Recent work - languages

Pictures! hopefully they are not absurdly large.  No idea; I'm on the tablets.  Anyway, as I have mentioned, I've been engrossed in transferring my notes from a rather rain-logged notebook to something a little more durable (and yet, not to a digital format, ironically).

As happens whenever I do this kind of thing (such as with essays), this has let me go over my ideas a second time more critically - to consider what is important, what is overbroad and extraneous, to revise and refine and develop.  So making progress!  Story is beginning to come together much better (somewhat less open ended), and possible plot twists are making themselves known!

But what it boils down to is a paper bound "wiki" - all the information and detail and reasons and so forth that I come up with, collected in one area.  I can even jump from page to page!  It's more organized now.

What you see in the last picture has been the most recent focus for the past few days (not pictured: three or four pages of discarded drafts) - a language subsystem.  It was inspired by something I read somewhere else (I wish I could remember where exactly now, to give credit where credit is due) but I've never quite bothered to formalize it.

what boils down to is a universal translation system for a foreseeable problem in interspecies communication; indeed, we have this problem here on Earth already, right here and right now.  Body Language (and other subtle communicators).  No one has a true Sarcasm Detector right?  The age old example would be the smile - it does not mean the same thing in all cultures, much less all contexts.  In some cultures it is a hostile gesture, a declaration of impending violence.  In others, a gesture of friendliness and welcome.  IIRC, the famous picture of Nixon stepping off a plane and signing "peace" with his fingers was, locally, equivalent to an offensive declaration to all viewers.  Kinda like flipping everyone off.

So what happens when you have aliens attempting cross species communications, if we have that problem within a single species on a single planet?  What happens if one alien is beaked, and wholly incapable of smiling?

What if the alien is a hive swarm, and incapable of demonstrating, much less comprehending, such individual expression?

What of species (for example, some octopii) that communicate through photo-chromatrophic signals (color changes and patterns)?

Thus the Emotional-Context Indicator system; imagine using hand signals to indicate whether you were or were not serious in making a statement (akin to Patrick Rothfuss' system in Wise Man's Fears, iirc)? Or to indicate deference to or agreement with another in making a comment?  How much better for eliminating misunderstanding!

Of course, I wouldn't put it past humans to misuse such a system for deception.  So it's not necessarily without it's flaws.  And of course, if you lack appropriate limbs for such signals, that's a problem too.  However, posit a wearable adornment of low level AI, capable of translating subtext via color gradients or shapes (and translating likewise back to the wearer, perhaps through holographic projection).

But not all emotional-context require signals, and in some cases it would be counterproductive (such as signalling that one was lying).  In case, I've imagine a tiered system, 1-10, indicating degree to which the resulting ECI is present in; and come up with quite a few.

I think I have more negatives than positives.... Well, that's Valentines Day for you.