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
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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.
