Author Topic: Aximili's name  (Read 6781 times)

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Mira

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #15 on: April 21, 2009, 06:25:15 PM »
I actually pronounced Tobias TOH-bee-as, before I heard the name on TV. Not the Animorphs show, but somewhere else. There they pronounced to Tuh-BYE-as.

I know, I'm still have a problem whit that, as Tobias is a very common name over here and everyone here pronounce it TOH-bee-as. And about Aximili. I have never had any problem with that, except as I think it sounds more like a girls name. His second name is much harder for me to say, as swedish language has no similar sound I think.

Offline wildweathel

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #16 on: April 21, 2009, 08:54:19 PM »
I've always had a major issue with the Andalite language.  Why does it have arbitrary phonetic symbols like shorm or nothlit?  Arbitrary phonetic symbols--spoken words--are a feature of spoken language.  

Written language is kinda bizarre, but is most often a representation of pronunciation.  (The second most common system borrows the written form of words from a source language.  It's fairly rare, but is found in English, Japanese (especially Japanese), and a variety of Korean writing.)

True sign language uses arbitrary manual symbols; though some words may be partially derived from written languages.  Written sign language is not based on pronunciation, but on hand and facial expression.

Example: Jack and Jill in Sign-Written ASL
[spoiler][/spoiler]

The final group of human languages are pure-tone languages: whistled, sung, and drummed.  These almost always are derived from tonal spoken languages.  Simply stripping consonants and vowels would leave most languages incomprehensible, so single words are replaced with longer set-phrases that can be identified simply by their pitch.

That's the most common form of natural pure-tone language development.  There are a few constructed pitch languages, most notably Srs from the Brackenwood animated shorts.

Grammar is for the most part universal.  Some details are limited to specific types of languages: only manual languages have spatial grammar, and only spoken languages have vowel gradation ("seek"/"sought", for example).  For the most part, however, grammatical features can cross from type to type: Somali (spoken), Japanese (spoken, but unrelated), and ASL (signed, again unrelated) all use topic-comment structure, while English (despite ASL-like vocabulary) and Esperanto (in the same family as English) do not.

Why is this important?  Because the ancient Andalite language is manual (Ellimist).  Telepathy developed later--presumably after Andalites developed manual grammar with its manual-specific quirks

(By the way, the Hork-Bajir language is almost certainly tonal--note the talking-drums!)

Then, Applegate pulls a Babel-Fish. (She's not a linguist and has more interesting things to talk about than the difficulties of inter-species language.  There are very, very few sci-fi/fantasy authors who dare to open that can of worms.)  She declares Andalite telepathy universal and we get on with the story.

Except for those weird, impossible Andalite "words".  Now, it makes sense that Andalites would establish different basic words than a human language.  Heck, various human languages have different root words: Japanese has a short, simple word meaning "to go to/towards one's home" and another pair of words meaning "to exit/come out" and "to cause to come out, to remove" (which is different from "to escape" / "to set free", another pair).  These aren't simple concepts in English.

Likewise, no human language has the basic concept shorm, nor would Andalites have the pressing need for "mouth" (a basic word in every human language I can think of).

One way to deal with such concepts is to imagine them as "images."  Christopher Paolini describes the native dragon language as being based on images (which strikes me as perfectly-sensible for a natively-telepathic species, if very alien).  But, that doesn't really describe how human minds process morphemes--the basic units of meaning.  Simply put, an "image" requires a lot of thought, while the human mind can handle hundreds, even over a thousand morphemes per minute when reading.

The human mind can (with practice) read morphemes from text faster than many machine guns fire bullets.  "Images" are simply too complex to facilitate that kind of processing.

So, what can we reasonably expect the human mind to do with new, untranslatable morphemes delivered directly through telepathy?  Might it create new words in the familiar phonetic pattern of its primary language?

That seems to be as good an explanation as any for a mouthless species somehow creating a word like "nothlit" making use of a rare human sound. ("th."  It's present in Icelandic, English, Swahili, Greek, Welsh, Arabic, and a smattering of endangered native languages.  Not a common sound compared to "ee" or "t" or "s".)

Okay, that can of worms opened, let's turn to names.

Most human names have "meaning" in the sense that they are constructed from morphemes.  It's really only European names that have lost contact with the underlying meaning, thanks to the extreme linguistic exchange facilitated by Christendom.  (Basically, there's a multilingual pool of "Christian names" which, separated from their linguistic heritage, have lost their meaning).  For example "Joshua" derives from Hebrew "Yehoshua" meaning "God rescues".   "Nicholas" is Greek, "Victory of the People".  The Prime Minister of Japan is "Asoh Taroh," written with characters that roughly translate Hemp(a)-Green(soh) Full(ta)-Son(roh).  ("full" as in "full moon"--by the way, the same as "tai" in "Taiyoh" or "taiko;" "green" meaning "raw" or "inexperienced" or "unprocessed")

Note that just as spoken words are arbitrary symbols, 'meaningful' names are mostly-arbitrary symbols themselves.  Don't read too much into them.  The Asoh family are certainly not hippies...

It would be kinda cool to see the meaning behind the Andalite names.  They can't be mere phonetic symbols, they have to be symbolic combinations of morphemes if that's how Andalite thought-speak works.  So what does Aximili mean?  Well, there's nothing in cannon to tell us.

So sorry.
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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #17 on: April 21, 2009, 09:00:27 PM »
I actually pronounced Tobias TOH-bee-as, before I heard the name on TV. Not the Animorphs show, but somewhere else. There they pronounced to Tuh-BYE-as.

I know, I'm still have a problem whit that, as Tobias is a very common name over here and everyone here pronounce it TOH-bee-as. And about Aximili. I have never had any problem with that, except as I think it sounds more like a girls name. His second name is much harder for me to say, as swedish language has no similar sound I think.

yeah, it's a hebrew name, i've always pronounced it 'toe-bye-as'

Offline Chad32

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #18 on: April 21, 2009, 10:15:41 PM »
I've always had a major issue with the Andalite language.  Why does it have arbitrary phonetic symbols like shorm or nothlit?  Arbitrary phonetic symbols--spoken words--are a feature of spoken language.  

Written language is kinda bizarre, but is most often a representation of pronunciation.  (The second most common system borrows the written form of words from a source language.  It's fairly rare, but is found in English, Japanese (especially Japanese), and a variety of Korean writing.)

True sign language uses arbitrary manual symbols; though some words may be partially derived from written languages.  Written sign language is not based on pronunciation, but on hand and facial expression.

Example: Jack and Jill in Sign-Written ASL
[spoiler][/spoiler]

The final group of human languages are pure-tone languages: whistled, sung, and drummed.  These almost always are derived from tonal spoken languages.  Simply stripping consonants and vowels would leave most languages incomprehensible, so single words are replaced with longer set-phrases that can be identified simply by their pitch.

That's the most common form of natural pure-tone language development.  There are a few constructed pitch languages, most notably Srs from the Brackenwood animated shorts.

Grammar is for the most part universal.  Some details are limited to specific types of languages: only manual languages have spatial grammar, and only spoken languages have vowel gradation ("seek"/"sought", for example).  For the most part, however, grammatical features can cross from type to type: Somali (spoken), Japanese (spoken, but unrelated), and ASL (signed, again unrelated) all use topic-comment structure, while English (despite ASL-like vocabulary) and Esperanto (in the same family as English) do not.

Why is this important?  Because the ancient Andalite language is manual (Ellimist).  Telepathy developed later--presumably after Andalites developed manual grammar with its manual-specific quirks

(By the way, the Hork-Bajir language is almost certainly tonal--note the talking-drums!)

Then, Applegate pulls a Babel-Fish. (She's not a linguist and has more interesting things to talk about than the difficulties of inter-species language.  There are very, very few sci-fi/fantasy authors who dare to open that can of worms.)  She declares Andalite telepathy universal and we get on with the story.

Except for those weird, impossible Andalite "words".  Now, it makes sense that Andalites would establish different basic words than a human language.  Heck, various human languages have different root words: Japanese has a short, simple word meaning "to go to/towards one's home" and another pair of words meaning "to exit/come out" and "to cause to come out, to remove" (which is different from "to escape" / "to set free", another pair).  These aren't simple concepts in English.

Likewise, no human language has the basic concept shorm, nor would Andalites have the pressing need for "mouth" (a basic word in every human language I can think of).

One way to deal with such concepts is to imagine them as "images."  Christopher Paolini describes the native dragon language as being based on images (which strikes me as perfectly-sensible for a natively-telepathic species, if very alien).  But, that doesn't really describe how human minds process morphemes--the basic units of meaning.  Simply put, an "image" requires a lot of thought, while the human mind can handle hundreds, even over a thousand morphemes per minute when reading.

The human mind can (with practice) read morphemes from text faster than many machine guns fire bullets.  "Images" are simply too complex to facilitate that kind of processing.

So, what can we reasonably expect the human mind to do with new, untranslatable morphemes delivered directly through telepathy?  Might it create new words in the familiar phonetic pattern of its primary language?

That seems to be as good an explanation as any for a mouthless species somehow creating a word like "nothlit" making use of a rare human sound. ("th."  It's present in Icelandic, English, Swahili, Greek, Welsh, Arabic, and a smattering of endangered native languages.  Not a common sound compared to "ee" or "t" or "s".)

Okay, that can of worms opened, let's turn to names.

Most human names have "meaning" in the sense that they are constructed from morphemes.  It's really only European names that have lost contact with the underlying meaning, thanks to the extreme linguistic exchange facilitated by Christendom.  (Basically, there's a multilingual pool of "Christian names" which, separated from their linguistic heritage, have lost their meaning).  For example "Joshua" derives from Hebrew "Yehoshua" meaning "God rescues".   "Nicholas" is Greek, "Victory of the People".  The Prime Minister of Japan is "Asoh Taroh," written with characters that roughly translate Hemp(a)-Green(soh) Full(ta)-Son(roh).  ("full" as in "full moon"--by the way, the same as "tai" in "Taiyoh" or "taiko;" "green" meaning "raw" or "inexperienced" or "unprocessed")

Note that just as spoken words are arbitrary symbols, 'meaningful' names are mostly-arbitrary symbols themselves.  Don't read too much into them.  The Asoh family are certainly not hippies...

It would be kinda cool to see the meaning behind the Andalite names.  They can't be mere phonetic symbols, they have to be symbolic combinations of morphemes if that's how Andalite thought-speak works.  So what does Aximili mean?  Well, there's nothing in cannon to tell us.

So sorry.
I didn't really understand that at all. Different people will have different words to describe the same thing. Which is where the words nothlit and shorm come from. Can you give that in layman's terms?


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Offline Estelore

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #19 on: April 21, 2009, 10:18:54 PM »
*two cents*

I always pronounced it ax-IM-uh-lee, hork-buh-JEER, TAX-uhn, el-FAN-gur, AL-lor-ran, tuh-BI-as.

*shrug*

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Offline ThinkAgain

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #20 on: April 21, 2009, 10:21:00 PM »
The Andalites would need a written language. Ax has said on more than one occasion implied they had one, and it should be obvious for any advanced civilization. If it can be written down in text, a phonetic sound can be applied to each symbol, regardless of the original intent. For instance, the true pronunciation of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphics is unknown, yet we know what the symbols mean. If we really wanted, we could apply a sound to specific groupings of symbols, hence creating a phonetic language.

In real life, it is known that KA made up Andalite words based on local things. Nothlit comes from the Hilton Hotels.

Either way, assuming it was not simply a plot device, Andalite 'words' should simply be like that; as you said, text can be more effective than pictures. Also, how would you say things such as a specific emotion with a picture. For instance, love. A heart. Does it mean love, or is it actually referring to a heart? Simply sending base emotions or motives to people are not specific enough for the needs of an advanced civilization. I feel, while it might not be phonetic, that the Andalites still simply had some sort of set language.

Being universally understandable is simply a plot device; the only way that could be possible is if it were conveyed through imagines, emotions, or motives. All of which are not direct enough for the needs of civilization; while in some cases sending a motive of the urge to eat or the need to sleep might be more effective, a motive or emotion simply cannot express such things as describing chemicals or building any sort of device. Images are good for showing memories or teaching, but it would be difficult to have them used to describe new concepts, which is vital for improvement and advancement.

As far as names... I would think that names would serve a purpose beyond identification. Indicating heritage or family line, as well as a given name that held meaning would be reasonable to expect, although not guaranteed; the Yeerk's names are simply the Pool they were born, as well a number for identification.

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Offline wildweathel

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #21 on: April 21, 2009, 10:49:30 PM »
Sorry, I'll run that again.

Let's take the example of "love".  I can write a symbol meaning "love" in 13 strokes:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?153026

This is possible because Japanese is one of the very, very few languages where (some) symbols stand mostly for meaning and not for pronunciation.  When used in Chinese-derived words, this character is pronounced "ai."  When in Japanese words, it's "ito" and is often followed by "shi" (written using a syllable-character, a "kana").  And then there are the weird expressions where the meaning and pronunciation get fuzzy.

ai -- love
aisu -- to love (verb)
kyuuai -- courtship
setsuai -- deep (literally, cutting) love
kawaii -- cute (terrible translation, but whatever)
itooshimu -- to be attached to, to cherish
itoshii -- dear, precious
itoshiko -- dear child
mederu -- to admire
medetashi -- wonderful!

Now, we can say that both in Japanese (with its many, I count four in those examples, pronunciations) and Chinese (with one, "yai4" in Mandarin) that character represents a basic concept, a "morpheme".  Chinese is strict about having 1 character, 1 pronunciation morphemes, while Japanese is significantly more loose: "ai" is love in Chinese -> Japanese words.  "itos-" is a Japanese morpheme meaning "dear" or "beloved" and "mede" means "admire," three different but similar-meaning spoken morphemes gathered under one character.

Note, that even in Japanese with it's two sets of basic root words (native and Chinese) and messy correspondence between spoken morphemes and characters, pronunciation of this character is not completely random.  It's always ito or ai or wai or me, and never da (even though there are dozens of characters that can be pronounced "da") or setsu or shou (another popular sound)--except possibly in names where all bets are off.

That's because humans are really tied to sound.  More specifically, we're tied to pronunciation, certain complex patterns of movement in the vocal organs.

Actually, that's what makes signed languages work.  They're complex patterns of arbitrarily-meaningful movement.  Movement of hands and face, not vocal organs.

Andalites lack vocal organs.  So, we should expect their language to be different.  It's not weird that they have different morphemes than we do--different human languages have different morphemes. 

Like Japanese: there's the morpheme "kaer-" meaning "to go home," English has to build that concept from "go" and "home".  Japanese will then use that morpheme to make compound words that cannot be perfectly translated: "kaeritsuku basho": "basho" means "place," but "kaeritsuku" combines "kaer-" with "tsuk-" meaning "to take root, to stick, to be glued."

"kaeritsuku basho" is your front door.  But only when you're coming home.  Now describe that phrase in no more than eight English morphemes.  Should be easy, the Japanese only use four morpheme-characters to write it--two of which gloss as the nearly-synonymous "place" and "location".

I'll bet you can't do it and make it sound natural.

Anyway, that's why it makes sense for Andalites to have untranslatable concepts.  What is weird is that those concepts have phonetic expression.  Why should the concept of "tail-blade" be associated with "voiceless retroflex frictive, back semi-open vowel with tongue curl, nasal bilabial stop" or "shorm" as it's written?  That can happen in spoken languages, but Andalite is obviously not one of those.

It does make sense that shorm=tail-blade becomes shorm=trusted-friend.  That's metomyny.  It happens in spoken languages.  It happens in sign languages.  There's no real reason why it shouldn't happen in alien telepathic languages, too.
« Last Edit: April 21, 2009, 11:21:22 PM by wildweathel »
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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #22 on: April 21, 2009, 10:55:06 PM »
*two cents*

I always pronounced it ax-IM-uh-lee, hork-buh-JEER, TAX-uhn, el-FAN-gur, AL-lor-ran, tuh-BI-as.

*shrug*

There y'go.

i used to say hork-buh-JOR. dunno why.
all the rest are the same, except for el-FANG-or.

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #23 on: April 22, 2009, 03:28:08 AM »
I always pronounced the names in the French way of pronunciation, until few months ago, when I watched the TV show in English.
About Aximili's name, I think the real problem at the beginning, when he presents himself, is that he must say "Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthil" quite quickly, and it's very long. Marco mustn't know where finish his "first name" and begin the "second name", and then made it the shorter he could. Maybe he just remembered the "Ax-" thing lol. See, reading it and hearing it are different things.
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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #24 on: April 22, 2009, 03:54:36 AM »
Now, we can say that both in Japanese (with its many, I count four in those examples, pronunciations) and Chinese (with one, "yai4" in Mandarin) that character represents a basic concept, a "morpheme".  Chinese is strict about having 1 character, 1 pronunciation morphemes, while Japanese is significantly more loose: "ai" is love in Chinese -> Japanese words.  "itos-" is a Japanese morpheme meaning "dear" or "beloved" and "mede" means "admire," three different but similar-meaning spoken morphemes gathered under one character.

could be I just misunderstood that, but "love" is not just "ai" in chinese. "xihuan" can also mean love, though to a slightly less extent.

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #25 on: April 22, 2009, 06:19:56 AM »
*dark chuckle* If we want to get into the subtle nuances of types-of-love, then we could hash out agape, filia, storge, and eros. Greeks and Romans a few millennia ago would've had no trouble at all treating them as completely disassociated concepts, never having used any single word such as 'love' to cover them collectively.

Honestly, as much as I love the English language, I think it is positively stupid to qualify that all under that one category. There is so much room for ERROR in your meanings!!!
I agape to all of you, filia and storge to some of you, and eros to a very few people. There should be vast differences placed to define them, from adore to admire to desire to cherish.
« Last Edit: April 22, 2009, 06:21:53 AM by Estelore »
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Offline wildweathel

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #26 on: April 22, 2009, 08:36:21 AM »
Agh, that's not what we were talking about! :explode:

Think, heiroglyphs are very phonetic (technically, they function as an "abjad," a writing system that preserves consonants only--no vowels nor pitch) in addition to logographic.  Your basic point still stands: it is possible to have a purely logographic writing system--it's just that no natural written language works that way.

But, I would expect written Andalite to do so.
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Offline ThinkAgain

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #27 on: April 23, 2009, 05:48:00 PM »
I thought of a hypothetical way to answer your original question weathel. It's not that great, and also has several flaws, but it was the best I could think of.

If the Andalite language is universally understandable because it is simply a transfer of pure thought, it could work instead by sending impulses that invoke more specific thought in the receiver of the message, sort of how pheromones invoke instinctive reactions, only based on independent thought and far more specific and complex. So instead of sending a signal that would give a symbol for something, which the receiver then interprets based on previous knowledge, it would send an impulse, so to speak, that would trigger a thought in the receiver.

So when the impulse for shorm, for example, is sent, the receiver would understand what they are referring to once they understand the reference to tail blade. Either way, since most humans are used to language in the phonetic sense, when they 'hear' that impulse, their minds create a phonetic sound, because the concept wouldn't exist in any of the things they've learned/been taught. So, the word is devised from memories or the subconscious, either way, probably specific to the native language of the person receiving the thought. So, if this is true, it would be likely that if the impulse to trigger the thought for what we hear as shorm could be heard as a phonetically different word for someone with a different natural language. Regardless of how a human phonetically interprets it, the same impulse sent would be the cause of it, and it would carry the exact same meaning.

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #28 on: April 23, 2009, 06:59:05 PM »
I don't think your theory works very well, because if Andalites could just send impulses that denote shorm, in this case, I'm taking it to mean "best friend," then why would they need the metaphorical meaning at all?

I'm vaguely remembering some Saussure/Lacan from college, something about signifiers and signified, let me see if I can summarize:

The signifier is the language we use to describe something. For instance, let's take "chair." When I say "chair," you know I'm talking about something that people sit in, or wheel around, or whatever. But "chair" itself is just a phonetic signifier we associate with the object. It's just a one syllable set of five letters. Inherently, it's meaningless. We apply meaning to it, we take it to be a verbal representation of the idea of "chair."

The signified is the actual thing, that is, the thing with wheels made of wood or whatever. Without the signifier, it still exists.

The Andalite word "shorm" refers to "tail blade." This has an additional signified, however--it also applies to the concept of a pair of people so utterly devoted and trusting of each other that they would be able to accept the other's tail blade at their throat fearlessly. Why would this secondary level of language be needed by a race that communicates telepathically? If Andalites really communicated the way you suggest, they wouldn't need a metaphorical representation of the concept of "totally devoted best friend."

I think we can chalk this problem more up to the fact that Applegate really didn't parse out her telepathy all the way. Which is fine. I always kind of preferred it a little mysterious. I just never really understood the difference between Andalite thought-speech and however the Ellimist communicated with them.

If you want to read more about signifiers/signified, start with Saussure. He outlines the theory. Then Lacan does some really incomprehensible stuff with psychoanalysis and Freud and tbh I don't understand it at all.
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Offline wildweathel

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Re: Aximili's name
« Reply #29 on: April 23, 2009, 08:59:26 PM »
I don't think your theory works very well, because if Andalites could just send impulses that denote shorm, in this case, I'm taking it to mean "best friend," then why would they need the metaphorical meaning at all?

Thank you.  You rescued my point.  Metonymy only makes sense if there are signifiers. 

Think's other point, about how phonemes are an artifact of a phonemically-oriented human mind attempting to understand telepathy is the only explanation that makes sense to me.

Maybe it's similar to glossolalia.
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