How to Converse in Universe
a case study on evolutionary phonetics
One way to look at an organism is as a reality processing system. That reality coupled with an effective way to exchange information from one organism to another catalyzes amazing things. Culture, computers, lasik surgery, access to coffee in the Arctic… these are the fruits of a linguistic society.
How homo sapiens acquired language is a contested mystery in science, but we do know that the earliest forms of language were vocal ones. There was a point in history where our ancestors were just as vocally communicative as any other vocal animal. Eventually, the repertoire of spoken sounds became a systemic, rule-governed device for constructing a potentially infinite array of larger units out of a finite assembly of smaller ones, marking a shift from expressive noise to structured symbols.
Let’s look at the granularity of speech and how the units come together as the pulp of our languages.
A Body is a Wind Instrument
In the same way a trumpet creates sounds distinct from a trombone’s, your anatomy produces distinct vocal characteristics. Vocalization is all about how air is manipulated on its way in or out of a body.
Linguistics students learn about the vocal system and how your anatomy moves and contracts to form human speech. You begin to see vocal cords as a reed and your head as a resonant chamber. I remember my own classes making me hyper aware of the way people spoke, even imagining corresponding phonetic symbols as subtitles. Like my Swedish friend whose accent sounds like a whisper. To me, “raspberries” is /ˈɹæzˌbɛɹiz/ where the s’s had hard /z/ sounds but for her it’s /ˈɹæsˌbɛɹis/ where the s’s had soft sound. The only difference between these sounds is that your vocal cords are either vibrating /z/ or not /s/. The Swedes are quite literally soft spoken people.
These phonetic symbols are characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It is robust system for transcribing human speech. It depicts individual units of sounds (called phones) and is impressively comprehensive. It works for every language and is even possible to transcribe beat-boxing using IPA. You can write the sound of a kiss as [ʘ], phonetically known as a bilabial click. Orthographically, IPA is a true universal system. It considers all of the ways air can be constricted in a human mouth, leaving no sound unaccounted for—unless you have an anatomical adaptation.
The phonetic alphabet fails to descirbe sound this accurately when you account for body modifiers. In college, I met someone with a bifurcated (split) tongue and immediately wondered how you would fit the novel sounds she could make with two tongues into the current phonetic system. I quickly realized you could not. This person was capable of creating sounds we had no definers for.
What is compelling about human body modifiers is how such a small change breaks open a system previously thought to be comprehensive. It’s a reminder of the fluidity and dynamic nature of language, even in a single species.
The Future of Talking Heads
I work for an animal genetic engineering lab. We build technology for designer animals that involve modifying physical traits and engineering sapient-like intelligence (we too are body modifiers in this sense). It’s a flavor of biotechnology that I call zootechnology [zoʊˈtɛkˈnɑləd͡ʒi]. I spend a lot of time thinking about how genetic manipulation could change these organisms in profound ways anatomically, socially, and of course linguistically.
How we might deal with other linguistic species?
My work as an artist and researcher are direct responses to blooming zootechnology. I offer you case studies on specific ways this could shape our world as well as how to expand our collective imagination.
Outgrowing the Alphabet
Questions about how non-human language will be integrated— and how human language will adapt— are too vast and abstract to give satisfying predictions. Even Chomsky’s widely accepted theory of universal grammar may be relinquished1.
However, one quality of cross-linguistics we can meaningfully investigate is vocalization. What dictates a vocal repertoire has everything to do with anatomy, how it shapes the air that flows in and out of our bodies. We are essentially instruments, each with a unique structure and coordination that shapes our voices.
Understanding how deeply intertwined sound-based language and anatomy are allow us to concretely speculate on what this part of a linguistic reality would look like. We have plenty of data on the vocal capabilities of many animals, along with the mechanical and anatomical insights to explain them, defining a measurable and finite "sound-making" search space. The requirements for vocalization are so concrete that they can even be replicated without a living subject—for example, the prosectors who made a dead lion roar.
This subtopic of linguistics is known as phonetics. It covers language transcription, production, acoustic transmission and perception. You can understand how quickly this complicates with interspecies language exchange. How is sound perceived by an owl? A crocodile?
Distilled further to the fathomable component of speech production(vocalization), there are major differences across vocal species. Having an organ like a syrinx, a melon, or a respiratory system completely separate from the mouth and tongue like a horse — a whole new anatomical schematic and phonetic alphabet is in order.
To show limitations of modern phonetics, I will explore examples of how our very anatomy can interfere with the efficiency and consistency of this linguistic system.
Expanding IPA
There are living humans with anatomical features who can make new sounds that meaningfully expand the phonetic potential of human speech. I’ve decided to focus on two of them; a bifurcated (split) tongue and Khecarī mudrā, a yoga move where the tongue is pulled back and into the nasal cavity. This is how it’s done:
To illustrate how these adaptations expand the current system, here is the latest recognized IPA chart alongside the adapted one. Additions have been highlighted and new sounds are assigned a unique symbol.
The rows on the consonants table describe manner of articulation. This is how air is constricted with the mouth and tongue which influences the sound. Having a split tongue would allow the speaker new manners of articulation because they have two tongues2. This I dubbed a bifid.
The columns describe place of articulation, or where in the mouth the tongue makes air constriction. People who can do Khecarī mudrā are capable of articulation in the nasal cavity, dubbed intranarial.
Finally there are subsections of the chart that describe nuanced qualities in speech production that describe things like intonation, stress or breathy voice.
The New Symbols and What they Mean
Consonants
Φ and ѱ
Bifids. These symbols, φ (phi) and ѱ (psi) were selected because they are unclaimed in IPA and visually represent a two pronged affair. Their distinction is in the voicing: φ is voiceless (no vocal fold vibration), while ѱ is voiced (with vocal fold vibration).
These symbols account for any phones produced in this manner within the 3 places in the chart. It’s created by keeping the tongue tips together while relaxing the downstream musculature, creating a slit where air flows, yielding distinctive sound.
/Φ/
/ѱ/
Ю
Intranarial Plosive. Airflow is completely blocked, then suddenly released. Similar to /k/ but intranarial.
አ
Intranarial Trill. A trill is produced by rapid oscillation between articulatory positions, generally of the tongue but also lips. Akin to a rolling r, but would occur in the nasal cavity.
∏
Intranarial Fricative. A fricative describes a sound made by partial air obstruction that creates turbulence, like in /f/ and /s/. Here, obstruction occurs in the nasal cavity.
ე
Intranarial Approximant. Almost like a vowel, but still a consonant for complicated reasons I’m not getting into. Air constriction is slight, like an /l/, but occurs in the nasal cavity.
Diacritics
Diacritics capture subtle differences in pronunciation. Even with identical manner and place between phones, minor variations create distinct sounds.
᚜
Bifid Divergence. This symbol, an ogham, I chose to denote a sound produced with the two tongues spread apart. The gap yields a subtle yet distinctive quality.
[θ᚜]
Suprasegmentals
These are phonetic features that extend beyond units of sound like stress and intonation.
∞
Simultaneous. Made possible with two tongues, this symbol was chosen to denote when two sounds occur simultaneously. One tongue tip could be placed between the teeth while the other rests behind, producing two sounds simultaneously.
Transcribed as [θ∞s].
So there you have it— newly defined speech sounds. While they’re not officially recognized in any known language, they are legitimate phonetic possibilities, producible by living human beings.
How to Build a Shared Reality
Language is alive. It is shaped by geography, culture, and technology, evolving under pressure like any living system. Adaptations such as Silbo Gomero’s whistled language (geographical), the coded slang of Polari (cultural) and adopted IRC-borne terms like ‘LOL’(technological) all demonstrate howing how language absorbs and restructures itself around the tools that carry it. It is terminally adaptive.
For all its adaptability, language gas remained a speices-specific trait of humans. In this century, we may influence its evolution. It will hybridize and mutate, become something stranger, something less human in origin but more universal in scope.
A linguistic future like this opens new dimensions of understanding. Other organisms experience reality through completely different sensory and cognitive hardware. We already know that the way organisms perceive the world is not uniform—so why should we assume that the way they structure meaning would be?
This primes us to imagine a future unconstrained by single-species technology and understanding. It feels like a door to profound breakthroughs toward understanding nature and better cooperating in this universe. If we seek to understand the universe, we should invest in maximizing communications between each node of experiences.
Tricky said it best— how can we learn the universe, if we can’t even converse in universe?3
Thank you to my alumni professor and phonetician Allard Jongman for the feedback on conceptualizing new phonetic sounds, and thank you to Bri Uvina for modeling and recording.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248226423_Universal_Grammar_and_Semiotic_Constraints
https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2015/Papers/ICPHS0461.pdf