This little piggy...

I designed a alien species with a extra thumb on each hand, I reasoned that they could bend their thumb around the back of their hands to keep them out of the way if needed. Having extra finger joints helped. They did however have seven limbs total. Two arms, two 'lesser' arms (four digits claw grab like arrangement) two legs and a tail. They were rediclously complicated but I won't go into detail here.

I agree with other posters that if your going to hand multi finger/multi limbed people that their should be other creatures on their planet with a similar arrangement. That or Polydactyly became very common due to a genetic bottleneck.

edited 9th Sep '12 4:47:51 PM by MCE

I don't remember anyone mentioning that aspect before (probably reading failure on my part), but yes, the extra digit would of course be present in related species as well. I discovered a 'pedia article on polydactyly in early tetrapods when I first researched this idea, and going by that timeline, the basic digital pattern had settled by the time the amniotes split from the amphibians. Meaning that, for Earth-parallel evolution, all birds, mammals, and reptiles would be affected, though with some potential for lower-level variation. As my evolution doesn't have to be entirely Earth-parallel, I don't need to stick to that religiously, but it's a helpful guideline at the very least.

Okay, I think I have this figured out now.

The anatomy of the hand is like ours, with an extra finger between our index finger and thumb. So there are two shorter fingers either side of the longest finger. Somehow, I find this simply more interesting than the other option, i.e. adding the extra finger on the other side of the palm, thus having three shorter fingers on that side of the longest finger. The extra finger is again as much shorter as our index finger as our index finger is shorter than our middle finger. So, if T is the thumb and 1-5 the fingers in order of increasing length, the pattern is like this: T-2-4-5-3-1

The semi-finalized names are these:

- Thumb;
- Forefinger;
- Firmfinger, because it's used to steady objects gripped by thumb and forefinger, such as a pen;
- Surfinger, because it surpasses the others in length;
- Banefinger, because it is the fifth finger and five represents bad things;
- Boonfinger, because it is the sixth finger and six represents good things.

It's probably not all that realistic to have these names be as similar-sounding (and thus more prone to being misheard) as that, but I'm invoking creative licence in that regard to cater to my whims.

The banefinger and boonfinger are used in gesturing and for emphasis. So, finger-wagging accompanying a cautionary tale would be done with the banefinger, and a Cleric's blessing gesture would be done with the boonfinger. I'm thinking their version of "fingers crossed" would also involve these two fingers, but I'm not yet entirely sure what it ought to signify. It might be "bad luck turning into good luck", which would be quite similar to our usage. Or it might be the opposite, which would be a rather nasty ill-wishing. It might mean both, depending on which finger is on top of the other. Or it might mean something else entirely...?

It could mean a mixed blessing.

In our culture, fingers crossed can also mean a lie is being told, and that makes sense here. Bane twisted with Boon could represent deception.

Is "mixed blessing" a sufficiently fundamental concept to have a gesture associated with it, though?

According to the Other Wiki, the significance of crossed fingers when telling a lie is to pre-emptively invoke divine protection from the consequences of the sin being committed. So I figured that wouldn't work here. But what you're saying makes a lot of sense; it could totally represent deception, and "twisting the facts" works on an almost literal level, even. The significance would then be to "strengthen" the lie being told, for example.

No reason it should have to be the same as it is for us, just because I'm borrowing the familiar gesture, is there. Especially when the gesture has by now more or less taken of a life of its own, with many, perhaps even most, who use it quite unaware of the original sense.

True.

I notice you seem lack an obscene gesture, equivalent to the middle finger. Maybe twisting the fingers could represent chaos and anarchy, and be used as a gesture of defiance?

Generally, insulting gestures would surely employ the banefinger. I went through a listing of gestures just now, and these are the ones that use specific fingers, rather than the whole hand, and don't rely on alphabetic representations (like the thumb-forefinger ring for "A-ok"):

Pointing would be done with whatever finger fits the situation, I'd say. If the person/thing being pointed at is something positive, one uses the boonfinger ("See that man there? He saved my life back in the day!"); if it's something neutral, the forefinger ("Which way lies Troperville?" - "Thataway!"); if it's something negative, the banefinger ("Burn the witch!"). Same for beckoning.

The equivalent of "screw loose" would be to banefinger-point at one's head: "Addled brains!"

The equivalent of the "money sign" would be to imitate antlers, of course, either by extending forefinger and boonfinger as in our "heavy metal salute", or by holding up both forefingers besides one's head, as we sometimes do when pretending to impersonate a bull or some such.

Not sure about "the finger". As an insult, which as far as I know derives from the historical notion of the middle finger being "dirty" in some way, it would obviously use the banefinger. As a representation of an erect phallus, it gets more complicated, because the connotations of sexuality in general and male sexual prowess in particular would be quite different in the Altlings' culture than in ours - influenced by religious tenets, in both cases. Hmmm.

That's kind of interesting. Is there a distinction between bane as something to be feared and bane as something beneath contempt?

Like, I imagine if you were fighting someone, beckoning with the banefinger would mean "Take your best shot." But would that indicate you're afraid of the other person?

Addled brains- so the Altlings understand the brain-thought connection?

"or by holding up both forefingers besides one's head, as we sometimes do when pretending to impersonate a bull or some such. "

Heh, that has a nice double meaning. "We're going to be rich if we do this." "This is a bullish investment opportunity."

Hm, in that case maybe the insult could be the bane finger pointing down? Or maybe beckoning with the banefinger is the insult.

I could see a justification for the "fingers crossed" gesture being either good luck binding bad (boonfinger over bane), or invoking hope by nullifying luck - good and bad "annihilating" each other. That might fit with the use, if I recall correctly, of showing crossed fingers to indicate the hope of no ill luck interfering with one's intentions or plans.

Well, there is, isn't there? The number five is "bad" in a mythological sense, thus verging on "evil" rather than "worthless". So the finger itself is considered more dangerous than contemptible. But showing it to someone is insulting, and one normally insults the contemptible rather than the dangerous.

If you meet that presumed witch alone in a dark alley, you'll probably want to make a protective sign with you boonfinger rather than insult her. It's only when she's safely tied to the pyre that you feel comfortable pointing at her with your banefinger.

That's my on-the-spot response to your excellent line of questioning, at any rate. What do you think?

Ohhh, good point. I remember that Jean Auel made that assumption in Earths Children, and that I picked up on it as being incompatible with what I'd learned at school about historical beliefs about other organs being the "seat of consciousness". And here I blindly follow in her footsteps anyway.

That being said, after some reflection I actually found myself agreeing with the assumption, because of two things. Firstly, regardless of whatever one knows or doesn't know about human anatomy, one invariably imagines one's innermost self to be located somewhere behind one's eyes, because that's the place from which one seems to be observing the world around one and because vision arguably dominates the sum of our perceptions. It would be interesting to ask a blind person about this - do they instinctively think of themselves as living between their ears, or possibly even in their hands, on occasion?

Secondly, there is a clear link between brain injuries and mental impairment, and no such link, or only a much weaker one, between other injuries and mental impairment. That's the kind of pattern recognition that humans have always been good at.

Any banefinger gesture would be perceived as negative, that much seems clear to me. But whether it's an insult or something else (condescension, challenge, threat) depends on the context and the details of the specific gesture's meaning.

Argh, I like both of those. And I like all of the previous ones, too. How am I supposed to make up my mind?!

Hm, I don't think I usually think of myself as behind my eyes. My eyes are part of me, just like the rest of my body. In the West, we put our hand on our chest to indicate "myself", while in some Asian countries they point at their chin from below. I don't know of any culture that indicates their brain case.

As to the second point, that depends on whether or not they have people who think about things like that. Are there physicians who would take notes on a patients progression of symptoms after injury? Neurological symptoms can occur without a head injury, so a casual observer might miss the correlation. Even if they do make the correlation, that doesn't conclusively prove the brain is the source of thought. Eating or drinking certain things can affect your mood, energy level, etc. but that doesn't mean the stomach is the source of thought.

Like I said though, it is possible they made the connection. According to The Other Wiki, Alcmaeon of Croton made the connection around the 5th century BC.

edited 11th Sep '12 10:37:37 PM by Topazan

Heh. I have the feeling there's a flaw in that parallel somewhere, but I don't seem to be able to locate it right away. Let me think about this for a bit.

That is at once totally true and hardly helpful, when it comes to writing body language into my plot, as I'm sure you'll agree.

I don't think the parallel is flawed. An ancient culture that believes that the heart, for instance, is the source of thought could easily conclude that the brain has some other vital function, and if the brain is damaged to where it can't fully fulfill this role, the heart goes all screwy.

This is assuming they can even diagnose brain damage in the first place. Doesn't that usually require an MRI in the real world?

I guess you're right about the second part not helping as an author.

Oh, I meant obvious physical trauma to the head. Arrow through the skull, that sort of thing. Usually, the victim dies, of course. On occasion, though, such injuries are survivable, at least for an extended period if not indefinitely, even without modern medicine. (ETA

And in some of those cases, there will be symptoms similar to those from a bad stroke: Paralysis, sensory dysfunctions, memory dysfunctions, and so on.

Maybe military surgeons would see enough of such cases to draw conclusions directly, I dunno. If not, you're of course right in what you said earlier - that without a rudimentary scientific structure with features like information exchange and record keeping, sufficiently rare occurrences might remain mysteries for a long time even though they seem entirely straightforward in retrospect.

edited 12th Sep '12 1:40:25 AM by kassyopeia

... like the incredible case of Phineas Gage.