Supernatural Language

The consultant says something interesting here, and there’s more to unpack than there might seem. In particular, I want to take a moment to address his comments on language, ambiguity, and to an extent on the actual magic in use, and all three tie together.

Start with the fact that he says English isn’t well suited to describing the supernatural. This is true, and it implies that there are languages which are, so that it could be compared against them. This is also true. I am unlikely to ever formally describe them, but there are two basic types.

The first is a nonhuman language, spoken by beings in the Otherside. For a number of reasons, these languages will be much better at it. They were developed by people with a much fuller understanding of reality’s scope and nature, and they were developed for people who more often engage with some of the key features of how this world works. They tend to have much clearer vocabulary as a result.

These languages will sound more or less similar to human languages, in many cases enough to be at least vaguely mutually comprehensible with one. In terms of my inspirations for those languages, it will typically be based on archaic versions of the languages dominant in the area I borrowed the creature from. It is important, though, to note that this is metatextual reasoning, and the in-universe Watsonian trend is inverted. Kitsune do not sound like they speak something akin to archaic Japanese because they’re from archaic Japan. It would be more accurate to say that Japanese language developed the way it did in large part because of the influence of kitsune and others who speak closely related languages.

This does not mean that human linguistics and etymology is baseless. Languages change once they’re introduced to a culture. There are variations that happen naturally within human society. The etymology chains are typically accurate. It sounds specifically like archaic Japanese because kitsune did not, directly, share the same experiences as Japan since that initial exposure window. Saori’s native language and Kyoko’s are mutually comprehensible but not the same. One of the differences is that most of that finely defined language for supernatural phenomena isn’t there in Japanese. Some elements will have become garbled over centuries of cultural exchange and linguistic drift. Some were never present at all, because most humans have little to no use for them. The joke about Inuit languages having countless words for “snow” is overplayed and at best an oversimplified model, but it expresses an underlying truth. You have extensive vocabulary for things you describe often or need to describe clearly.

This trend is even clearer with the other type, which are constructed languages specifically designed for use in magic. In this case I think there are a few comparison points with real languages, and they help to illustrate the differences between these and natural languages.

Any given complex scholarly field will inevitably have jargon. There are things that the people who work in that field need to be able to define much more clearly than normal language allows for. If I tell you that when I was still considering grad school, my planned area of focus was going to be interspecific eavesdropping by parasitoids and predators on characteristic honest signals of their prey, and that I was considering (among other things) the application of bioinformatics on abstract information, the application of game theory to interspecific relationships, the nature of semiotics as applied to animal communication channels, and the use of traditionally-computational concepts like encryption as a model for the more generalized pressures of a benefit-detriment interspecific relationship, that uh.

Well, if you know the jargon it’s clear. If you’ve spent much time in ecology fields you can probably pick up a fair portion of it, and the rest is coming from information science and computational biology. A little bit of psychology, but not a lot. If you know the jargon, that sentence is much more succinct than any clear, layman’s-terms explanation of the fields of study in play. If not it’s incoherent. This can become even more pronounced in fields like quantum mechanics where the things being described are very far from how humans generally think of their world, and many maths and information science articles require a massive amount of background knowledge related to jargon and notation to make any sense whatsoever.

Magic is a complex, abstract field of study. The basic information can be conveyed in English, and can be conveyed better in the major Otherside languages. But it is not any more necessary for Saori to understand a lot of the abstract, complex ideas involved than it is for Kyoko. She does not care how fundamental forces are interacting to produce an enchantment than you likely care about the (-+++) 4-vector geodesic which marks the free-falling path of the baseball you just threw as it moves through 4-dimensional spacetime. There is no reason for her to have that vocabulary. Her language is not as limited as English but it’s still far from ideal.

Languages in this class, then, are purpose-built. Strictly speaking you could use English and just add a whole bunch of vocabulary, semantics, and symbolic representation, just like you can describe what spacetime is like using English. But with the amount of work that would take it really makes more sense to just construct a language that’s got that material in mind from the start. This is particularly the case because mages (and various Otherside beings, who often have similar needs) have always had very good ability to travel and communicate across long distances. If you’re living in France ca. 1400CE, and you want to collaborate with a colleague who lives in China, you’re…going to need to learn another language anyway. It might as well be one that you can both use to collaborate with the third member of your research team, who is from Central America.

It’s somewhat similar to the status Latin used to hold, and which has now been in many ways taken by English. Even in cultures which do not routinely use English, there are applications which are always going to involve it. Being able to provide air traffic control in English is mandatory internationally with little if any exception. It has been adopted as the shared language so as to avoid language confusion leading to flight collisions. Similarly, Latin used to have much the same status in scholarly circles, and anywhere you went in Europe at one point you would be able to have specific kinds of conversation about topics related to medicine, law, and literature in Latin. Similarly, there are purpose-built constructed languages which have a great deal more precision than English for the supernatural.

All of which brings us back to the original point: English sucks at it. You can see this, among other things, in the sheer number of words I have to use in their original languages. I do that in part out of respect but it would be entirely necessary to avoid translating twenty different creatures as “elf”. There is no detailed vocabulary entirely within English for defining the nature of each.

I think the consultant expresses this frustration pretty well. What’s the difference between a ritual and a ritual spell? Well, they’re nothing remotely like the same thing and in fact have basically nothing in common. But I don’t know what wording would more clearly explain the difference between a ritualized action which will result in something happening because of an external event, and a ritualized action which will result in something happening because of your own magic, when both are producing effects that can superficially be quite similar. Similarly, “spirit” in this setting is a word with a very specific meaning that will come up later on. It has no relationship to a tree spirit. But if you don’t know, say, whether you’re looking at a dryad, a faerie, a kami, there are plenty of possibilities here and many do not even have names in any human language. They are all associated with trees in similar ways. They are thus considered the essential expression of the tree, and thus called spirits.

Both of these frustrations vanish when using a language which was created from the start with the awareness of what these things are and the differences between them. I am unlikely to actually write one out as a conlang and there would be very little value in doing so, but characters are very likely to continue feeling frustrated by these limitations, and it’s plenty of motivation for a lot of mages to study a language better suited to their needs.

As a final note, there are other considerations which come up when actually performing extended ritual spellcasting which further encourage someone to learn specifically one of those constructed languages. In those cases it’s closer to learning a coding language, without which writing software is essentially impossible. The reasons and the nature of this practice will be discussed more later; for now, I just wanted to note that there is this other point of comparison, and it provides an additional incentive to practice at least a bit with one of the more technical, constructed languages.