What are language concepts that could be considered to be based on human anatomy?

Question

I'm in the early stages of creating an alien language for a personal writing project. I'm trying to avoid the aliens' language having properties that human languages do that are somehow linked to our anatomy. One of the most obvious examples of such a feature is a numerical system with base ten due to the number of digits.

What are language concepts that are linked to our anatomy in comparable ways that I should find alternatives for when creating a language for aliens who are not humanoid? Any references for links between our anatomy and such language concepts or features are much appreciated.

Answer 1

Some obvious ones:

Phonetics, be it of spoken or signed language, is obviously constrained by the body of humans - both in the channels (aural, visual) employed and also in how they are employed.

Metaphors often make use of body parts. Spatial prepositions and adverbs are often derived from relevant body parts: front from face, forehead, nose, chest; back from back or butt; up from head… you get the picture. Basically every organ has been referred to as being the cause of emotions etc as well in metaphors.

Words for directions in particular are also somewhat based on human anatomy. We have lateral symmetry (left-right) but an alien could likely have some form of radial symmetry in their bodies, which would make the concepts of leftness and rightness very weird to them. Aquatic beings would also likely have a different concept of directions altogether, probably based more on the orientation of their own bodies than relative to the ground.

Those are the things that come to mind. However, much more importantly, the inner workings of language as a whole would likely be different from a human’s. There are some things in human language that you really wouldn’t assume to be necessary. Just to make two examples:

It seems pretty clear that humans take the raw audio input, break it into segments (phones) then further abstract those phones into phonemes, which are then in turn used to build more complex words. One could just as well imagine skipping the segmentation step and going directly from audio to meaning. There appears to be evidence however that some songbirds also employ what could be considered phonemes in their songs, so perhaps it is to be expected.

Another thing is in syntax: human language does not appear to allow circular dependencies, that is word¹ A modifying word B, which in turn modifies word A again. From my fairly limited understanding of syntax, human sentences can be structured in a tree structure. It seems plausible that an alien language might have more or less freedom, perhaps allowing cyclic graphs in their syntax… or in the other direction, only linear dependence. An example of an alien conlang playing around with this is Europan, which I personally consider one of the most interesting conlangs I’ve ever encountered.

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¹or clause

Answer 2

I think the question is not well formulated. Mostly because "language concepts" (e.g. tense-aspect-mood systems, animacy, verbal valence, case systems...) reflect the workings of the human mind far, far more than they could ever reflect the human anatomy. Anatomy/biology of course influences massive swathes of semantics, but I don't think anything other than pure phonetics or sign language is influenced by anatomy.

Facial expressions and body language probably belong there, but tend to have a huge cultural element. Position of the ears, for example, is not something humans make (or can make) use of, but maybe elves could.

Some more semantics example:

• We make distinctions useful to us at our given size. We cannot tell apart things by smell, or by UV light the way other animals (or measuring instruments) can. We do not tell apart very tiny things by basic names (e.g. ants, mites, sand). If we could sense, say, gravitic variations or psychic energies, we might have entirely different ways to describe position or time.
• Time is linear to us, cause precedes effects and so on, we cannot watch again a past event. This obviously affects how language models time and mood. Consider the Observers from Fringe or any other species with a different perception of time. Their possibly utterly alien perception of time may well be the reason their writing is (apparently) indecipherable.
• "Fish" is not a proper biological class (and whether marine mammals are excluded from it in common parlance is debatable!) because we don't feel a need to be any more precise about it, but we would have better concepts for it if we were a marine species! Similarly, plants are divided, roughly, into, flowers, lianas, grass, trees and shrubs. This system is not even very efficient for Earth ecology!
• Expanding on the UV thing, color words are constrained by our visual capacity, and typically distinguish a surprisingly limited number of basics. Forget the hierarchy part, nonderived terms usually stop around 6-8 words, why? A species with different color perception would do things differently. Mark Rosenfelder spends an entire chapter on this point in his Conlanger's Lexipedia.
• As far as number base systems, decimal and vigesimal are most common in humans because we have 10 fingers, and 20 fingers and toes. (although a huge number of bases have been documented, I don't think any languages have a binary or ternary one)
• Kinship terminology is based off our own reproductive biology (and our gregariousness). What of a species where the embryo must be incubated in a member of a different species? What about a species where reproduction requires gametes from more than two individuals?

Answer 3

Just a couple of sci-fi examples:

Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye has a race with two small manipulating arms on one side, and a large "gripping hand" arm on the other. Even the humans pick up the phrase "on the gripping hand" to mean a third alternative to two possibilities.

One of Spider Robinson's Callahan's Place stories has an alien species with trilateral symmetry. Having full 360-degree vision eliminates many ideas about distrust- "Blind-sided", "Stabbed in the back", etc.

And, going the other direction, L.Neil Smith's Converse and Conflict" has a scene where a human is explaining to an alien how Cold-War-ish Earth politics is causing friction among the multi-national human crew, and the alien observes that, if war breaks out on Earth, the captain

"...will have a headache on his hands. Can you really say that? What an amazing language!"

Answer 4

Much of by is based upon anatomy. Mostly that of Phonetics, and, by extension, phonological change and glottochronology. If you look at the IPA, the various phonemes are based upon point of articulation and such. Dental, Bilabial, Palatal, Glottal, etc. So I would recommend looking at the structure of the mouth of the aliens in question, and looking at the IPA in order to see what sounds would be possible with them and which would be impossible. For example, if they have no teeth, they would not be capable of dental consonants.

This by extension can effect the way in which their sounds change, based upon what sounds are easier for them in any given situation.

The amount of digits can also effect what the most common radix would be for the languages, for example, in Humans the most common radix is 10 due to us having ten fingers. But, it is still not the only one used. Look at:

Mesopotamian: Base-60

Mayan Languages: Base-20

Pamaen: Base-8

Yam Languages: Base-6

Chumashan: Base-4

And so on. But more languages use Base-10 than any other base, due to the ease of counting in Base-10 compared to other bases, due to our ten fingers.

Note: If you want better bases, it is easier to divide and multiply numbers in Bases with a greater amount of factors. This is the main reason behind the Duodecimal Movement, due to 12 being a superior highly composite number, with four non-trivial factors (2,3,4,6) compared to Base-10's two non-trivial factors (2,5). You can find multiple bases and their mathematical properties on wikipedia