I just read\/skimmed a story from 1983\u2014\u201cCryptic,\u201d by Jack McDevitt\u2014in which the protagonist has come across a radio signal that seems to include \u201csixty-one distinct pulse patterns, which was to say, sixty-one characters.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
The protagonist consults the only linguist he knows, who says, among other things: \u201cSixty-one letters seems a trifle much.\u201d And goes on to suggest (if I\u2019m interpreting right) that it\u2019s unlikely that any sophisticated aliens would have an alphabet containing sixty-one letters.<\/p>\r\n
That is, of course, a ridiculous thing for a linguist to say.<\/p>\r\n
In the real world, modern Malayalam script<\/a> has over fifty characters. Japanese hiragana<\/a> and katakana<\/a> each include 40+ base characters, with modifying markers that result in over 70 distinct characters (in each of the two sets of characters) representing different syllables. (Well, technically the characters represent mora<\/a>, not syllables.) A couple of thousand kanji<\/a> are in common use, and 13,000 kanji can be represented numerically in various encoding standards. And the GB 18030<\/a> standard defines numerical representations for over 20,000 Chinese characters.<\/p>\r\n So I strongly suspect that most linguists, even English-speaking ones, would be aware that sixty-one distinct characters really is not a lot in a written human language. And I furthermore suspect that most linguists would point out that seeing sixty-one distinct patterns in a transmission doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that the aliens have an alphabet, much less that it contains sixty-one characters. The patterns could, for example, be numbers in a base sixty-one numbering system. (Or base sixty, with an extra character used as a sexagesimal point or other such punctuation.) For that matter, even ASCII<\/a> (which was in wide use in the real world by the time this story was written) includes 256 distinct characters; that doesn\u2019t mean that English uses 256 letters.<\/p>\r\n In short, I suspect that McDevitt didn\u2019t know any linguists and didn\u2019t know much (if anything) about character encodings, and that he didn\u2019t consult any experts when he was writing this story.<\/p>\r\n Part of why I\u2019m annoyed enough to write this post about a minor error in a thirty-plus-year-old story is just that I hate to see authors handle linguistics poorly in fiction. But part of my reaction is also political: this story reads to me like another example of American sf author provincialism, a recurring pattern in which white American writers take for granted that all human culture is pretty much the same as late-20th-century upper-middle-class white American coastal English-speaking culture, and thereby end up writing fiction that tries to portray alien cultures but doesn\u2019t even manage to portray the range of diversity of real-world humanity.<\/p>\r\n (I should note that it\u2019s possible that I\u2019m misinterpreting what the linguist character says; maybe McDevitt didn\u2019t mean it to come across anything like the way that I\u2019m reading it.)<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[107,39,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabets","category-fiction","category-languages"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18003"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18012,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18003\/revisions\/18012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\r\n