Grrl Power #868 – Going native
I’m sure no one will be surprised to learn that this page contains a Patreon cameo. Robert Nava asked if he could appear an alien in a Robert Nava disguise, and I was like, that fits in rather nicely with a storyline I’m just about to start.
I do feel bad that some cameo request have been languishing in the void for a while, but I want to actually fit them into a storyline and not just have them walking by in the background. I guess “cameo” might be the wrong term actually. They’re more like supporting cast usually. Still, if you’re wondering where your cameo is, they’re in the queue. I may need to revisit the Twilight Council relatively soon, because there’s quite a few supernatural characters waiting in the wings.
Anyway. Universal Translators. I won’t go off on a huge tear about them*, as I’ve done so a few times in the past, but I do think that a society that had them would largely devolve into a bunch of monoglots. Why learn more than one language when only knowing one language would let you understand every other language? It’d be like everyone today and phone numbers. I can barely remember mine half the time, and if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t tell you my wife’s.
I actually think having universal translators would actually cause languages to converge in certain ways, because you’d want to properly translate certain concepts. The easiest fix for English would be to introduce more words for “love.” It’s a wildly overused word, because we have one single word to convey how you feel about a girlfriend, pet, parent, favorite food, brother, mentor, scent, sexual partner, etc, but clearly those are different emotions. Even having a word that means “like this more than anything else in this category” would help break up the love monopoly, but we don’t.
Western languages generally have plurals, Eastern languages by and large don’t. It’s one of those reasons why putting phrases through multiple languages in google translate always fucks stuff up, because information is lost. Language doesn’t have metadata. Universal translators might be able to introduce something like that, and reduce language from words to concepts and intent. Then putting new words in using the proper grammar would become a lot easier.
*I will.
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That horrid beard makes me want to undigest.
The beard is a holographic artifact that isn’t mapping properly to his ‘chin’.
Actually… have seen plenty of Pacific Island men with beards like that
Look up “The Laughing Samoans”
It’s clearly moving and that could be deliberately done though subtle. If that’s the case then I wouldn’t be surprised if it also changes form.
That’s probably the real face.
It is, and I kiss it most days. Also it is essential, if he shaves it off there is no chin.
Actually, the ‘beard’ is the one part of him that extends outside of the holographic disguise.
It’s a tuft of hair that conceals his sex organs.
Yeah, you REALLY don’t want the details.
The hell I don’t. :)
Oh! He is a Ballchinnian? Sweeeeet!
Not the boots!
She’s right. Learning a second language makes you smarter.
Mind you, I knew TWO guys who spoke all major European languages and they didn’t seem extra smart to me…
And ‘undigest’ – brilliant!
You’re assuming they were of average intelligence before they learned the second language.
Food escape!
When opposite of nom is they called mon? Sorry for Reg people then.
Learning a second language makes you smarter. Devoting all of your learning time to language … not as much. Especially if you don’t really learn the languages.
The aspect of learning another language that feels the most conceptually difficult to me is the bit of learning words that simply don’t exist in other languages. Some of them, like agape, are easy enough, because it can apparently be described by a series of English words, or a series of Japanese words, or … most languages you may be coming from. But it feels like there would be some words which would be sufficiently dependent on the subtle semantic differences in words in the source language that some target languages would be difficult to grasp them in.
But even without *that* difficulty, I’ve definitely been around people who’d just learned the word agape, and opted to simply use it in place of love for everything. And, well, some people wanted to unconsume their meals over it.
Much of this response was paraphrased from some guy who was at the scene when I met a moron who claimed to know all European languages. This other person at the scene knew three of them, and enough of some of the others to feel confident that the guy was in fact butchering most of the languages he claimed to know.
However, as a hopeless monoglot (well, I know a few words from some other languages, just not enough to survive anywhere that didn’t include people who speak English and the local language and were willing to help me translate), I couldn’t possibly convey her full response properly, because she actually had an example for a language with a word that was very difficult to learn from a particular other language, but I can’t remember either the languages or the word.
Learning a second language doesn’t make you smarter. If you have the capability to learn a second language it means your I.Q. is probably higher on average. It’s like saying learning how to cook different cuisine makes you smarter. It doesn’t, it’s just that doing more than microwaving meals takes intellect and application.
Learning anything may add to your intellect at least partly by imparting good learning technique. You learn what works and doesn’t and become a better learner in the future. But that’s not the same as saying learning a language specifically made you smarter – you can get those same benefits from applying yourself to any skill.
There is a marked difference in knowing enough to order dinner and being able to reflexively understand something without converting it to your mother tongue in your head.
Replying appropriately without doing a reverse conversion and reshuffle to make the syntax work in the new language is also a reasonable gauge of your mastery.
Learning a different language literally makes you think differently, adding the local culture imbued in the very ideas they use for common sayings brings a different shift as well.
I read all sorts of dodgy translated schlock stories and even that colours my view of the cultures that they originate from, without including the obvious hot button cultural mores.
“Agape” as in “wide open”? That’s a perfectly good English word already…
It’s also one of the ‘other words for different forms of love’ to which DaveB refers above. If I remember correctly, it’s [i] originally from Greek, [ii] pronounced “ah-gah-pay” or thereabouts (as opposed to “ah-gay-p” for the English word you mention), and [iii] the sort of not-necessarily-personal appreciation and concern used in the context of ‘love your neighbour’. (Anyone better informed on any of those counts is welcome to correct me!)
I think it was ancient Greek that had multiple words for different types of love. Agape, Philia and Eros were just a few of the variations.
If you’re leaving someone agape, I guess that can engender certain feelings of love I guess
Another joke that would be undecipherable outside English. Homonyms and Homographs because of borrow words make for excellent puns, and by excellent I mean real groaners.
One man’s fish is another man’s poisson.
One man’s fish is another man’s ghoti.
Also there are words spelled the same but pronounced different depending on which part of speedh they aare being used as. Example is the word “envelope“, when it is a verb the first syllable is not accented and the last syllable the vowel is shortened, but when used as a noun the first syllable is accented and the vowel is pronounced like a short “a”, and the last syllable the vowel is pronounced long.
Yeah, English is weird:
Read and Lead end with the same sounds, and so do Read and Lead, but Read and Lead do not, and neither do Read and Lead.
You’d be weird too. English started as Anglisc and Saxon (both, mixed) and a goodly helping of Old Norse from the Danish and Viking incursions, which suffocated the native Celtic tongues, and was in turn overlaid with Norman French following the 1066 invasion. Latin and “Greek” were inlaid from the Church.
Unlike the French language, English never saw a need for official regulation by a Language Institute (like the Académie Française), so a traveller in those times might wonder if any of the island actually had a common tongue.
And then the Great Vowel Shift began, and 300 years later Modern English was being spoken throughout (more or less) England. However, linguistic differences don’t die easy. There was a BBC TV series called “When the Boat Comes In”, set in the North East of England. The pilot was voiced in the every-day dialect of the region, but had to be completely re-shot as it was unintelligible to viewers in the Southern regions.
It didn’t help that early English dictionaries were actually lexicons, word-books, with no prescriptive pronounciation guides; and worse, literacy was abysmally low in England until the late 19th century, and was far from universal in the early 20th century. This meant that English had to wait for widespread household use of the new “Wireless” before the English language could become standardised.
But it was all too late. “Lead” the metal, and “Lead” the act of guiding had converged in spelling and pronounciation, while “Read” and “Reed” depended on context to differentiate them in speech.
Actually English is Gemanic at it root, which is the root for all the languages you mention. The older version of the language don’t even sound like what we speak today. It is much closer to it’s Germanic origin. The version of English we speak now is derived for Middle English, which is where you get he many different dialects from which are not languages unto themselves just localized variations of the same language. Dialects tend to really screw people up, my grandfather from Maine was nearly unintelligible to must people unless you really listened to what he was saying. Didn’t help he would talk at you without his teeth in. Even then it only helped a little bit.
We here in the states now speak English that is called American English as opposed to British English. We can understand each other, but there are meaning to words that we use that are different. Mostly when it comes to Slang but there are other areas as well.
You earned a biscuit for that summarization. Whether you have it with gravy or a cup of tea is up to you.
English also contains words which are actually duplicated, being basically the Saxon and Old English spellings of the same word. “Guarantee” and “Warranty” would be examples.
Act… tually, a Guarantee and a Warranty are not the same thing
A ‘guarantee’ is an assurance that something will perform as it is meant to for as long as it is intended (barring accidents or deliberate tampering), a ‘warranty’ is insurance for when that something does break down within a certain time period (most seem to be designed to break down shortly after the period has passed :P )
True. But. Look up “Warranty”, “Warrant” and “Guarantee” on Online Etymology. Aaaand, they both derive from PIE *wer through Proto-Germanic *war and French.
It’s not about what they started as, as what they now are
I’ve forgotten the word for twin cognates in a single end language, such as (fragile, frail) and (warranty, guarantee). but, yeah, there are lots of those pairs.
English, is an IndioGermaic, language. The Indo-European languages are a large language family native to western Eurasia. It comprises most of the languages of Europe together with those of the northern Indian Subcontinent and the Iranian Plateau. Wikipedia
As another bizarre linguistic accident, the past perfect tense of the verb “to wend” (“went”), got attached to the present tense of the verb “to go”… possibly because the natural past perfect conjugation of “go” (“goed”) would homophone with the verb “to goad”.
English. It’s not just a language, it’s an adventure. And a muskrat nest. And a dumpster fire.
English isn’t a language – it’s three languages in a trench-coat, and they ambush other languages in dark alleys to go through their pockets for loose words.
There is a t-shirt for this that a linguist friend of mine saw me wearing and immediately ordered 10 of them so he could be sure to wear them in front of his classes…
https://teechip.com/english-doesn-t-borrow-from-other-languages-shirt
Here’s the source of the original quote.
Well, consider that in the late 19th century, England ruled the largest empire the world had (has?) ever known. There was no corner of the world that — one way or the other — was untouched by the British Empire. So. Administrators, soldiers, adventurers… they will learn new languages.
Go to Switzerland. This lucky nation hosts three language groups, Italian, French and German. Most Swiss are fluent in at least two of those, and many are fluent in all three, plus whatever else they have been exposed to. Listen to a Swiss group chatting: you will hear them slip unconsciously from one language to another, mid-sentence, choosing the right word/s for the purpose. It’s entertaining also to listen to Indian people spicing their speech with English, Tamil, Bengali, Hindi… depending which languages they have been exposed to in childhood.
So all the English expatriates will eventually return home. And bring their knowlege with them. I have no doubt that this also hapened in ancient Rome.
Fun fact – due to a couple small island territories thar still remain under UK control, the sun has yet to set on the British Empire.
… shouldn’t it say follows not follow?
Yes it should say ‘follows’ and not ‘follow.’
Man, you deserve all the internets.
Standardised, recognisably modern English dates from Tudor and Stuart times, roughly 1500 to 1600.
1600 English, though recognizable and even understandable, isn’t easy going for C21 English speakers. Check Shakespeare and the King James Bible for that.
The written word in that period is still full of weird little things that make it harder for a person that reads modern English. You can muddle through it if you have a reference, but Shakespeare in the original is full of stuff that makes you go huh. The King James Bible is worse of course since it was translated from Latin and then into English at that time. Lots of errors creep into it with each translation.
Most modern Bible translations into any language go back against the original, so no new errors creep in.
Nonetheless, any confusion from Shakespeare’s words will often be derived from the fact that he was poking fun at to-him-modern political references, so there’s no reason that you should understand them at all.
That’s one of the biggest errors made in various Star Trek episodes. Because of the writers’ biases, they use references that become dated in mere years, rather than decades or centuries.
Strom Thurmond in a dress?
Interestingly enough, English does have a word for the concept of “to him, modern”: contemporary.
Nothing beats the many, many pronunciations of the syllable ‘ough’
Bough, cough, dough, enough, hiccough, lough, ought, thorough, through.
I think that’s examples of all of them.
TIL: “lough” is pronounced “läk” (like “lack”) and is the Irish version of the Scottish Loch. (Which is not a (freshwater) “lake”, but a long, narrow bay. But I knew that part.)
So, a lough is actually an Irish Fjord?
Rare Norwegian blue?
It’s both. For example, Lough Neagh is a lake and Carlingford Lough is a fjord.
Loch can be used for either a freshwater lake (e.g. Loch Ness, Loch Lomond) or a seawater inlet similar to a fjord (e.g. Loch Long, Loch Linnhe). The important bit is that it’s a body of water which obstructs land-based travel while opening up a route for water-based travel.
And it’s not pronounced the same as lock. The kh phoneme is more like a h with the airflow partially restricted in mid-mouth.
I think Heinlein wrote, in The Door Into Summer, “Though the tough cough and the rough hiccough plough him through.”
English is simple. All you have to do is remember the following.
The plural of moose is moose.
The plural of goose is geese.
The plural of caboose is cabooses.
Once you have that down, it is easy!
“How do you make a word a plural?”
“You put a ‘s’ at the end!”
“When?”
“…on weekends, and holidays…”
“Not always. The plural of ‘ox’ is ‘oxen’. What’s the plural of ‘box’?”
“…BOXEN!”
And the singular of dice is die.
Another example of the pronunciation difference is the use of ‘use’ as a noun, and how you use ‘use’ as a verb. Or when you merchandise merchandise.
Or refuse refuse
And refuse to refuse a burnt out wiring
English language sucks!
I cant believe no one has mention Buffalo
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Because it’s a bastardized language, at least it didn’t inherit the horribly and unnecessarily complicated conjugation rules like the EU languages.
Me loves Latin, ahh the Romance Languages. Biggest pain in the ass right after English as a first language. Freaking grammar, makes writing in it a pain. Sigh sorry had to vent yes it is my mother tongue yes I suck at writing in it.
How about a word that changes pronunciation if you capitalize it? Check out ‘polish’ (verb) and ‘Polish’ (related to Poland).
I am glad I didny have to make that joke
Actually five. Taking from Wikipedia:Greek_words_for_love (it’s convenient) Koine Greek lists agápe, éros, philía, philautia, storgē, and xenia. The English language Christian Bible translates all of them as “love”. I won’t comment further, lest I make a great rant about lazy stupidity.
And DaveB, yes, our web-based translators — and I suspect the fancy ones the affabet agencies have — are pathetically undernourished travesties. Their AIs probably power the face-recognition apps that mistake a Nordic face for an Afro face.
Pope Benedict wrote about the different words for love, making it the center of “God is love” here:
http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est.html
When you speak in a different language you think differently about subjects. Universal translators will not create a monoglot future.
Different languages strongly suggest a different way of thinking. But to the extent it’s possible to think without language, language has no effect on thought.
Think of a baseball game. From the perspective of the announcer, or someone listening to the game, it’s all language. But from the perspective of someone playing the game, some of it is language, but a lot of it is motion. We have words for those motions, and it would be possible to think the words for the motions as one does them, but if they’re really good at baseball, they probably don’t take the time to think the words. Some may claim that they just do the thing, but it feels like they would need to think about what they’re doing to do it – it’s just that, without the words, it’s less likely to register as thought.
For example, someone in the outfield catches a fly ball. There were runners on first and second base. Do they throw the ball to second base, third base, or home? That decision requires thought, and a lot of it. Where exactly are the runners? How long will the ball take to travel to each base? But there’s no time for the words of those thoughts, just the thoughts themselves.
Language definitely has an effect on thought; and not always a good one. Ones’ mastery of the lexicon can determine the words one uses to engage in various actions. If you regularly say the phrase “i before e except after c” (nonsense for English, no idea why it’s taught in schools) you may put Irene higher on your preferences than Eugene, unless Carmilla is around. If you’ve ever seen a person “flip” their attitude when another person joins the group; that’s some kind of emotional bias in action. Such biases can occur for the most abstruse reasons: language is one of those reasons.
Neurologists have a phrase “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Which, much like the aforementioned aphorism, is not explicitly the case, but it does happen in the absence of other factors like emotional bias. So yeah, language can affect your preferences or decisions.
Which means learning multiple languages can be a problem. If one has to think of different concepts for similar words in different languages, their brain will parse both before arriving at a conclusion. It can slow down decision-making. On the flipside, having both contexts available may make a thinker less likely to stall on hard problems. Yet having multiple options can also make a person less confident, less able to pick a set path, and less apt to make consistent decisions.
So there’s trade-offs. As is always the case when dealing with an entropic system like the human brain.
““i before e except after c” (nonsense for English, no idea why it’s taught in schools)”
There’s an absolute reason for teaching it in schools. English has formed from several markedly different language groups, all of which have their own alphabets, some of which do not include letters that English currently recognises. For example, Latin does not recognise our letter “C”. Germanic languages do not recognise the “Woo” sound.
In English, “c” is “softened by a trailing “e”, but not normally by an “i”. Thus any word using a soft “c” needs to have an “e” before the “i” to achieve (see what I did there?) the “see” syllable. There are exceptions, “icing” is one. “Ice” is a Germanic word of Old English, modified in the 15th century, probably to make it look French. But in the 14th century, the verb form was ysen, “cover with ice”, thus “icing”.
English does have rules but, like any organic system, it also has an unwelcome multitude of exceptions.
I tried to explain that rule to my weird foreign neighbor. It didn’t go very well.
Nothing in English goes very well to foreigners :(
You bring up a fair point, but at the same time, any system which relies on a mixture of stated and implied language and yet STILL has exceptions is a bad rule to teach. Because then you begin this branching path of more finite rules and still get it wrong sometimes.
Languages didn’t used to be organic. They were codified by linguists and scribes. Which is what we should be doing; not inventing zany rules and exceptions. Today’s lack of rigor may literally (figuratively?) preordain the demise of the English language.
Why? Because the English language is more popular than ever. If the lexicon is that flexible it’ll fracture into local dialects to the extent that eventually there will not be a singular “English” anymore. What good is a language that mostly matches but sometimes doesn’t? At that time I could foresee academia stepping in to standardize the language.
However, if we assume things continue as they have, English would become increasingly popular until it fractures. Then the trouble of conversing becomes too much and people either go back to their native language or create a different standard from several major languages.
That said, I strongly suspect that the driving force for standardization will be computer keyboards. It was the same for every language-related matter related to computers since the 1970s. It would not surprise me at all to see English standardized simply because it’s easier to use in a context that has little to do with the language itself.
That… I don’t think that could be further from the truth. Languages have always been organic, aside from the very few that have been artificially constructed, and I’m sure even those evolve organically if they have a significant number of speakers. While many languages other than English do have an organization that defines the official, “correct” version of the language, they have little to no control over how the language is used in practice.
English already has many regional dialects. So do many of the other languages with large numbers of speakers, such as Chinese and Spanish. It’s not as big of a deal as you’re making it out to be, because humans are good at figuring language out on the fly. They have to be, because even when two people think they’re speaking the same language, there are subtle (or major) variations in their understanding of it. It may be that no two people share an identical language — there’s just enough overlap for most people to at least think they communicate successfully.
You missed the final exception that fills out the rule…
“i before e, except after c, or as sounding in ‘a’ as in ‘neighbor’ and ‘weigh’.”
That covers most words that aren’t names or German loan words.
As I wrote above
“You bring up a fair point, but at the same time, any system which relies on a mixture of stated and implied language and yet STILL has exceptions is a bad rule to teach. Because then you begin this branching path of more finite rules and still get it wrong sometimes.”
Making slower decisions, and being less confident in those decisions, is not necessarily a bad thing. Making fast, consistent decisions, regardless of the subtleties of a situation, is a coping strategy for a limited mind operating in limited time, and may be better for the individual organism, but probably worse for everyone else.
A recent study found that all thought, even rational and scientific thought, was routed through areas of the brain strongly associated with emotional thinking. Hence, we can infer that as the psyche slows down, the threshold at which emotionalism overrides rationality must rise to compensate. The human brain is an entropic system which cannot always spend more energy to get the same level of efficacy.
Heck, the rise of multilingualism might actually be a driver of humanity’s recent intellectual stagnation. Notice how “processing speed” rises in lockstep with “visual” and “auditory” processing. The latter are two metrics of lingual mastery and the former is a limiting factor of both – as I’ve mentioned.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_Q2U5uycu3Uk/TQ6Bb1vY0jI/AAAAAAAAGCg/S_JxhQVI-oM/s1600/photo1.JPG
But it doesn’t stop there; the relative decline of dynamic intellectualism precedes the decline of intellectual growth overall… And the average height of humans?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Sundet_et_al_2004_fig_3.svg
What does height have to do with language? Those who focus on words tend to care less for appearance and fact. This discounting of reality in favor of lexicalism may have caused humanity to stop evolving. It’s crazy, but the data fits: language might be destroying humanity.
Humans are not rational creatures. That they’re able to build some semblance of rational, intelligent minds on top of a framework that does little more than assign emotional categories to memories is impressive, but still ridiculous.
Height is not always advantageous, and when you can supplement your height with external aids, it may overall be better to be more compact. Your heart doesn’t have to work as hard to pump blood to distant extremities, and it’s easier to retain body heat.
If anything, language, and the more complex, abstract ideas it gives people the tools to think about, are what may save humanity from itself. But I will contend that most of our information comes to us third-party, as memorization rather than learned experience, and there is probably a correctable decline in reasoning and understanding as a result. The problem is that societies tend to value people who “think the correct things” more than they value people who have the ability to think for themselves.
It’s important to remember when comparing languages that not everyone considered fluent in a language knows all the words of that language. This is especially true with languages like English that are prone to mugging other languages for words. There’s apparently over a million English words, and that’s not hyperbole.
I’m pretty sure I don’t know a million English words. I do know a number that many don’t know, such as cwm, crwth, and discombobulate. But I mostly know that many don’t know them because they question me when I use them.
I personally don’t feel competent to agree or disagree regarding whether English only has one word for love, but I do know that a lot of English speakers decomplicate the language as much as feasible, so they can get by with vocabularies of less than 10,000 words. I also can agree that whether the language has different words for the different meanings of love, we don’t use them. I have the feeling that we’ve been slowly adding meanings to the word love to further decomplicate our active language usage over the course of my lifetime.
Enamor(enamorment), admire(admiration), lust, fu¢k, care, favor, bias, enrapturement, faithful, partner, family(familial), familiar, etc.
DaveB made a mistake. Love means many things but I guess he forgot those things also have their own words. It’s like saying “my car is red” and then insisting there’s no other color to describe the car. It could be maroon, burgundy, etc. Red is itself a color but it’s also treated like a class of colors. Love is the same.
Someone told me “After the 5th language every other language is easy.”
Though I guess they should be part of different language families.
And I agree, learning something new makes you smarter. More knowledge allows you to react better to unfamiliar situations.
Had a classmate in Latin, back in the day she spoke five different languages could write in three more. Was translating the Iliad from I think Latin into Russian or something else for fun. Yeah she was an odd cookie but then so was I.
Sam Starfall also has an undigest inducing face so he wears a mask he operates with his face tentecles.
See Freefall.
I figured someone would have beaten me to that…
I however, have found the comic where that fact is revealed!
http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00083.htm
Robert Nava looks a lot like Big Bang from the Society of Virtue.
I’ve had that exact same thought about the word “Love”. Especially when explaining a poly lifestyle to vanilla friends/future partners
We don’t need additional words. Haven’t you heard? All you need is love.
I heard love is just a game.
It’s also a battlefield.
It’s just flowery words used to describe chemical reactions that sometimes lead to mating and cohabitation to raise offspring.
At least in english you have “like”, so you have some degree of intensity. In French there’s only “Aimer” which stand for both like and love.
Aimer – to like
Adorer – to love
E.g. “J’aime les velos, mais j’adore les ananas” I like bikes, but I love pineapples.
Yep. I think the confusion probably comes from “Je t’aime” being equivalent to “I love you”, but of course when you translate things literally (or try to map them one-to-one) it’s easy to loose information :).
Aimer – to like, to love
Adorer – to Adore
…
Adore.
Aimer – to like, to love
Adorer – to adore
Oh, that is an aquatic-bowl they are wearing, guess fish is off the menu tonight
At least on Earth, a large number of aquatic creatures eat fish.
Lot of Humans eat Mammals too. It’s pretty much the same distinction.
After all, Fish’ve been around a lot longer and with a lot more variety.
Yeah it seems like there’s going to be big meeting of the Veil
Okay, has anyone spotted the little bug wearing a thong? He was there last page, now he’s gone, did he get left behind on the side of the road… again? Or maybe he is sitting on the windshield :P
Not even on the last page. How little is little?
Big – they’re in the 2nd to last panel of this strip – sitting in the back with the purple alien, but her antenna have disappeared – and the fact she’s wearing a thong is covered by the fact you can’t see their torso.
You can see the dark blue bottoms that are kind of thong like in the last panel of last page, in the background with their back to the vehicle.
Different bug, that’s the one who was looking in the back seat while the other bug was looking in the other direction
Ah, I didn’t see the backseat bug on the previous page – what with them being right in the middle of the frame and all. Purple was already my favorite color, now it’s distracting.
The two bug guys decided to wait to catch a ride in a Volkswagen.
The one looking in the back seat I am naming Scott, because he is obviously an Ant Man.
I want to see the kids uploading content. Is a video being loaded or a stream of audio clips or is she typing fast.
Then you get replies to that.
Then again she could just be playing a game on the phone.
Paula: Jenny, what are you talking about? You have been kidnapped by a purple alien lady with no nose?
Jennifer: I said hijacked! Like in she paid my dad a bunch of gold for him to show them around the city. So that is what were are doing. We are definitely going to be late getting to the mall.
Paula: Them? As in more than 1? How many are there? You have to share pictures or it did not happen!
Click, Click, Click
Jennifer: There. Take a look at the pictures I just took. There is 4 of them, all different.
Being on her phone with a bunch of aliens seems to indicate she’s a) incredibly jaded as an NYC kid, b) scared and trying to self-comfort (but she’s talking to them so not that scared, or c) plastering her friends / social media with alien selfies. Quite possibly all 3.
Also, before the pandemic I had a side gig of cleaning up machine translated ads and user manuals for companies that didn’t have Fluent in English people working for their companies, and who didn’t want to become fodder for https://www.engrish.com/. I was so good that some clients requested that I handle their docs and only me. I think that might be because I have a knack of figuring out meanings from incomplete data, and I have a knack for ad copy.
I honestly can’t fault those two for turning their translators off to actually learn the language. what happens if it ever shorts out? Or maybe learning new languages is fun?
Have to admit, I’m curious what his real face could look like to be worse than the horrid beard thing he has going.
Or somebody might sabotage it like in that Python sketch. Best to learn the language or put a fisk in the ear. I’m sure the galaxy is full of troll hackers who loves to mess with the translator programs.
Actually, check out her datapad in the previous strip. It says “Glorb to English translation [alien script] My hovercraft is full of eels.” (A line from that MP sketch.)
I love Dave’s easter eggs.
I mentioned this in the last comic :)
Just what is happening inside the helmet in that last panel? Is ice forming?
I would guess it’s a bubbled up exasperated sigh.
Air bubbles floating up, I believe
I think Violet is patting him on the (helmeted) head, and it jiggled some air bubbles loose. Or maybe he is sighing in response through some lower gills or something.
We can at least hope that the bubbles are coming from the front end of his body.
So I am guessing because extraterrestrials have been largely outed they think it’s fine to play tourist au natural now?
Boy ain’t that a kind of dangerous and disruptive assumption.
Tho I think it is a bit overkill to send Maxima and friends at this relatively tame issue, guess they’ll do until they get a more…. “domestic” form of extraterrestrial tourist management to deal with this kind of thing. Tho at this rate might be come pretty “normal”
Well, in fairness, they’re sending Max and Halo because they’re the two fastest fliers they have, and Cora and Dabs ARE Extraterrestrials and’ve probably dealt with similar situations given their adventuring lifestyles.
I have an overwhelming urge to see the pink alien girl in a pinup. Vote incentive…hint hint.
Dave sure likes drawing exotic beauties.
Yes, that might be interesting.
Then again, paraphrasing a scene from Farscape,
‘I am the male of my species.’
“… so?”
Meh, cleavage ain’t everything. Personally, I find the lack of a noise and the star-pupils kind of off-putting. The lizard dude in the fishbowl looks more normal to me, oddly enough.
I suppose a pinup of the female of its species probably wouldn’t be much more appealing tho.
I actually kind of like this whole touristy thing with the aliens. The one in the helmet who I am going to call “Bub” is at least being kind enough to use the translator. You can use the translator while learning the language so once you stop using it you do not make a complete fool of yourself. But I do like Pinki’s mindset.
Unfortunately, as “Bub” breathes liquid, it is necessary for “Bub” to use the translator when communicating with all aliens who are not telepathic nor fellow liquid-breathers.
Even on Earth, it’s rare to find a fully aquatic species that communicates underwater in a way that is audible to humans without some form of translator.
I see no reason he couldn’t use a transmitter to pass sound from water to air (and back) without also using a translator. The sound and the meanings are 2 different issues, assuming his humanoid mouth can make human sounds.
“Upon face-seeing truth, consumption of food is backward”. Brilliant :D
“quintessential”
“Epitome“?
Just so.
“My beauty is so awesome that all who look upon me vomit.” I’m pretty sure I know people who think this way.
‘Such beauty am I that all undigest’
That word, you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
His beauty is level negative 12 for our eye truth seeing. He is meaning many things as he says it is because of big brain thoughts.
Pung? Blorp? Did something just smash against the Lizard guy’s helmet? (and spectacularly fail to do much it looks like).
Yes, Pinki patted Bub’s helmet
I’m going to assume it’s not someone speaking Swedish. I can’t imagine why they would say ”scrotum” three times.
Two times, not three.
I love the bubbles in the helmet, and also the tapping-on-glass sound :).
U, Dave, there is something wong in panel 6. Either “Lizard in a jar” guy is phasing through the driver front seat or you lost the driver and his chair there. Language gripes? Pay no attention to the man in the flowery shirt!
It’s a van; three rows of seats. :-)
Although I guess that’s obvious, so nevermind. -_-
I’m reminded of the most recent expansion to Final Fantasy XIV. There are a series of dungeon bosses named Philia, Storge, and Eros. The Latin words for love of family, love of mankind and romantic love, respectively.
The irony is Philia killed an entire village, Storge hides at the bottom of a mineshaft, and Eros is a ravenous chimera that on encountering it, immediately attempts to eat your face.
JRPG, which means they aren’t using the meaning of the words but the actual names for deities. Japanesess developers and Manganiks, use European names and words for naming characters all the time. Mostly because it makes them sound cool. But most native speakers will look at the name and go why is this character named that. No really Golden Darkness that is one of the lover interest in To-Love Ruu, and that isn’t even the most egresses of them.
Also those aren’t Latin but Greek words, people tend to get them mixed up for some reason.
Oh no, the naming was very purposeful. The whole background of the expansion is a world corrupted by light. The non boss types of these monsters have names following the theme of “Forgiven” sins. It’s basically a larger delve into the concept of “Light is not always good, Dark is not always evil. “
I think this was due to the fact that English wasn’t the first language that went around mugging others for loose words.
These guys better not undigest on the interior of the car.
Panel 4 is the creepiest of the lot.
Why have plurals if you can literally just add an extra word for clarity? lol.
Instead of adding a lisp to to end of a noun and also making verbs harder with conjugation, just use infinitives for everything and specify plural with stated number or amount, lol.
As for too many definitions for one word… I’m sure we’ll get by. That’s true for a lot of words we have. If we start having the need to emphasize the different loves often, it’ll get changed, either through borrowing another language or people just getting tired of adding an adjective in front of the word “love” (fraternal love, familial love, filial love, romantic love, etc). Maybe when some academic proposes an alternative word and it catches on in the general public and becomes widely used? Although we already do have one differentiator because those Christians c. 1500s were big on separating the two: lust. lol
The problem is not having enough words to cover the range, but neglecting their use in favor of overloading a single word. This not only causes confusion, but leads people to conflate the ideas themselves. Humans struggle to think beyond the boundaries of their language.
A long time ago I read a new agey book where there were universal translators. I really liked the concept. They made a telepathic link to nearby people, it would read the thoughts that were being verbalized and then translate the intent into the users language.
In the opposite direction it would do something similar, read your own “to be vocalized” thoughts and then stimulate your vocalizing organs in a way that would produce the appropiate sounds in the intended target’s language.
Due to physiology artifacts, it would produce a funny accent when using it to speak.
I recall reading once… this was about 15 years ago, I think… that the UN was developing a way to write documents in a meta-language so that they could be accurately machine-translated into many different languages without losing any of the original meaning.
Esperanto?
No. Esperanto was not developed by the U.N. It was developed in 1887 over 60 years before the U.N. was created. Also, it is not a meta language by any stretch of the imagination.
Esperanto
I am having question. How is person wearing of the head water making the word sounds that are needing air breathing?
Translator translating the bubbles
He is using a translator device. For all we know his real words could be ultra sonic or infra sonic.
Their real words are actually from their facial expression shifts. It may look to us like their face is stuck in one expression, but that’s because we’re not familiar with the species enough to distinguish all of the subtle nuances.
Their facial expressions are *very* expressive.
Free fall reference or coincidence as they didn’t do the my true form would be disturbing for your species. But Sqids do trigger a vomit response in most humans.
It’s fear-vomit. Have you seen their parents? You know, the ones that wrap themselves around sailing Clippers?
You’re probably fine in touristy districts of New York, but yeah, I wouldn’t want to go to a lot of Rural America. Now to be fair, there are a lot of americans that would have trouble in much of rural america.
Lol, some rural Americans have trouble in rural America. Depending on where you land, the reaction can vary from “Button up the perimeter and load the 50 cal.” to “What took you so long? Take your shoes off and sit a spell.”
You ever live in rural America?
I’ve lived in rural America. I had trouble. The town which I lived nearest to was populated with people who thought people who didn’t spend their whole lives in the valley were weird. They thought people who didn’t want to spend the rest of their lives in the valley were weird.
They didn’t like weird.
Also, I’m borderline autistic, which really did not help my social standing there at all.
Thanks Dad, moving to Green Acres was really a great idea, thank you very much.
I can confirm, though, that there were rural Americans there who had difficulties in rural America.
It can really be pretty hit or miss in terms of tolerance. I lived in a small city that, at least for north Texas, was pretty racially integrated and which had an active gay community while just about an hour’s drive down the road was a town of similar size that still has a reputation as a “sundown town” even though they took down the sign twenty years ago. Even with that relative degree of tolerance, small town in rural areas have their cliques. Even though we worked there for 30 years and lived there for nearly 20 you really weren’t “from there” unless your family had been there for two generations.
I shared the last bit of the comic in a discord, because I thought it was a great meme. A Swedish and Norwegian friend both said that “Pung” means Scrotum :)
Hmm, did not notice that the “fishbowl” is full of liquid, until reading the comments. That’s because, as a biologist, the creatures head enclosed in that bubble is not designed to process a liquid, but gasses! Small nostrils, eyebrow ridges – clearly a reptile, or exposed to the same selective pressures as terran reptiles, so hot, dry gasses and bright overhead light. Heck, the violet colored alien looks more aquatic/fluid breathing than this one!
Don’t fish have small nostrils for smelling, separate from breathing functionality? Could be amphibious from a planet with a much different atmospheric mix and pressure where it normally breathes gas, and just wearing a liquid-filled suit and using its gills, due to the different phase transition points in Terran atmosphere.
This is why Ithkuil is the best language! It conveys intent, portent and makes you dement.
Like, Ghast from Crawling Dreams or the other one from a similar comic. I think the creature’s name was Ugg or something :P Kinda like a smaller sized Lovecraftian horror that makes friends with a human and “protects her” aka: ends up eating would be muggers, rapists, and thieves.
It is a good thing that their flight was not met by Chris Tucker.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJX1REQB12o
It seems that causing people to undigest might be a more common problem when humans meet aliens then i had thought. http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff100/fv00083.htm (Just to be clear, i am not screaming plagiarism, people can have the same ideas. It just amused me and im a sharing kinda guy. :P )