Is this too unrealistic?

When a made up species of mine have their own vocal language, with approximately as many words as English, but are currently enemies humans. A character of mine and his assistant was able to contain them in a room and watch them secretly, taking notes of syllable frequency analysis and how often each syllable is linked together, similar to how you analyze bigrams in a cryptogram.

After a while they introduce a context, such as shutting off the lights, throwing in an apple or a comrade of theirs and analyze how their speech pattern changes. Which set of syllables have higher frequencies in certain context.

Then just with those techniques, within a week, my character was able to provide his assistant with an analysis to create a device that can translate most of the language to English.

edited 6th Nov '12 7:21:34 PM by PsychoFreaX

Help?.. please...

Pretty damn unrealistic unless you're operating in a particularly soft sci-fi environment. Unless someone is some kind of supergenius or they have incredibly high tech devices analyzing things, two dudes aren't going to be able to translate a whole language based off of what's essentially prison chatter.

So it really is possible for a supergenius huh. Even if it doesn't seem realistic it is then. I guess that's good enough for me. I thought of including more deciphering techniques to make it more believable. But can't come up with many yet.

edited 6th Nov '12 10:41:43 PM by PsychoFreaX

Help?.. please...

Consider what percentage of our language the average person uses in a day. The captives would have no need to use anywhere near a decent sample of their language within the cells and there's no guarantee they're talking about the things that are happening for any length of time. For all your observers know, they're discussing their favourite sport groups.

Try this exercise. Write a script that seems realistic between two humans locked in a cell and have those things happen. See how much or how little time they actually spend talking about the changes that occur.

"oh, the lights have gone out" is probably going to be the extent of their commentary. Unless they go on for half an hour about lights and the sort of lights they like (because of one random incident), the frequency of the syllables used is not going to be heavily affected.

And languages are odd fishies - mutable verbs, pronouns etc. Think of "a", "the", "an", "my", "your", "his", "her", "their", "our" or "am", "are", "is", "was", "were" - and that's just in English, which doesn't give nouns gender like most the European languages do.

Without some means of telling exactly which word(s) pertains to the object (i.e. some helpful soul pointing at things and saying "a tree", "a leaf" in the best "me Tarzan, you Jane" style), all they will have is a detailed analysis of how many times a certain syllable turns up and no idea of what it applys to.

I'm sure that if I were captured and stuck in a cell, my most common syllable is going to be "fuck". It's likely to become even more frequent if the jailers start dicking around with lighting etc.

That does not mean that "fuck" means "light" or "dark" or "cell door".

I can swallow the scenario if a) magic is involved, b) it's soft sci fi, c) the work isn't entirely serious or d) rule of cool, drama, etc.

Otherwise, the methodology involved is faulty (as above poster has pointed out).

"I can't see anything in this cave, it's too fuck."

edited 7th Nov '12 7:48:28 PM by DrStarky

Put me in motion, drink the potion, use the lotion, drain the ocean, cause commotion, fake devotion, entertain a notion, be Nova Scotian

You could actually use that to your advantage... Have the "interpreters" draw the wrong conclusions and end up with a translator program that thinks My Hovercraft Is Full of Eels. Plenty of room for conflict.

edited 8th Nov '12 11:46:00 AM by LongLiveHumour

It's a possibility of it working over an extended period of time, but probably not a week.

Read my stories!

Over time any language will crack and begin to be understood by someone else. Body language, context, hell simple reaction will start filtering out what means what.

Otherwise the Spaniards in the 1500s never would have gotten ANY native allies. (They had a lot despite what Hollywood History would tell you.) The languages of Spain and the Americas had never come in contact with each other prior to 1492 thus never would have had a chance to teach interpreters. Yet over time the Spaniards learned a bit of the language from context and got to doing enough translating that they got some friends who began to learn Spanish themselves and then the cat was out of the bag so to speak.

The difference is that in those interactions, both sides were trying to establish communication. It wasn't the Spaniards simply sitting around watching the locals and extrapolating from what they heard.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

I suspect a lot of pointing at things and speaking slowly and clearly was involved on both sides.

Another major problem (of the many) is where adjectives and adverbs fit in relation to their nouns (over and above whether or not the adjectives change depending on the gender/number of the noun) and verb-subject order.

In English, it's "I am going to town"; in Maori, it's "e haere ana ahau ki te taone" - "going I to the town". (and e [verb] ana is the "performing an ongoing action at this time" tense. In this case "going").

A red sports car in English vs "a sportscar [that is] red" in French.

In many languages, not only must the indefinite article agree with the gender or quantity of the noun, so must any adjectives applied to it/them.

And gods help the humans if the predominent language of the aliens is as much of a clusterfuck of origin languages as English is (and can you imagine how much worse English would be if our nouns still had gender and you had to apply French-descended adjectives (two genders) to Saxon-descended nouns (three genders)?)

And all that's assuming that the alien language doesn't have really bizarre rules or many different words for "my" depending on sex of the speaker and whether it's a possession, a relative, an idea, a part of the body... (borrowed the idea of distinctions in types of possession from one of Larry Niven's short stories in which the aliens were appalled that we have only one word for "my".)

edited 8th Nov '12 7:32:03 PM by Wolf1066

Yeah, unless there is some kind of mind-reading going on here, I don't think I would buy this. There are way too many problems, many of which other people have pointed out.

I might possibly be willing to accept it if they were using this kind of analysis on a much, much wider sample of the aliens' population, and had visuals to take into account. Even then, there would probably be a lot of problems, such as miscommunications, poor understanding of grammar, and lack of cultural context to make sense of certain concepts and idioms.

Overall, it's a neat idea, but it needs a lot of work.

edited 8th Nov '12 7:35:35 PM by ChocolateCotton

Yes I am still kind of iffy about it. One thing I can make clear is that the above contexts are only examples of contexts you can provide them. Certain contexts won't even need to be stimulated, such as time. I guess most of the cursing would go on early during the containment and the discussion of how they get out, so those terms would probably die down as they get bored. We can also stimulate the same context twice, resulting in a natural reaction of "This again?"

Help?.. please...

Nice guess, but I was actually saying "what the fuck are those c***s smoking!?!"

edited 5th Dec '12 12:23:05 AM by PsychoFreaX

Help?.. please...