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So we'll still be having this debate thousands of years from now and hundreds of light years away?
(Think of this post as a kind of supplementary village at the base of the Tensor's almighty Mt Linguistics-in-SF.)
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky (which this post will spoil parts of so caveat downloador) is a first contact novel in which two groups of humans stumble across and then prepare to reveal themselves to an alien species they call "Spiders". The Spiders don't know about the humans at the beginning of the book, but the opposite isn't true, so we get to spy on them along with the humans. This is where it gets interesting (and spoilery.)
Rather than make up a language for the Spiders, Vinge sidesteps the issue completely. Not only does he translate their dialogue and vocabulary into unremarkable English, with very occasional alien color (references to extremities called "midhands", etc.), he even overhauls their proper nouns. The first spider we meet is named "Sherkaner Underhill" -- the Spiders have a culture where burrowing is very important. He is from "Princeton", and his nation is at war with a nation that has a city called "Tiefstadt."
In other words, the Spider sections are presented in about as hard a translation as you could get without denying their basic physiology. Even the enemy nation is dressed in German to show contrast with the English of the main society. I don't think I've ever read an SF novel this linguistically obstinate before. Most alien language creators at least want to invent a fancy word for "king" or something. And even within the story, we learn that the translator responsible for this (our) view of the Spiders isn't pleasing her superiors:
"Whatever you're doing, it's messing her up. She's giving me figurative translations. Look at these names: 'Sherkaner Underhill,' 'Jaybert Landers.' She's throwing away complications that all the translators agree on. In other places she's making up nonsense syllables."
"She's doing just what she should be doing. You've been working with automatons too long."
"You're no linguist. ... Her grotesque simplifications are not acceptable."
"No! You need people who truly understand the other side's minds, who can show the rest of us what is important about the aliens' differences. So her Spider names look silly. But this 'Accord' group is a young culture. Their names are still mostly meaningful in their daily language."
"Not all of them, and not the given names. In fact, real Spider talk mixes given names and surnames, that interphonation trick."
"I'm telling you, what she's doing is fine. I'll bet the given names are from older and related languages. Notice how they almost make sense, some of them."
(In the end, the second speaker there manages to calm down his boss by persuading her that the translator is providing a "higher level of translation," allowing the average human crew member to easily comprehend mission-critical information without having to deal with interphonated names and other cultural cruft.)
From a literary point of view, the reason Vinge sets things up this way is so that he can tell the story he wants to about how governance, social structures and science influence and are influenced by each other. And one of his major points is that we, the readers, are more like the Spiders than the human protagonists... at least in the ways that a "higher level" translation preserves.
Zusty:
Yeah, I always had the impression that it was essentially a shortcut (albeit a really smart one), just so readers wouldn't have to slog through meaningless goofy SF names before they could start seeing past them to the characters underneath. Acknowledging it within the fiction was just the icing on the cake.