Language and Thought

One of the key elements of Alien Awakening is the portrayal of intelligent alien individuals who appear to think on their own and have the ability to converse with each other and the player. One of the most important aspects of this is language. One of the most important things that separate human beings from other, non-sentient animals such as dogs, is our language. Language is not just a tool for communication but a tool for thought itself. Our language defines the elemental concepts of conscious thought – that which lies beyond the basic qualia of feeling and need. By changing the language, not just the language we are speaking but the language that we use to form our conscious thoughts, we change the way we think. As an example, one could imagine a species like the Borg from Star Trek – their language would have no words for I or self. As a result they cannot form thoughts of individuality or self – it is a completely foreign concept. Before they could think of themselves as individuals, they would need to learn how to think of individuality.

It follows, then, that the language in Alien Awakening performs several very important tasks: it forms a means of communication between the player and aliens, it forms a visible form of communication between the aliens themselves to make them feel more alive and finally it forms a framework for the alien thought process itself. This thought process would inherently be alien – the concepts expressible in the alien language would certainly be different then our own – and yet understandable if you learn to think in the alien language (or at least understand the concepts that they can express) . This means that the alien AI must express “conscious” thought in their own language – if it is not expressible then it cannot be thought of at a conscious level. Of course, at first this seems crazy, but the AI would need to be scalable. When dealing with individuals, each individual has it’s own thoughts and perceptions. When talking about groups acting out of sight or far away, a group AI would take over. It would still track the individuals – similar to particles in a massive particle system – but work at a much higher level. This would allow individual behavior when needed as well as group behavior for the rest of the world.

So, then, the language should be relatively simple but must be complex enough to give the aliens adequate – even rich – expressiveness of thought and action. First thing, the basic rules of the language must be simplified. For example, in English, there are a large number of phonemes (a group of sounds that serve the same purpose in a language) which each have a number of allophones (individual sounds that belong to the same phoneme). To add additional complexity, there is a poor match between spelling and phonemes. Several things will be simplified here – each phoneme will have exactly one allophone, one sound. Each phoneme will also be represented by a single symbol or letter. In addition the number of unique phonemes will also be reduced, allowing players and aliens to “speak” directly in phonemes – greatly reducing the complexity at the base level.

There is a lot more to talk about when it comes to the language system but that will have to wait for future posts. Feel free to let me know what you think.