After last night’s recitation, I had a few comments on the professor’s idea that the ‘perfect alien language’ has yet to be achieved in literature. I can appreciate his exhaustive clinical approach: indeed, it certainly helped me understand his field of study with such a unique topic of discussion. My point of contention arrives when he talks about the creation of an alien language that utilizes all the nonhuman phrasings and segmentations he brought up in the lecture. He felt that he ultimate goal of any author attempting to create a completely alien language is falling short of his goal by not making his language strange enough (while still keeping the possibility of human pronunciation possible). He went on to give possible reasons for this lack of inaccessibility found in writers attempting to simulate alien speech, immediately discounting the idea that any author who is trying to create connections to the reader by making the language more familiar to our own ways of speaking.
I believe that the sole hope of an author of science fiction should not be to create the most technically bizarre language for its readers. For one thing, to create a limit of only human sounds is a rather silly way of limiting alien speech, even in fiction work. If the only goal is to make a language completely indecipherable to humans, why bother with human noises at all? Why not have a language of whooshing noises, or of rhythmic slapping or growls? The limits, while an understandable deterrence in acting, will only hold back from a truly unique experience. Another thing I couldn’t understand was the emphasis put on preventing a connection to the alien language by the reader. Isn’t it the author’s job to try and make the reader feel some kind of association with the characters in a book? Unless the express aim is to do the exact opposite, I don’t think it’s fair to discount an attempt to make the reader empathize with a creature alien to our understanding by framing its speech in a similar manner. If you want alienation, make a race that communicates nonverbally, or uses light and music (a la Close Encounters).