If you want to create a realistic science fiction/fantasy world, language helps a lot. Here are some conlang (constructed language) resources for creators and those interested.
How to write the next great alien language (io9.com on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish and Marc Okrand’s Klingon)
Linguist Marc Okrand on how he used less common sounds/grammatical forms to make Star Trek’s Klingon language more alien:
More resources:
[EDIT (6/7/10): I broke this long post up into two posts.]
This is Part 2 (Part 1) on finding early uses of American slang and colloquialisms from the television clips and episodes on Hulu‘s (language corpus of) shows from NBC Universal (NBC, USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance Channel, Oxygen) and News Corp. (Fox, FX, Fuel TV).
While searching in vain for the Steve Martin “NOT!” clip on Hulu for the Part 1 post, I found another “The Nerds” sketch from Saturday Night Live and stumbled on an old usage of yet another expression. This time it was post-adjective much? (e.g. “Awkward much?” for “You’re very awkward”).
I first noticed post-adjective much? in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer pilot, (“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” Season 1, Episode 1; first aired March 10, 1997). Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) informs Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) that there has been a mysterious death at their high school. Buffy wants to find out if it was the work of a vampire without blowing her secret identity:
BUFFY: How did he die?
CORDELIA: I don’t know.
BUFFY: Well, were there any marks?
CORDELIA: Morbid much? I didn’t ask!
(Welcome to the Hellmouth, 15:37-15:43, hulu.com/watch/48/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-welcome-to-the-hellmouth [EDIT (6/7/10): no longer available])
The construction not surprisingly predates the show, but I was surprised to find it two decades earlier.
On SNL’s October 7, 1978, episode (Season 4, Episode 1), with The Rolling Stones as host, the teen nerds Lisa Loopner (Gilda Radner; Safire spelled it “Lupner”) and Todd (Bill Murray) are hanging out in Lisa’s kitchen:
TODD: I really need your help with my history homework.
LISA: Well, Todd, you know if you sincerely need my help, you can count on it.
TODD: Oh, good. Because I’m studying all about [grabs at Lisa's shirt neck and tries to peek down her shirt] underdeveloped nations!
LISA (shouting and smiling): Cut it out, Todd! Cut it out! [lightly swats him away] Stop it!
TODD (points at Lisa’s chest and mock laughs to a pretend audience): Underdeveloped much?
(Nerds Broken Fridge, 02:37-02:55)
The bit is quite crass, of course, but there’s the post-adjective much? construction way back in 1978.
As if I couldn’t waste enough time watching comedy and other clips and episodes on Hulu, now I shudder to realize that there’s a corpus linguistics use as well. NOT! No, there truly is.
See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics
Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)
Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Slayer Lexicon by Michael Adams (2004, Oxford University Press, ISBN13: 9780195175998)
Having trouble finding early uses of slang and colloquialisms? If you’re looking for instances of American (and possibly Canadian) ones, the television clips and episodes on Hulu from NBC Universal (NBC, USA Network, Bravo, Sci Fi, Sundance Channel, Oxygen) and News Corp. (Fox, FX, Fuel TV) are a useful language corpus.
I was sent an old clip of Saturday Night Live (SNL). The clip happened to contain a “Wayne’s World”-esque “NOT!” (e.g., “That sounds like fun—NOT!” for “That does not sound like fun”), but it’s thirteen years earlier.
I learned the post-clause NOT! expression from the “Wayne’s World” segments on SNL in early 1990. The sketches began at the beginning of the fifteenth season in Fall 1989, but I don’t think the post-clause NOT! appeared until the Tom Hanks-hosted February 17, 1990, episode (Season 15, Episode 13, video clip embedded below).
Tom Hanks plays Garth’s (Dana Carvey) cousin Barry, a roadie for Aerosmith. Barry has brought Aerosmith to appear on Wayne’s World, Wayne (Mike Myers) and Garth’s community-access cable show. After Barry demonstrates his roadie duties, comes:
WAYNE: Anyways, Barry, uh, that was really interesting. [mugging to camera] NOT!
(Waynes [sic] World with Aerosmith, 04:39-04:43)
With the movie Wayne’s World in 1992, the expression became even more popular. It even made the American Dialect Society’s 1992 Word of the Year. According to Sheidlower and Lighter (1993), however, the usage of post-clause NOT! is older than that:
The publicists for the movie Wayne’s World claim the construction was coined in the late 1970s by Steve Martin and Gilda Radner in “The Nerds,” an ongoing sketch on Saturday Night Live:
That’s a fabulous science fair project. . . . Not!
(Jesse T. Sheidlower and Jonathan E. Lighter (1993). A Recent Coinage (Not!). American Speech, 68(2) (Summer, 1993), 213-218 [first page].)
For the SNL quote, Sheidlower and Lighter cite a 1992 “On Language” column by William Safire. Safire calls it “belated negation” and gives the sketch as 1978.
(William Safire (1992). On Language; Not! New York Times Magazine. March 8, 1992, 20.)
That would be the April 22, 1978, episode (Season 3, Episode 18), with Steve Martin as host. That sketch doesn’t seem to be on Hulu. At any rate, at least my discovery is still a little older. The usage I stumbled on is from two years earlier.
In the very first season of SNL, the May 8, 1976, episode (Season 1, Episode 19) has Madeline Kahn as host. The show has a slumber party sketch about what a group of young girls think sex is:
MADELINE KAHN: That is why you should only do it after you are married. Because then you won’t be so embarrassed in front of your husband because you will [would?] be in the same family.
LARAINE NEWMAN (sarcastically, with only a slight pause): Oh, well. Now I really want to get married. Not!
(Slumber Party, 02:46-03:00.)
I can’t get too excited about this either, however. It turns out, according to Mark Israel (Postfix “not”), the construction is a lot older and goes back at least to 1905 with Ellis Parker Butler’s Irish English poem Pigs is Pigs (“. . . ‘Cert’nly, me dear frind Flannery. Delighted!’ Not!“).
Part 2:
Buffy (and SNL) ‘much’ much?: Slang research with Hulu.com, Part 2
See also:
Gateway to Corpus Linguistics
Corpus.byu.edu (English, Spanish, and Portuguese online corpora)
The fifth annual International Linguistics Olympiad for high school students was held in St. Petersburg, Russia, earlier this month. I was hoping the U.S. would finally join in. It did and fielded two teams, one of which won the team competition. One member of the other U.S. team won the individual competition (results, participants).
U.S. National Science Foundation press release
North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad
(This year was the first, sort of the U.S. Olympic trials.)
See also my posts:
2006 International Linguistics Olympiad
Results: 2006 Linguistics Olympiad
Do you want to know what a linguist/name analyst thinks of brand names and company names? If so, head on over to The Name Inspector blog from linguist Christopher Johnson [via John Cook's Venture Blog].
Here’s part of the entry for Youtube:
Like many good names, YouTube evokes sound-alike phrases that activate appropriate associations in our minds. First, of course, it’s built on the pattern of boob tube, and sets up an implicit contrast with this comically derisive term (“This isn’t the boob tube, this is the YOU tube!”). The use of tube to refer to video is a little retro and ironic, which makes it kind of fun. YouTube also suggests the phrase you too, as in, for example, “You too can be a star!”. These expressions and their meanings resonate in the background, making this an excellent name for a video service featuring user-generated content.
YouTube is also strong phonetically. It has no consonant clusters, so it’s very easy and pleasant to say . . . .
I thought of the you too, but not the “we’re better than the boob tube” implication. There are increasing numbers of people watching lots of videos on Youtube and its ilk instead of watching TV. “O brave new world . . . .”
Director James Cameron is working on a 3-D science fiction film called Avatar (2009, IMDb entry) set on a distant planet with aliens. They, naturally, have their own alien language.
Here’s the language part of the interview with Cameron:
There’s a guy named Paul Froemer [sic] who I was lucky enough to encounter a year ago. He’s the head [sic] of the linguistics department at USC. I talked with a number of linguistics experts, but he was the one who kind of got the challenge. He said, “We’re going to beat Klingon! We’re going to out-Klingon Klingon! We’re going to have a more detailed and well thought out language than Klingon!” He’s been working on this for a year. It began by riffing off things in the treatment, but from there, it went to how sentences would be constructed, and what the sound system would be. It would have to be something that was pronounceable by the actors but sounded exotic and not specific to human languages. So he’s mixing bits of Polynesian and some African languages, and all this together. It sounds great.
There’s no Froemer listed in the University of Southern California linguistics department or any other department there. Wherever he is today, it sounds like he’s enjoying his work. Regardless of the movie’s other qualities, I want to hear this carefully constructed language.
UPDATE (February 6, 2007): Thanks to a link from Language Geek, I found out it is “Paul Frommer” and “linguist” but not “department head,” according to linguist Benjamin Zimmer on Language Log.
Bit of trivia: Zoe Saldana, who plays an alien in Avatar, played a Star Trek fan in the movie The Terminal, even making the Vulcan salute (borrowed by Leonard “Mr. Spock” Nimoy from his earthly Jewish culture).
See also my post:
The Cornish-language band Skwardya (“ripping”) is now performing Beatles songs translated into that lesser-used Celtic language, songs like Hi a’th kar (“She Loves You”) and Neppyth (“Something”).
Unfortunately, the copyright holders won’t allow them to record the songs in Cornish (Kernewek).
Good for Skwardya. It’s nice to see a language revival embracing the modern. Since the Beatles are timeless, I guess forty-year old Beatles songs count as modern.
See also:
Back in August I posted (Oral language-play for speech impaired) about the System to Augment Non-speakers Dialogue Using Puns (STANDUP) project that helps speech-impaired children develop language analysis through puns.
The Discovery Channel has a little more information. The program:
has two parts: a screen and controls designed especially for children with disabilities, and a database of 130,000 homophones, synonyms and phrases that have double meanings for shaping riddles.
The program has 10 joke types that define basic punning structures from which the child can choose. For example, the bunny joke [Q: What do you call a strange rabbit? A: A funny bunny.] is the ‘juxtapose’ joke type where the answer consists of two similar sounding words.
Good jokes can be added to a ‘favorite jokes’ collection that can be looked up quickly for sharing with family and friends.
Puns and other silly verbal jokes may make adults groan, but they’re an important part of linguistic and social development in children. It’s also good for foreign-language learners to play with the language, such as mnemonics and risk-taking.
A good book about play, language play, creativity, and language learning is Guy Cook’s Language Play, Language Learning (Oxford University Press, 2000).
This book looks like fun and is hot off the press (if books take over a week to cool down):
Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures
By Luc Reid
ISBN 1-58297-423-3
Publisher Writers Digest Books (wdeditors.com/wordpress/fall-2006-titles/talk-the-talk/) [EDIT (5/17/10): dead link] says:
Organized by subculture, each section introduces the group and its key characteristics, then provides the key phrases and their specific meanings. Perfect for novelists, screenwriters, students, or anyone interested in pop culture, Talk the Talk is a fun and informative insider’s peek at culture and diversity in America.
There’s a Web site for the book (http://www.subculturetalk.com/) with forums and links about the various groups. There’s also a promise of free stuff that didn’t fit in the book, such as “About 7,000 drug synonyms.”
I hope the use of the term subculture doesn’t hurt sales. The prefix sub- means both negative “inferior” (substandard) and neutral “smaller part of the whole” (subcategory). Subculture is the latter. It shouldn’t have any negative connotations, but some people do see it that way. What if we shifted from Latin prefixes to Greek and called them “hypocultures”? Of course, that might be germs you extract with a hypodermic (“below the skin”) needle.
A couple of weeks ago I reported on the Somerset, England, cows that seemed to drawl their moos like the accent of their human caretakers (Cattle herd speaking with accent). As my light-hearted title and Cockney reference in the post suggested, I was skeptical, but I was open to the possibility.
The original press release included a quote from a British phonetics expert:
John Wells, Professor of Phonetics at the University College London, says: “This phenomenon is well attested in birds. You find distinct chirping accents in the same species around the country. This could also be true of cows. In small populations such as herds you would encounter identifiable dialectical variations which are most affected by the immediate peer group.”
Notice that Professor Wells didn’t imply the cows would pick up the local human dialect. On his own My Phonetic Blog, he said that he
was telephoned by a public relations consultant on behalf of a cheese manufacturing company in Somerset. Was it possible, they asked, that the local cows might moo with a west-of-England accent? I told them that I thought it was highly unlikely, but that there had been serious research showing that various species of bird exhibit geographical variation in their calls. And if birds and human beings have local accents, you can’t entirely rule out that cows might too.
American phonetician Mark Liberman has also had a bit to say about this on Language Log (here and here, as well as the related Scottish crossbill bird dialect story).
Thus, it’s all either nothing or a publicity stunt by cheese makers until someone decides to investigate regional bovine communication with actual field research (watch where you step). Yeah, I said it, but at least I didn’t mention “pie” charts. Oops.
![[LINK IMAGE: site logo]](http://languageandhumor.com/blog/images/lahlogoicon.png "[LINK IMAGE: site logo]")