forms of organization) or far less (therefore more likely to engage in cutthroat capitalism). Racial, sexual, and other distinctions may play a larger or smaller role in their development, and they can also drive an interest in genetics and similar fields.

Even their history has an effect on their general level of technology. How much different, for instance, would our world be if a few centuries of general stagnation in Europe—the Dark Ages—never occurred? What would the effects of “early” gunpowder be? Aliens can be a great place to practice your what-ifs.

The garden of your mind

We are sentient. We are sapient. No matter how you define the terms, no other species on Earth can fit both of them at the same time. That’s what makes us unique. It’s what makes us human.

An alien species might feel the same way. Intelligence looks exceedingly rare, so it’s stretching the bounds of plausibility that a planet could hold two advanced lifeforms at the same time. On the other hand, science fiction is often about looking at just those situations that sit beyond what we know to be possible.

One or many, though, aliens will always be alien to us. They won’t think just like us, any more than they’ll look just like us. Their minds, their desires and cares and instincts and feelings, will be different. For some authors, that’s a chance to explore the human condition. By making aliens reflections of some part of ourselves, they can use them to make a point about us. Avatar, for example, puts its aliens, the Na’vi, in essentially the same role as the “noble savages” of so many old tales. Star Trek has Klingons to explore a warrior culture, Vulcans for cold, unassailable logic, and hundreds of others used for one-off morality plays.

Others use aliens to give a sense of otherworldliness, or to show how small, unimportant, or deluded we humans can be. Aliens might be a billion years older than us, these stories state. They’d be to us what we are to trilobites or coelacanths…or the dinosaurs. Or if you want to take the view of Clarke and others, a sufficiently advanced alien would seem magical, if not divine.

Whatever your sentient aliens do, whatever purpose they serve, they’ll have thoughts. What will they think about?

Borrowing and loanwords

Languages can be a bit…too willing to share. Pretty much every natural language in existence has borrowed something from its neighbors. Some (like English) have gone farther than others (like Icelandic), but you can’t find a single example out there that doesn’t have some borrowing somewhere.

For the conlang creator, this presents a problem. Conlangs, by definition, have no natural neighbors. They have no history. They’re, well, constructed. This means they can’t undergo the same processes of borrowing that a natural language does. For some (particularly auxlangs), that’s a feature, not a bug. But those of us making naturalistic conlangs often want to simulate borrowing. To do that, we have to understand what it is, why it happens, and what it can do for us.

On loan

Most commonly, borrowing is in the form of loanwords, which are exactly what they sound like. Languages can borrow words for all sorts of reasons, and they can then proceed to do terrible things to them. Witness the large number of French loans in English, and the horrified shudders of French speakers when we pronounce them in our Anglicized fashion. Look at how terms from more exotic languages come into English, from chop suey to squaw to Iraqi. Nothing is really safe.

Pronunciations change, because the “borrowing” language might not have the same sounds or allow the same syllables. Meanings can subtly shift in a new direction, as cultural forces act on the word. Grammar puts its own constraints on loanwords, too; languages with case and gender will have to fit new words into these categories, while those without might borrow without understanding those distinctions.

But let’s take a step back and ask ourselves why words get borrowed in the first place. There are a few obvious cases. One, if the borrowing language doesn’t already have a word representing a concept, but a neighbor does, then it doesn’t take a psychic to see what’s going to happen. That’s how a lot of agricultural and zoological terms came about, especially for plants and animals of the Americas and Australia. It’s also how many of Arabic scientific words came into English, such as alcohol and algebra.

Another way loanwords can come about is through sheer force. The classic example is the Norman Conquest, when Anglo-Saxon fell from grace, replaced in prestigious circles by Norman French. Another “conquest” case is Quechua, in the Andes, where Spanish took the place of much of the native vocabulary. And then there’s Japanese, which borrowed a whole system of writing from China, complete with instructions on how to read it; just about every Chinese character got reinterpreted in Japanese, but their original—yet horribly mangled—Chinese pronunciations stuck around.

Third, a relative difference in status, where a foreign language is seen as more “learned” than one’s own, can drive borrowing. That’s one reason why we have so many Latin and Greek loans in English, especially “higher” English. Educated speakers of centuries past looked to those languages for guidance. When they couldn’t find the right word in their native tongue, the first place they’d look was the classics.

Taking more

Words are the most commonly borrowed item in language, but they’re not the only thing that can be taken, and they’re not always taken in isolation. English pronouns, for example, are a curious mix of native terms passed down with only minor changes all the way from Proto-Germanic and beyond—I and me aren’t that much different from their equivalents in most other European languages. But in the third person, the he, she, they, and it, things get weird. Specifically, the plural pronouns they, them, and their are, in fact, borrowed. Imposed, if you prefer, as they seem to be a result of the Viking invasions of England in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Other bits of grammar can be lifted, but the more complicated they are, the less likely it’s going to happen. There aren’t a lot of examples of languages borrowing case systems. (Getting rid of one already present, however, is a plausible development for a language suddenly spoken by a large number of foreigners, but that’s a different post.) Borrowing of pronoun systems is attested. So is heavy borrowing of numeral words; this one is particularly common among indigenous languages that never needed words for “thousand” and “million” before Westerners arrived on the scene.

As I said above, Japanese went so far as to import a script. So did Korean, Vietnamese, and quite a few other languages in the region. They all took from the same source, Chinese, because of the much higher status they perceived it to have. Others around there instead borrowed from Sanskrit. On our side of the world, you have things like the Cherokee syllabary, although it’s not a “proper” borrowing, as the meanings of symbols weren’t preserved.

One other thing that can be taken isn’t so much a part of grammar as it is a way of thinking about it. As part of its mass importation of Latin and Greek, English picked up the Latin style of word formation. Instead of full compounds, which English had inherited from its German forebears, Latin used a more purely agglutinative style, full of prefixes and suffixes that added shades of meaning. It’s from that borrowing that we get con- and pro-, sub- and super-, ex-, de-, and so many more.

Word of warning

It’s easy to go too far, though—some would say English did long ago. So where do we draw the line? That’s hard to say. For some conlangs, borrowings, if they’re used at all, might need to be restricted to the upper echelons of the vocabulary. The technical, scientific terminology common to the whole world can be used without repercussion. Nobody will call out a conlang set in today’s world for borrowing meter and internet and gigabyte. Similarly, place names are fair game. Beyond that, it’s a matter of style and personal preference. If your conlang really needs a lot of loans, go for it.

There’s one more thing to think about. Borrowings get “nativized” over time, to the point where we no longer consider words like whiskey or raccoon to be loans. It’s only those that are relatively new (karaoke) or visibly foreign (rendezvous) that we take to be imports. Even those quixotic attempts to purge the language of its outside influences miss quite a lot here; you wouldn’t find even the hardiest Anglo-Saxon revivalist wanting to change Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, but ado is a pre-Norman loanword.

So this gives you an out: some words can be loans, but they were borrowed so long ago that the speakers have all but forgotten where they came from. Any conlang set in Europe, for instance, wouldn’t be wrong in having a lot of Roman-era Latin loans. Asian conlangs would almost be expected to have an ancient crust of Chinese or Sanskrit, or a newer veneer of Arabic.

Whatever you do, it’s an artistic choice. But it’s a choice that can have a profound effect on your conlang’s feel. A few well-placed borrowings give a conlang a sense of belonging to the real world. And if you’re making your own world, then you can create your own networks of linguistic borrowing, based on that world’s history. The principles are the same, even if the names are changed.