The Languages of Dr. Daniel Jackson

[icarus]

melpemone and I were chit-chatting about Daniel Jackson and language, and I thought I'd better write this while linguistics is still fresh in my mind.

The Languages of Dr. Daniel Jackson

For Daniel to have the range of skills he's displayed in interacting with all these ancient races across the galaxy, he will have studied all the main types of language morphologies (a morphology is the way a language, well, morphs or grows. Some grow by sticking words together free+way=freeway, others by adding endings this-um, that-am, etc.). Since he understood 23 languages (as mentioned in 1969), it's very likely language has been a lifelong hobby. People who only learn languages in school for doctorates learn maybe 3-5, and only those relevant to their field. Daniel's knowledge is far-ranging and has little to do with his specialty of Ancient Egypt.

Early Childhood Exposure

I believe that Daniel was exposed to three radically different language systems before the age of 8, when the human mind is hard-wired to pick up language quickly.

Those languages (and their associated morphological systems) were probably:

His native English (derivational)
Arabic (agglutinating) learned on digs with his parents, through playing with the worker's kids, and
Dutch (compounding) via his grandfather Nick.

He would also have played with his parents Egyptian symbols and been taught hieroglyphics (what kid could resist all the cool pictures?).

Teenage Language Studies

Because these three languages form words so differently from each other, Daniel would have taken an interest in sorting them out. After his parents' death he would have had a very different lifestyle, and noticed other kids didn't know other languages.

Then he would've found in Junior High that he picked up new languages readily. The American school system starts teaching foreign languages after age 13, when the window for language acquisition has closed. So while the other kids struggled, these foreign sounds flowed easily from Daniel's lips, due to early exposure. One can imagine a German teacher excited by Daniel's lovely (if slightly Dutch) accent, "Everyone, listen to Daniel. Now Daniel, repeat the passage for us."

A nice little ego-boost, especially for a slightly goofy-looking kid living with foster parents. French, German and Spanish are the usual language offerings in High School.

I expect after a couple years of "normal America" he would have missed the multi-lingual world (it's unlikely his foster parents were Archeologists) and associated the sounds of foreign languages with family, parents, home... It would be like the smell of homemade cookies for most of us. Studying language would have felt good for a lot of reasons.

By the way, his American accent – with the soft t-sounds and non-rhotic accent – is distinctly Californian, probably southern CA (not bad for an actor from Canada; we must congratulate his voice coach). His parents' accents were both East Coast, his mother being more midwestern, from Pennsylvania or Chicago. His father's voice had the hard east coast edge, slightly aristocratic. I'm going to say Connecticut born, lived in New York as an adult.

The implication is that Daniel spent the majority of his childhood after his parents' death in Southern California. There he picked up both his accent and most of his slang… with that west coast tendency to trail off and throw away half a sentence.

Daniel is my age, and was a teenager right around the early video game boom (Space Invaders, PacMan, Donkey Kong) and… the original influx of Dungeons & Dragons, which sucked in all the imaginative geek-types (before it developed the rep of being a little strange; originally parents supported D&D as being a sort of "PBS" of kids' games.). His interest in Mythology goes far beyond and probably predates college.

Since Daniel's life as a foster child would have been very normal (he's too well-adjusted for it not to have been), we have to assume pop-culture teenage sources for some of his later interests. His parents died too young to explain it entirely. With Daniel being slightly geeky it's not much of a stretch to picture him making use of (and expanding) his childhood knowledge of mythology for gaming through ages 11-14, which then revitalizes and makes use of his knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics. I'm going to guess that he also learned Celtic Runes at this time, for very teenage reasons:

a) they look cool when you draw them on your jeans
b) pretty girls cluster around and say "Hey, draw my name in Runes!"
c) their similarity to hieroglyphics where each symbol means something.

Daniel, with his obsessive personality, probably went further and started playing with Old English and Middle English in high school. This may have come through the patron saint of D&D, J. R. R. Tolkien, (a devotee of mythology, linguist and Old English scholar), or a high school literature teacher (Advanced Placement in literature, Chaucer, anyone?). Or else Daniel may have taken summer jobs at the Renaissance festivals (it's somehow difficult to imagine him mowing lawns and working at MacDonald's).

Since this D&D and Renaissance festival stuff had a rep of being "childish" and "weird," he would have abandoned it by the time he went to college, and studied mythology from the perspective of psychology and philosophy. This would have fed his interest in Archeology, following in his parents' footsteps.

This would go a long way in explaining why Daniel is far more mystical than his parents (note their clearly intellectual responses to "8-year-old" Daniel when he claimed he'd hurt his leg).

College Language Studies

Later languages he would have picked up through formal study in college. His ease in acquiring languages through conversation indicates someone who's used to learning through listening. I'm guessing that in addition to his childhood, he probably "hung out" with the foreign students out of his own desire to travel and see the world, and learn about other cultures. This is where the Daniel we know begins to make his appearance. Here his language acquisition would have been very eclectic, based on whatever nationalities were represented at school.

We know he has a Doctorate in Archeology from the Oriental Institute in Chicago, and there's strong evidence his Doctorate in Linguistics is from UCLA. We don't know where he did his undergraduate studies or his Master's, or what his majors were. However, Daniel's way of dealing with people has a psych-student tinge, so I would guess that his undergraduate degree might be in Psychology (many people start out with more practical foundational degrees) until he realized he was more interested in foreign cultures than anyone's petty psychological issues. He probably took the opportunity to formalize his study of Old English (inflective), Middle English (derivational) at this time (for fun).

Recognizing his interest in culture, he would have shifted to Cultural Anthropology for his Master's. Since culture is so language-driven, he would have really geared up on the world languages, reaching for those languages that were very different from his experience, such as Russian (inflective) or Chinese (isolating).

Then for the doctorate in Linguistics, by this time he would have known he was going for ancient cultures and thus studied Mayan, Aztec, gone back to Hieroglyphics and coasted through those classes, composing his own dictionary and staying late to chat with his professors, Welsh, Ancient Babylonian (Cuneiform), and Phonecian. It's also possible he didn't study Old English until he began Linguistics.

Then on to Archeology, making an arc from the human myth-centric to the historical search for myth in the dusts of time. He would have studied Greek (inflective, I believe) in order to read the Rosetta stone himself and argue with Budge. Most people who study Greek also study Latin, for the same reason: to have direct access to classical texts.

He admits in The Fifth Race that his Latin (inflective) isn't very strong, and that would be because he wasn't exposed to a heavily inflected language when he was young. His German would've always been far better than his French. His Latin's probably excellent compared to most people's, but it would not have come as naturally as he's used to.

He also would have no exposure to an isolating language morphology, but would have studied it intensely once he began focusing on Egyptian Hieroglyphics. It's likely that Ancient Egyptian, like Chinese, has an isolating morphology, namely one sound equals one word, with not much change or growth. Also Chinese is one of only a few modern almost-pictographic writing systems. So he would have studied Chinese in order to gain a grasp of Egyptian that goes beyond Budge.

Daniel and Fundamental Linguistics

So Daniel's background in language doesn't come solely from his parents, nor does it appear out of the blue. It's gradual, and he would have seemed a relatively normal kid, if somewhat better at languages than most (understandably so). His ability comes from the fact that he was exposed to a cross-cut of three radically different language systems, while the sheer number is due to his love of culture.

Below is an explanation of the main language morphologies, and Daniel's exposure to them.

Derivational – English is a derivational language, where prefixes and suffixes are added to a word to make it multi-purpose. This of course in Daniel's native language. "Dis" + "Illusion" = "disillusion."

Compounding – German is a compounding language, as is Dutch I believe. Daniel probably would have been exposed to Dutch via his grandfather, but since Dutch is rarely taught in US schools (based on the slang Daniel uses and his accent, he went to school in the US) Daniel probably studied its close relative, German. Compounding creates words through sticking them together "whale" + "road" = "whaleroad" or ocean.

Isolating – It is highly likely that Ancient Egyptian, like Chinese, has an isolating morphology, namely one sound equals one word, in an isolated society where there's not much change or growth. Daniel's exposure to Abydonian would have worked on his main weakness in his language experience.

Inflective – Latin and Sanskrit are both inflected languages where endings are tacked on to indicate case, whether something is a subject or object. Old English also was highly inflected, and the case still remains in our oldest words, our pronouns. We say "he" if he's the subject, and "him" if we mean the object. Inflected languages do this for all words, so that word order doesn't matter. One can say CAT CHASE DOG or DOG CHASE CAT or CAT DOG CHASE, and the endings on cat/dog/chase will tell who's doing what to whom.

Agglutinating – Arabic is a classic agglutinating language, where the root word syllables are sorted into related words. English doesn't do this at all, so Daniel has a real leg up by being exposed to Arabic so young. With that, unlike most Americans, he would have had some exposure to all the main language strategies. If there were a root Arabic word KaMaTa, then the words created from it would be KaremMa'Tabi.

Notes: A special thank you to melpemone for providing the list of canon languages.

Languages According to Canon: 22 Earth-based, 4 Off-world

14 Earth-based Languages mentioned in Episodes:
English
Ancient Babylonian/cuneiform
Phoenician
Norse Runes
Aztec
Middle English
Welsh
Ancient Egypitian (later known to be Goa'uld/Abydonian)
Russian
German
Spanish
Latin
Greek
Mayan

4 Off-world languages:
Ancient
Gadmeer
Unas language
Linear A (obscure Goa'uld)

8 Remaining Hypothesized Earth languages (and basis for guess – I'm open for votes on the last two):
Sanskrit (Nirti)
Arabic (Time spent in Egypt, possibly a couple dialects)
Dutch (his grandfather's Dutch)
Chinese (Yu)
French (just making a guess since it's so common in high school)
Old English
?
?

I hope you found this interesting and helpful in writing Daniel. No, I am not remotely obsessed with Daniel Jackson. Why do you ask?



ETA: Corrections, additions, guesses at other possible languages, up to and including no way Daniel was a D&D geek, he was really a [punk/goth/stoner/other]! are all welcome. :D

Comments

[kuteki.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post, and I didn't even understand some of it. But very useful too, as for the other two languages, how about Italian and something like Swedish/Icelandic. Just making a random guess. :)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Italian! *slaps forehead* Yeah. As for the other, yep, I bet he would learn a modern Nordic language to go with those Norse Runes.

Icarus

[destina.livejournal.com]

This is a fascinating conjectural essay. Very interesting extrapolations from canon.

By the way, his American accent – with the soft t-sounds and non-rhotic accent – is distinctly Californian, probably southern CA

Hmmm. I don't really agree with this. I'm from SoCal, and he sounds distinctly Canadian to me, because of his elongated o's. I could be wrong, but don't think Michael Shanks is trying to affect an American accent at all.

As for the canon languages he knows, don't forget Atanik (Upgrades). Also, he doesn't speak Chinese; we find this out in Fragile Balance.

[moojja.livejournal.com]

Or just a dialect of Chinese. I have to re-watch the clip, but it doesn’t sound like Mandarin to me, which is the official language spoken in mainland china since the communist take over.

Daniel also speaks fluent Ancient now, I wonder how that affects his French. ;-).

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

*nods* Most of the Chinese immigrants (up to a certain date) to this country spoke Cantonese. I think since he needed a translator in Fragile Balance, he doesn't speak any variety of Chinese.

Which is sort of a relief. I mean, the number of languages is getting ridiculous.

There's also the possibility, mentioned in comments below, that when he says he speaks 23 languages he doesn't mean he's fluent in all of them. That would be impossible.

Icarus

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

The O's are where he slips from time to time. It could be just a slightly Americanized Vancouver accent and not deliberate at all. But he does consciously study and use accents, for example his Boston accents from Lifeboat.

On the whole though, his accent rules out the midwest, the south (by a long shot), the east coast, and especially New York.

Hmmm. Possibly not SoCal. It's very close to my boyfriend's accent, which is San Francisco/Bay Area.

Ha. It would be too much to have my slashy Daniel grow up in San Francisco. *cough*

Okay. Sacramento then. :D

Icarus

[tafkarfanfic.livejournal.com]

Boston accents from Lifeboat? What?

Sorry, I'm Boston born and bred. If there were Boston accents there, I sure didn't hear them.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh, and thanks for the heads up on the canon languages. I'll cross off Chinese.

This is a fascinating conjectural essay. Very interesting extrapolations from canon.

wildernessguru says the reason why it's so hard to find good SG-1 fanfic is because we're given too little character background canon by the series. So the writer has to stretch to fill in all the holes. In his opinion it makes SG-1 fanfic harder to write, but you become a better writer in doing so.

Icarus

[destina.livejournal.com]

wildernessguru says the reason why it's so hard to find good SG-1 fanfic is because we're given too little character background canon by the series. So the writer has to stretch to fill in all the holes.

Many of the stories I dislike the most have filled in the character background -- with fanon. For instance, pervasive fanon that Daniel grew up in Egypt, or England, or that he was abandoned as a child, abused, neglected, etc. Sometimes the fanon infiltrates the character portrayal in the fan fiction to such an extent that the adult characters become unrecognizable to me -- needy, insecure Daniel as an outgrowth of an abused child, for instance. So I'd say it's the opposite problem from what wildernessguru describes -- not that there's not enough writers stretching, but they aren't stretching in logical or believable directions. *g* Instead they are stretching to accomodate certain views of the characters that don't line up with mine, and so they aren't writing things I really want to read.

[cordelia_v]

It's always nice when we can import academic interests into fandom hobbies, no? I felt like that, when I wrote the essay about Hermione as a historian.

xochiquetzl has shown herself to be no true friend to me (nor are you, with your SG rec pages), by getting me to read some SG fanfiction. Actually, it's getting rather odd that I've now read quite a few SG fics, without seeing an episode (I can IM Xhochi with questions, when I don't understand something).

Clearly, I won't escape getting the DVDs for this, in the long run. But I am desperately grasping at the defense that I can't start any new fandom canon until I've turned in my big RL manuscript in July.

At any rate, I read your post with interest. A couple of reactions. I haven't studied as much linguistics as you, and am more of a user than a theorist, but your categories didn't work entirely for me.

I can't see how English and Dutch are radically different language systems. They're sister languages. Because I speak German and English (Dutch is sort of halfway between the two, in a sense I can't verbalize), I can almost always read Dutch text, and usually understand short spoken passages. So, how are these two different? Unless by "radically different language systems" you just mean what the rest of us would call "two different languages."

The division between derivational/inflected/compounding languages totally doesn't work for the three I know fairly well. German is at least as derivational as German (think of the list of prefixes like an, vor, ver, hin, her, ab, etc.), and English compounds sometimes (not as often as German, I know). And German is inflected: it has four cases, which are heavily used. Russian and Latin have six, of course. But German is still inflected, much more than English.

And Russian makes even more use of prefixes and suffixes than English and German. It's the most derivative-dependent language I know of. You can't construct hardly a single sentence without those meaning-deriving prefixes and suffixes.

As for Daniel, he's a little too good to be true, from an academic's standpoint. (of course, most TV characters are, for example in their physical beauty, so why am I quibbling?). Judging from fanfic, Daniel seems to have an advanced degree not only in linguistics and archeology (as you note) but also in anthropology. It wasn't clear to me whether TV script writers realize that these are three distinct disciplines.

I have a hard time buying that someone his age knows that much, to be honest. Languages are acquired relatively young, as you note. But archeology and anthropology (like history and some other disciplines) are acquired cumulatively. That is: you only really begin to understand what's going on after you've been doing it for years. Not at all like math and the hard sciences, where many people do their best work before the age of 35.

Also, he'd be the best-looking academic on the face of the planet. But I'll let that go.

Yeah, he's the platonic ideal of an intellectual, I'll grant you that. I can see the grounds for a major crush, here.

What I Get For Not Proofing Posts

[cordelia_v]

German is at least as derivational as German

I meant that German is at least as derivational as English, of course.

[moojja.livejournal.com]

I think Daniel the character is supposed to be older than the actor, and way he looks. Daniel is at least middle age now.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Daniel's degrees are beyond credibility. But once you get past the wormhole technology, etc., that window for suspension of disbelief is pretty wide open.

As for the advanced degrees, there is a lack of canon evidence for Anthropology. I threw it in as a theory, but the only ones we really know about are Linguistics and Archeology (both from the TV series). He has evidenced some knowledge of Anthropology, but I don't think it's really gone beyond an undergrad level, what you'd expect from prepatory classes for Archeology. The movie's more plausible. It portrays him as a mono-focused specialist in Egyptology, with a primary interest in linguistic evidence. Also James Spader is more convincingly innocent and geeky. :D

The timeline doesn't work: he's too young to have two doctorates, unless we factor in being moved up two grades so he started college two years early... and that barely works.

As for the 23 languages, that's Season two in the series. I insist that there's no way he can speak them all fluently.

My translator friends all say it takes about 8 years of experience and intensive study to master a foreign language... but I also know that people tend to learn languages in families. A friend who speaks seven languages tells me that after the fourth or fifth one, you start to pick them up rather quickly. But not to fluency, no.

Since Daniel is pretty damned cocky (we find this in the movie where he tells everyone he can do something when he really just makes an educated assumption), I'm guessing that when he says he knows 23 languages, he really means that he has some exposure to 23 languages. It would be like me saying I speak German, French, Japanese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Nepali, Hindi, Chinese, and Spanish. Not really. I just have exposure to all of those.

So I always throw that mental caveat in. Otherwise I'd urt myself rollong my eyes. I doubt he's fluent in more than a few, with a good solid grasp of a few more.

But his cracking texts overnight -- ha! New and unfamiliar languages take years to figure out without an intermediary.

Languages use a variety of morphological methods. English uses derivation, inflection, makes up new words the way an isolating morphology does, uses compounding (note: freeway) - pretty much everything but agglutinating. Most languages are like that. So when one says English is derivational, it means that the dominant morphology is derivation. German is considered to be a classic compounding morphology (as is Tibetan), despite the fact that English and German are so closely related. It just means that it's the main word strategy. The German declensions, by the way, are inflection.

I'm gonna argue with you about Russian: those endings you're referring to are inflectional. They change case. Derivational endings change word class, i.e., an adjective becomes an adverb by adding the ending 'ly.'

Whee. This is fun.

Icarus

[moojja.livejournal.com]

That is very interesting. I never notice that Daniel has a California accent. I would've assume he grow up in the New York State system, b/c his parents died in NY. But there is no reason he couldn't have moved to CA. I heard the actor’s natural voice, and it doesn’t sound different from Daniel’s, Hollywood has influence the way we speak, even in Canada.

There is some idea floating around the fandom that Daniel got a Master from Oxford, but cannon never said anything one way or the other.

Here is a link on another discussion of the same topic you might be interested in: http://www.livejournal.com/users/raqs/134728.html#cutid1

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I've considered it, but I can't see how Daniel could've grown up in New York, just because there's nothing New York about him. He has none of the cynicism, none of the toughness, none of that edge. Possibly upper state New York... but his accent rules it out.

His parents as archeologists would had to go where the grant money and teaching positions were available, so it's more likely Daniel didn't live in any one place more than a few years at a time until age 8. His personality, diving into the new surroundings, seeking out the new people and making connections quickly - while keeping his inner life very private - fits all the military brats I know.

Since it was the New York Museum of Art, they were probably travelling with that exhibit across the US. Their carelessness and overconfidence tells me they'd set that display up a hundred times.

There is some idea floating around the fandom that Daniel got a Master from Oxford, but cannon never said anything one way or the other.

Yeah, I've heard that, and I like it. But I can't imagine Daniel not mentioning it. I mean... Oxford! Coooool. I think the Oxford idea sprung up because Sarah has a very British accent, so where did they meet? It's since been revealed that they met while he was studying at the Oriental Institute in Chicago.

Icarus

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh, raqs' post is brilliant, and her list of languages far more probable than mine, since it really focuses on Archeology and Daniel would really need.

*bookmarks happily*

I love it when people do this kind of detailed background research. You know I'm gonna need this for a story.

Icarus

[(Anonymous)]

Lovely writeup of probabilities, but, uh, "Celtic runes"? Do you mean the Norse ones or Ogham or what?

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Norse. Whoops. *chuckles* It's in the language list.

Icarus

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

Commenting mostly because the italic liek whoa is hurting my brain.


Let's see, did that work?

[goseaward.livejournal.com]

Yay! *rules*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Oh thank god. Why was it doing that? *Fears the italics*

Icarus

[cyanei.livejournal.com]

Mm, I enjoyed reading this! (And your Daniel obsession is so appreciated, as it feed quite nicely into my obsession. *L*)

Minor quibble on the accent; I live in Vancouver, and Michael Shanks' accent seems pretty damn home-grown to me. I could be wrong; there are only very slight differences between California and Lower Mainland accents (interior B.C. is a whole other story), but I've been focusing a lot on figuring out the nuances of the accent around here so that I don't sound so Albertan, and his seems the same to me. *shrug*

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Glad you liked!

Yeah, pretty much everyone agrees that I'm dead wrong on the accent. Ah well. :D

Icarus

[gurrier.livejournal.com]

I wonder if Daniel would have gone for isolate languages, languages with few, if any, known relatives. My first guess would be Japanese - how could he resist a language with three (four if you count Latin imports) scripts? Maybe the Basque language, Euskara, which predates all his Indo-European languages. I can easily imagine him learning some to compare with Ancient Egyptian.

[flaming-muse.livejournal.com]

I'm popping in months late (I found this post in somebody's memories) to say that if he were learning Ancient Babylonian, that's probably three different languages right there - Sumerian, Babylonian, and Akkadian. Also, as an Egyptologist he'd learn multiple forms of writing (hieroglyphs, hieratic, demotic) and multiple stages the of Ancient Egyptian language, not to mention Coptic, a sort of combination of Egyptian and Greek, which most Egyptologists learn as well.

As a Ph.D. student in Egyptology he'd be required to learn French, so that was a good guess on your part, and he probably would have picked up Italian as well, which is useful in the discipline. German would also be a mandatory requirement, but we've already seen that he knows it in canon.

Fascinating post! :)