(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . WriteOn! Parley Voo? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-04-06 Depending on your setting, your characters may have to communicate with people/beings that do not speak their language. How do you even start? Gestures might be useful. Then again, they can be full of pitfalls too, they don’t all mean the same thing in all languages, and some are quite obscure and dependent on recent events. I was quite puzzled by the story of two female athletes trading “wave hand in front of face” gestures in the heat of a match. It’s supposed to mean “you can’t see me”?? In South America, one does not beckon a person with fingers curling upward, but palm down. beware of places where this might be an obscene gesture. Some effective barter meetings between strangers with no common spoken language can be carried out by displaying goods on offer, and pointing, adding to or taking away from piles, and haggling in this manner until everyone is satisfied. this could conceivably mean “one of those”. or not. American tourists are often lampooned as believing that anyone can understand them if they speak loudly and slowly. This seldom works. And a tourist really should make the effort to learn something, since they are the guest. Starting to learn a language absolutely from scratch with no books or interpreters probably starts with pointing and naming, counting, miming actions. Note, not everyone points with the finger, and some cultures consider it rude. They point with the chin. James P. Hogan, in The Gentle Giants of Ganymede , has Earthmen and Ganymeans at first contact interfacing via video screen, with a Ganymean AI doing all the learning. Sort-of-approximately believable, since this turns out to be the supercomputer that is running their ship and doing hundreds of other things simultaneously. Waaaaay smarter than a flesh person. Then a series of pictures was flashed on the screen, to each of which Storrel replied with an English noun: Ganymean, Earthman, spaceship, star, arm, leg, hand, foot. That went on for a few minutes. Evidently the Ganymeans were accepting the onus of doing all the learning; it soon became apparent why — whoever was doing the talking showed an ability to absorb and remember information with astonishing speed. He never asked for a repeat of a definition and he never forgot a detail. His mistakes were frequent to begin with but once corrected they never recurred. A small screen alongside the egg’s main display suddenly presented a diagram: a small circle adored with a wreath of radial spikes, and around it a set of nine concentric circles. … “Solar system,” Hunt suggested. The picture switched to that of just an empty circle. “Who is this?’ “Correction,” Storrel said, employing the convention that had already been adopted. “What is this?” “Where ‘who’? Where ‘what’?” “’Who’ for Ganymeans and Earthmen.” “Ganymeans and Earthmen — collective?” “People” “Ganymeans and Earthmen people?” “Ganymeans and Earthmen are people.” “ ‘What” for not-people?” “Correct.” “Not-people — general?” “Things.” On the other hand, some of the most messed-up conversations occur between people who ostensibly do speak the same language, but do not agree on what words mean, or have divergent dialects, or speech impediments, or one is so steeped in the jargon of his specialty that he leaves everyone else floundering, or…. There are some amazing dialects and accents even in the world of English speech, and a few deliberate slang systems that are nearly unintelligible to outsiders. In a Doctor Who episode, a human who has been observing something closely for a couple of days nonstop wipes his forehead and says, “and I am cream-crackered!” This is rhyming slang for “knackered” which itself is slang for worn-out (ready for the knackers, aka slaughterhouse). I stumbled into a thread on Twitter several months back that was mostly black users, apparently, and some of their phrases went completely past me, I had no idea what they were saying. Challenge: write a scene where your characters (or stock ones) are attempting to communicate with someone who cannot understand them, or vice versa. Limit to 350 words. READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/6/2143412/-WriteOn-Parley-Voo Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/