So my OTHER hobby is conlanging (constructing languages. Think Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Klingon from Star Trek, Na’vi from Avatar, Dothraki from Game of Thrones, etc). If you don’t know what an international auxiliary language (IAL) is, it’s a constructed language designed to be easy to learn in order to ease international communication. Esperanto is the most famous example of an IAL.

Conlanging, like ham radio, is a fairly broad hobby. I focus specifically on xenolangs, which are languages spoken by aliens or other nonhuman creatures. The most notable feature of most xenolangs is that they don’t use sounds that humans can make. The vocal tract (the set of organs that we use to make speech sounds) is like a musical instrument, and a very differently shaped vocal tract will produce very different sounds. Indeed, xenolangs as often as not don’t even use sound as a medium. Real life signed languages use vision rather than sound, conveying meaning through space and motion. You could use flashes of light at different wavelengths and amplitudes, clouds of pheromones, really anything that can be used as discrete symbols can be assigned meaning to form a language.

The language I’m thinking of takes inspiration from CW and RTTY. Like CW, it uses two different mark lengths (here called ‘short’ and ‘long’). Also like CW, it is intended to be transmitted and interpreted directly by the operator rather than being demodulated by a computer. Like RTTY, it uses two different mark frequencies, tentatively separated by 170 Hz. The two frequencies are called here ‘low’ and ‘high’. With two lengths and two tones, we have four possible mark values: short low, short high, long low, and long high. What I described above, the set of sounds or other symbols used to convey a language, is referred to as its phonology.

The next layer above phonology is phonetactics, or the ways in which the symbols that a language uses are allowed to be arranged to form words. Taken together, a language’s phonology and phonetactics are what make a language sound the way it does. If we limit the length of a word to six marks or fewer, that gives us 4^6 + 4^5 + 4^4 + 4^3 + 4^2 + 4 = 5640 possible words. For comparison, 2000 words is usually cited as the amount of vocabulary needed to communicate most ideas in a language. Since we’re not encoding letters but whole words, we don’t need a character space like CW uses. We thus have two space lengths, intra-word and inter-word.

What makes this a language rather than a code is that the sequences of marks represent morphemes (individual units of meaning like prefixes, suffixes, and simple words) rather than letters in an alphabet. Morphology refers to how a language uses its morphemes. Perhaps the most common way to categorize a language’s morphology is whether it uses word order (analytic) or inflection (synthetic) to indicate the role of words in a sentence. This is a spectrum. English, which lacks a lot of the inflections seen in other related languages, tends toward analytic. Latin tends toward synthetic since it uses noun and verb ending to do what English does with word order and helping verbs.

At the extreme ends of this spectrum are isolating languages like Mandarin, which rely on word order almost exclusively, and polysynthetic languages like Navajo which can form whole sentences with a single word composed of many prefixes and suffixes.

This language would be analytic, possibly even isolating. Relying on subtle changes to small parts of a word when you only have four phonemes and are talking over a noisy connection would be a bad idea.

That’s about as far as I’ve gotten. My next step would be to assign meanings to a list of basic terms and use those to write simple sentences to start teasing out the grammar. I personally use something called the Swadesh List for this, which is a list of ~207 words that are claimed to be more or less universal across languages. It’s mostly words for pronouns, small numbers (1-5), body parts, ubiquitous natural things like certain plants and animals, celestial bodies and meteorological phenomena like sun, moon, and cloud, and so on.

But why, though? We already use English as a common language in ham circles. For fun, that’s why. Tolkien invented peoples and places and histories and myths to give context to the languages he was already developing. Just so, this language technically exists in a wider world that I develop for fun. Coming back around to the xeno in xenolang, this language is actually used by a species of aliens who have just invented wireless communication. The languages these aliens speak have far fewer different sounds, and rely much more heavily on subtle changes in pitch and volume to convey meaning. The use of volume in particular means that fading is a bigger deal for them than it is for us. Analog radiotelephony proves to be a much harder nut for them to crack, so they invent this language which doesn’t rely on volume in order to communicate.

Other ham-related tidbits you might find interesting: Their planet has a ring, so ‘ring bounce’ makes intercontinental DXing on VHF and above much more doable, provided they’re at the right latitude. Their first contact with Earth (which occurs several dozen millennia after inventing this language) is an attempted response to a ham calling CQ via CW over satellite. They don’t know Morse, but can deduce that it’s sent manually based on the slow data rate and the subtle imperfections in timing imparted by the ham’s fist. Their “response” consists of spamming CQ CQ CQ CQ over and over again, only knowing that ‘dah di dah dit. dah dah di dah.’ is some sort of message preamble.