Language and Historical Linguistics in Stargate: SG-1
This is intended for people interested in linguistics as they might apply to Stargate SG-1 and its fanworks. It's not a complete primer, by any means, but it's somewhere to get a feel for what kinds of things to think about if you're starting to look at the field of linguistics and the jargon that goes with it, either for interest or for research purposes. Also, it's sg_betty's fault, who mentioned this, and then I couldn't stop thinking about it :)
Disclaimer: I am not a linguist. I am an engineer who dabbled in languages and linguistics throughout high school and college. I am fluent at a native level only in English. I consider myself near-fluent (if rusty) in Spanish and French, I can read and write simple, classical Latin with the help of a dictionary, and I'm something like a passive or partial speaker of Mandarin Chinese. That's the extent of my knowledge. This is what I've picked up from classes and some of my own opinion; please feel free to correct me or debate a point.
I'm also a speaker of American English. It shouldn't affect too much, but when I make broad statements about "English" in the discussion below, that's what I'm referring to. There are probably exceptions to most rules in some variant or other of the language.
First off, the following terms do not, in fact, mean the same thing.
Linguist. Translator. Interpreter. Multilingual speaker. Anthropologist. Archaeologist. Historian.
This may seem obvious, but some fic--and the Stargate writers--seem to get some of them confused at times. It's not unreasonable that the SGC has very high hiring standards, so they're more likely to hire an archaeologist who speaks several languages, for instance, and many of their people probably have to learn some languages as part of their job, but it's something to keep in mind: it's not necessarily a given.
A translator is also not the same as a linguist. A translator may be a linguist or have a background in linguistics and vice versa, but it's not always the case. Some translators and interpreters are, in fact, people who are bilingual or very fluent in more than one language but don't know much at all about language theory. I was certified as a translator before I ever took my first linguistics course, although knowledge of one certainly could help to learn the other.
Daniel almost always identifies himself as an archaeologist, as do most other people. I would argue that most of what he does is translation and language-related, and not necessarily much to do with archaeology, except in the sense that they're studying people descended from ancient cultures. ETA: As randomfreshink points out, though, he could very well be an archaeologist whose training focused on the linguistic part of the field. Archaeology covers a lot of topics and skills, as does linguistics--having training in both doesn't make one necessarily an expert in everything, including architecture, artifact analysis, supervising digs, ancient literature, ancient and modern language decipherment, speaking languages, and theoretical linguistics. Daniel's background is probably somewhere in the intersection of the two fields--analyzing writing found at digs, for instance--and it's canon that he's a very bright man, but he likely would have had to learn a lot of things on the side or on the fly in order to play his part at the SGC.
Then again, people at the SGC are probably the "elite," so if some of them speak a lot of languages and know lot of mythology and history and archaeological methods (and paleontology, apparently), that's okay. It's like the way we accept that Sam knows an awful lot for a relatively young astrophysicist--it's her job on SG-1 to recognize issues that have to do with the physical sciences, just like it's Daniel's job to recognize cultural and linguistic issues, even if they often have to reach outside of their actual specialty. I like to think they read up on things that might be pertinent to their work (or survival) during their downtime, when they're not polishing motorcycles.
Still, we should keep the distinctions in mind when writing about them.
Now.
What does Dr. Daniel Jackson actually do?
Daniel Jackson is a linguist, along with being an anthropologist and archaeologist. Since I know little about anthropology or archaeology, I won't say much about those. It's not specified what kind of linguist he is, but we can make some guesses about his area of expertise from canon.
For instance, he's an Egyptologist. It's safe to assume he speaks or knows a lot about Afro-Asiatic languages based on his knowledge of Ancient Egyptian and his comments in the movie that Abydonian sounded like Berber, Omotic, or Chadic.
When people say 'linguistics' these days without other modifiers, they're often referring to theoretical linguistics--essentially, how language is represented in the speaker's mind, how that translates into what comes out of the speaker's mouth, and how a listener hears and understands it the same way that the speaker meant it. This includes phonology (how sound gestures are structured), morphology (how words are structured), syntax (how sentences are structured), and semantics (what it all means), among other things (see below).
In recent decades, a lot of focus has been put into finding linguistic universals--features common to all languages everywhere, a concept that is not without debate--and the way that parts are put together to make a whole that also has meaning. While this is an interesting place to go in the SG-1 fandom, given the issues of alien influence and the mixing of cultures, you may want to stay aware that most of the modern theories about universals have to do with cognitive factors and similarities in our brains, and not so much with the aliens--not, of course, that it isn't fun sometimes to add to theories of Universal Grammar with some help from our buddy Thor. The very nature of this genre is that we can decide how much we want to stretch things.
According to the SG-1 series (I understand the novelization of the movie says differently), Daniel's degree is in philology, which combines principles of linguistics with literary bodies of work. Given Daniel's background, he's probably studied a lot of ancient texts, partly to draw insight about mythology or other social implications, and partly to study the language itself.
Much of what Daniel actually does on the show is some sort of decipherment and then translation. In other words, he takes languages that he doesn't know (or doesn't know well) and figures them out. Depending on whether you take the view that the Stargate has a babel fish function, Daniel does a lot of language decipherment at his desk as well as orally, in the field and on the spot.
Is this believable without lots and lots of textual comparisons or the equivalent of Rosetta Stones for all his languages?
We could fanwank this by saying the Goa'uld don't like change, so relatively little change has taken place since such-and-such ancient language on Earth, which other scholars have worked out in detail based on texts found on Earth. Given how much time has passed since they've been on Earth, I'm inclined to think there would still be a lot of language change, and probably more than Daniel could figure out 'just like that,' but let's assume for now that language change is minimal and Daniel's just that good (and that knowledgeable about a lot of languages).
ETA: Also, aelfgyfu_mead pointed out below that the long lifespan of Goa'uld (and therefore much slower generation turnover, if you will) might also have kept language change fairly minimal compared to what we've seen in Earth's history without Goa'uld mucking around with us.
So what kind of changes are we talking about?
Philology often overlaps heavily with the field of historical linguistics, which is essentially the study of how languages change over time. This includes changes in sound, grammar, and vocabulary, as well as consideration of social influences (contact with peoples who spoke other languages, etc.).
We can start with a language family tree. At the top is a proto-language, the common ancestor of the languages in its family. This can be subdivided into smaller divisions, and down and down further until we get to the modern spoken language and its sister languages. Languages that evolved from a common ancestor or evolved from each other are said to be genetically related (as opposed to languages that evolved separately and share features because they were in contact and influenced each other).
For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance family. It's a well-studied language about which we know a lot, but there are others that we don't really have on record at all; instead, they're reconstructed from the common features of their descendants.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the ancestor of Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Hittite, Sanskrit, Proto-Celtic (itself a reconstructed ancestor of languages like Welsh and Scottish Gaelic), and other languages. While PIE is believed by most linguists to have existed at some point, there are disagreements about what it was actually like. In other words, we can make guesses about what certain words might have been like, based on what we see in later evolutions of the language, but it is not, itself, attested on record. If we reach back further, there are those who have tried to reconstruct a proto-language for everything--the ancestor of all language. Whether or not such a language existed or can be reconstructed even if it did...well, I think that's up to debate. Maybe the Furlings speak it--I'd be fine with that.
(As a side note, when people write a word that's reconstructed rather than something found in historical record, they add an asterisk to indicate that fact. For example, we can say that the English word "fish" is derived ultimately from the PIE root *peisk-.)
In order to reconstruct a language, we have to understand certain principles of language change. I'm just going to talk a bit about sound change as an example of how this might work.
Relatively recently, it has been shown over and over that sound change is 'regular.' In other words, there are predictable ways in which a sound might change; it doesn't all happen in unexpected exceptions. Some of this can be rationalized by a physical or physiological reason--for example, the words 'impossible' and 'indescribable' both have that 'in-' prefix, meaning 'not.' It comes out as 'im-' in 'impossible' probably because your lips close for the 'p' in 'possible,' and the anticipation of that sound makes your lips close over the 'n' sound. Try it--say 'n' and close your lips, and you get 'm.' In an earlier version of that word, it might have been something more like 'in-possible' (or 'in-possibilis' or something like that).
The environment of a sound, therefore, influences it. The above is a simple example of assimilation, in which one sound becomes more similar to another sound near it. You do have to be careful about whether something changed over time or if it's a rule in the language itself, not something that changed over time. Without historical context, it can be hard to tell which is the case.
There are other common principles we see fairly often. The change of a stop or plosive consonant to a fricative is an example of lenition, or weakening.
(A stop or plosive is a sound in which there is complete closure in the oral tract at some point before the air is released, like the lips closing or your tongue forming a seal with the top of your mouth. In a fricative, airflow is continuous, but the oral tract is constricted enough to cause turbulent flow and, therefore, friction. See below for examples).
An example of that can be seen in the word 'cent.' It comes from the Latin 'centum,' meaning 'hundred' and pronounced classically as 'ken-tum.' In later Latin, that 'k' weakens to a fricative, and by now, it's "ciento" in Spanish (see-en-to), and we get the derivative "cent" in English (pronounced, of course, like 'sent'). This is not an uncommon sound change.
(In that case, I think there might have been some other rule that moved the consonant further to the front of the mouth, too, from 'k' to 's,' influenced by the vowel, but don't quote me on that.)
The point is, there are many, many ways for a sound to change, some of which interact with each other, but there are rules and ways to predict it. And then there can be changes in the grammar--Latin and German, for instance, have much more complicated verb conjugations than modern English, which descended from Germanic languages and was heavily influenced by Latin and French. I'm not going to pretend to understand the more abstract theories of grammar that linguists study today, but we can probably assume that Daniel Jackson would understand them pretty well.
And then, of course, vocabulary might be traded back and forth between societies. For example, I'm a fan of the idea that the Goa'uld language borrowed words from the Unas language, like 'onak' and 'kek.'
How does this have anything to do with Daniel and Stargate?
Daniel might have studied related languages and used their common features to predict how their proto-language would have sounded, and then used his knowledge to predict how that might have evolved into the modern language spoken by off-worlders. This means that his job includes a lot of guesswork--an advanced civilization that speaks Phoenician might have a word for 'electricity' that we've never seen in Phoenician on Earth, for instance. Context is important, because it can be used to fill in some gaps when you don't know the actual word you're looking at.
I'm going to end with some quick notes on the art of translation.
I say 'art,' because it really is an art as much as a science. Anyone who has tried to translate long passages into another language, for example, might have been surprised at first to realize how much meaning can be crammed into a few words of a language.
In some sense, there's no such thing as a 'literal' translation. Almost every word in one language can be translated more than one way...and that's just at the level of the single word. Tweaking a phrase might change the tone drastically from serious to ironic, and when you're looking for deep meaning in some text, that's an important distinction.
As an example from a class I took once, I had to translate a (French) story in which a mother put her daughter in the passenger's seat of a car and eventually killed the girl. There was an entire paragraph revolving around the irony that she'd put her daughter in 'la place du mort,' which looks like 'the dead(person)'s seat,' but is slang for 'passenger's seat.' It loses the irony just to translate it as 'passenger's seat,' but it makes no sense in English to say 'dead man's seat' or some such, and our own closest slang ('shotgun,' maybe) doesn't have the same meaning. In other words, we can't translate that 'literally' without losing or adding something or, at the least, interrupting the flow.
Obviously, Daniel's not often trying to write exciting fiction stories (I think), so if he had to translate something like that for a report, he could just add a footnote to explain.
The more pertinent question is whether he'd realize he was missing some meaning when the language is millennia old and relatively unattested. I find it perfectly reasonable, therefore, that Daniel might spend hours and hours trying to work out a good translation and still have to send lots of it to the researchers at Area 51 or some entry-level translators at the SGC to finish working on. In other words, I don't see how he ever doesn't have a backlog, without discarding certain things as being irrelevant to the SGC, etc.
Conclusions:
Where does this leave us?
Well...Daniel Jackson must be an inhumanly genius linguist, in addition to being a genius archaeologist. We can excuse that, perhaps, because it's not completely ridiculous how much he knows, and main characters in sci fi are often somewhat Mary Sue-ish (or the male equivalent). The rest of SG-1 really is, too.
However, those planning to delve into the linguistic part of Daniel's work would be wise to realize that there must be method to his madness. He probably knows a lot of ancient languages and enough theory of language and language change to be able to make good guesses (some of which might not be 100 percent correct) based on what he knows and the observations he makes of a culture. And some charades--he's good at that, too.
Again, since some people like using the Stargate as a translation device, there's a wide range of just how believable you find Stargate linguistics to be. For those writing fic about the linguistics aspects, though, here are some basic references:
Grammar: The rules that govern how pieces are put together (sounds, words, phrases, sentences) in a language. This includes several subsections, which are explained below.
Note, however, that one principle that a lot of linguists adhere to in modern times is the idea of "descriptive," rather than "prescriptive" grammar. Linguists describe what they observe in a language, and if a native speaker of that language considers something to be "correct," there's no reason to say it's "incorrect" just because some grammar handbook said so.
In the past, many linguists became grammarians who eventually went on to teach people how to speak "correctly;" this is becoming rather a minority among theoretical linguists.
Lexicon: Simply put, the vocabulary of a language or all the words in a language. (More accurately, it's all the lexemes of a language, but I get flustered and confused when people start to talk about abstract units of morphology and phonology, so I like to call them 'words' or 'lexical items.') A language can essentially be divided into its lexicon and its grammar--the lexicon is the pieces, and the grammar is how they work and fit together.
Native speaker intuition: This isn't something that seems to come up often in fanfic, but for semi-completeness... An important concept in natural languages is that it's intuitive to a native speaker. If you acquired the English language growing up, then you don't have to learn explicitly that the "s" at the end of the word "foxes" is pronounced more like a "z" than like an "s;" it seems natural to you, and you might not notice that you pronounce the final "s" of "chucks" and "chugs" differently unless someone points it out.
I'm assuming Daniel is not a native speaker of 23 languages or as fluent as a native speaker in all of them, but as a linguist, he probably notices the quirks of those languages, even though a native speaker might never think about them.
Phonetics: The study of sounds of human speech. This includes the physical properties of sound (acoustic properties of the sound waves, etc.); the physiological mechanism of producing sound (the position of the vocal folds, the shape of the tongue, whether or not you allow airflow through the nose, etc.); and sound perception (what we hear, how our brains process it).
I should note also that some phoneticians extend this to other things. In sign languages, for instance, sound isn't the smallest unit of communication; other gestures are. Some phoneticians study the phonetics of signed languages, i.e. the basic units that make up a signed gesture.
Phoneme: The smallest distinctive unit of sound. We can think of this as, for instance, a 't' versus a 'm,' which contrast in many ways--the parts of your mouth that you use to make the sound (tongue and alveolar ridge behind the teeth or the lips, respectively), the way air flows (through the mouth or nose), what the larynx is doing (vocal folds wide open or closed just enough to vibrate), etc.
Various systems have been developed to describe these; the wikipedia page on IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) will give you an easy example of how they can be written out. The phonemic inventory of a language includes all the contrastive phonemes in a language, with "contrastive" being the key word.
For an example of contrast, and how it differs cross-linguistically, say the words 'car' and 'key,' and pay attention to where the top of your tongue contacts the roof of your mouth. It touches significantly further back in the mouth (at the soft palate) in 'car,' and more forward (near the hard palate) in 'key.' Native English speakers think of the 'c' in car and the 'k' in key to be the same sound, but they're different enough that they could be two separate contrastive units in a different language.
Or think of the stereotype of 'r' and 'l' similarities in speakers of Asian languages--in some languages, those are perceived as the same sound that are simply used in different phonological environments and never in contrast with one another; or in Japanese, for instance, there's no 'r' or 'l' as they exist in English, but we don't have Japanese's so-called 'flap' sound that is written as 'r' in Japanese romanizations (similar to a single 'r' in Spanish. We don't have that in English, or the 'rr' trill, but we arguably have more vowel sounds than Spanish).
Stop (or Plosive): A consonant in which there is complete closure at some point in the oral tract (the vocal folds are completely closed, the tongue forms a complete seal at the top of the mouth, the lips are closed, etc.). E.g. "p" "t" "k"
Fricative: A consonant in which there is continuous airflow through the oral tract, but there's a partial constriction at some point that causes turbulence and friction between the air and the oral tract (which makes, for example, a hissing or rasping noise). E.g. "s," "sh," "h," "f," the "ch" in "Chanukah," the "ch" in "Bach."
Affricate: A consonant that's like a combination of a stop and a fricative. It starts with a closure as if for a stop and then releases like a fricative. The English "ch," for instance, starts with the tongue in the position to make a "t" sound, but once you release the closure, it sounds like an "sh." Try sustaining a "ch" sound, and you'll find yourself saying "sh."
Voicing: A voiced sound involves vibration of the vocal cords; a waveform of a recorded voiced sound will show periodic oscillations that correspond to the vibration of the vocal cords (which causes the fundamental frequency of the sound). Vowels are voiced, as are nasals (m, n, ng). For consonants, you can tell the difference by sustaining "s" and "z" one after the other--if you touch your hand to your throat, you can feel the vibration for "z" but not "s," while there's no difference in things like tongue position.
Stops are trickier--some will argue that English doesn't have voiced stops in certain environments, especially at the beginning of a word. What we think of as a voiced "b" is often actually just a "p" (no significant vocal cord vibration) while what we think of as a "p" is really just a "p" with an extra puff of air (hold your hand in front of your mouth when you say "bee" and "pee," and you can feel the extra aspiration). That's why, for instance, a native Spanish speaker might say "beso" and "peso," and they sound pretty similar to some English speakers. Spanish contrasts "b" and "p" with voicing, while we contrast "b" and "p" primarily by aspiration, at least in that specific case. Is there a difference in the way you pronounce the "sb" in "sbarro" and the "sp" in "sparrow?"
Differences in phonemic inventory are among the things that makes learning a foreign language difficult if you don't have either a very good ear or an awareness of the differences. It's also part of what makes foreigners sound like they have an accent. The difference in phonemic inventories and contrasts was used for comic effect in one of my fics, in which Daniel tried to get Sam to hear the difference between two sounds that a native English speaker would probably just hear as the same "h" sound.
Phonology: Simply put, the study of sound patterns in a language. Phonetics deals with the physical sound or the physical and biological mechanism of sound production and perception; phonology deals with how those sounds are put together and encode meaning to us. Phonologists study the features that make up a sound, how they influence surrounding sounds, how things like pitch and length affect meaning, and how they're lumped together into things like syllables.
Prosody: This includes stress, tone, pitch, syllable length, and other things that you don't always see or think about immediately when you write something down. I'm told this even includes facial expressions in signed languages, and all of it can change the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence pretty drastically. Note, however, that a few languages have a whistled form--you can whistle whole conversations in Silbo Gomero, for instance, and those whistled languages essentially keep the prosody (pitch, length, etc) and strip away everything else...and it's still chock-full of comprehensible meaning. Prosody is an integral part of a language, even if it seems at first to be the extra and less important stuff; losing the native intonation patterns is another way a foreign speaker's accent becomes obvious, not to mention missing out on some of the meaning.
Morphology: The study of the structure of words. In some languages, this looks relatively simple: in English, you add an '-ing' to a verb and it becomes a gerund, or you add an '-ed' and it becomes past tense. There are exceptions, of course, but those are the general rules. Anyone who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, or a related language, however, will probably know much better than I that verb morphology doesn't work the same way. It's not always a matter of adding letters onto the beginnings and ends of words; sometimes, we insert vowels into a framework made of consonants, and the vowels that get inserted determine the tense, meaning, etc. of a word.
Different languages have different morphological rules for modifying their words, and it's something a linguist has to figure out if he or she is trying to understand or reconstruct a language.
Syntax: The study of sentence (or phrase or clause) structure. Do the words go subject-verb-object, like in English, or subject-object-verb, like in classical Latin? Or, like classical Latin, is word order more flexible because the morphology is complex enough to tell us the role each word plays, while English word order is more strict because we use a less rich morphology to encode the cases of nouns? (see, they overlap, too :) ) If you don't know what order your words go in you're going to have trouble figuring out what a sentence means.
Other considerations that syntacticians have to face include whether or not certain words can be omitted in an utterance, if word order changes when asking a question, etc.
Semantics: The study of meaning. This includes etymology, the effect of word and sentence structure on the meaning of an utterance, and other things. Some study only the "literal" meaning of a word or phrase, judging by its logical form, while others also study the connotations and secondary meanings or even meanings that aren't encoded directly into the words (which gets into pragmatics).
There are debates on whether pragmatics is part of formal semantics and linguistics, but I would argue that knowing what a person means, as well as what he says, is probably pretty important to the communications person on a team of peaceful explorers.