By Retep Rakbek, Berte Pakker, Pratek Beek and Peter Bakker
The folk/rock/metal/electronic music band Angine de Poitrine is taking the world by storm. The two-person band is known for the music that is not from planet Earth, and apparently microtonal, according to musicologists. The first landing took place in the small town in Saguenay, Québec, a city of about 150,000 inhabitants. Their concerts tend to be sold out quickly. Their exoplanetary language has not been studied by linguists yet. This is the first analysis.
Language data
The musicians, despite their 333 year presence on our planet, have not yet learned to speak Earthian, but they understand enough French and English so as to give an occasional interview in which questions are asked in these human languages, but they answer in their own language. And rightfully so. Their music is mostly instrumental, but enough fragments of their speech are available to make a preliminary study of their language. As far as we know, their otherworldly language has not yet been subject to scientific analysis, so Lingoblog.dk will have the honour to feature that analysis as a world premiere. Even though we did not manage to arrange a personal interview with the two musicians, called Khn de Poitrine and Klek de Poitrine, we can base our analysis on four types of available data. First but not foremost, the titles of their songs. Second, the few song lyrics (since most titles are instrumental, that does not help a lot). Here is a part of the lyrics of their song Sahardnieh:
Kla kla ouh kla ouh
Kla kla kla klo klo
Kla kla kla klo klo
Third, the utterances on stage, when they perform live. These are of two kinds: gestures and words. Fourth, the few interviews they have given. These are all in their own alien language. Before doing, we make a detour via a similar band.
Another band: the Hub
Before we do analyze Angine’s exolanguage, another band that had a similar approach to music, but which is almost completely forgotten today, deserves mention here. Whereas Angine de Poitrine attracts large crowds, the band The Hub scared away most of their audience when they were playing their unusual music. We saw them live in Gyngen in Aarhus, Denmark, maybe 15 years ago, and that was quite an artistic experience, we spoke with the band members, and they said to us: “Ah, you are the ones who stayed until the end!”. Indeed, there were not many members of the audience who had endured their fast and changing rhythms. We bought their CD Light Fuse and Get Away from them, with a hand-made cover.
Their music was also instrumental music, also fast and furious and flexible, and also funny, like Angine de Poitrine. The drummer played with boxing gloves on, and the bass player had his sheet music in front of him. There are several clips on Youtube, most with under 1,000 views in 15 years. Ladies and gentleman, virtuoso Tim Dahl on bass, and superfast Sean Noonan on drums, and usually with another person on saxophone. In Aarhus, however, someone looking like linguist John McWhorter played keyboard. The real McWhorter also plays keyboard. Maybe it was him?
Look at The Hub here (warning: there are several bands with the same name; these clips show the correct one):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IJP9dfi3Tg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8wW3P5s30c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNJukqRVfIY
Hopefully, this band can now be resurrected, and we might have the pleasure of experiencing them in the near future as a warm-up band for Angine de Poitrine.
The language of Klek and Khn
Back to the language from the unidentified planet where Khn and Klek come from.
What can we say about this language on the basis of song titles such as: Fabienk, Mata Zyklek, Sarniezz, Utzp, Yor Zarad, Angor, Sherpa, Tohogd, Tamebsz, Ababa Hotel, Sahardnieh, L’Aberek? A few words are clearly cognates with known earth-languages: Sherpa is a language and ethnic group of the Himalayas, Hotel is a place where one can stay overnight. There are also a few apparent anagrams: tohogd for ‘hotdog’, Aberek for ‘breaker’. Some of the words have been interpreted by amateur linguists as slang, like sherpa for dunno(colloquial French je sais pas, pronounced /ʃɛpa/). Most of the other words could also exist in other Earthian languages, but unfortunately, we do not yet know them all – and therefore, in our investigation, for the purpose of the present, we will take as a point of departure that their language is a legitimate alien language.
The language seems to have a five or six vowel inventory, which is a typical size for a human language: a, i, u, e, o, y (used both for a vowel and consonant, as in English and other languages).
There are some unusual consonant clusters like <tzp> and <bsz>. Otherwise, these sequences of consonants are not found in languages of planet Earth. Voiced sibilants between two stops are unheard (of) in Human, and a semi-geminate like /sz/ is similarly unlikely.
On the other hand, perhaps the language has an alphabetical writing system, and it could be that <tz> and <sz> just represent single phonemes, affricates and sibilants, as is the case in Polish, Hungarian and Basque. It is conceivable that the song titles were transcribed by an Earthian who was familiar with these writing systems.
Based on the song titles, we could thus conclude that the language is quite Earthian-like. This would lead us to the inevitable conclusion that their articulatory organs (mouth, tongue, lungs, etc.) are anatomically incredibly close to those of the human species.
Biologists speak of convergent development when animals develop similar properties, such as sharp teeth for carnivores. Perhaps human-like life on other planets would have led to similar physical properties, and they would have developed, for example, four limbs and one head, and a number of fingers and toes, and similar articulatory organs in their head, like a mouth, lips, a tongue and teeth.
Song texts
Most of the lyrics consist of just one word, so we do not get much further from there. However, there is an exception, in the song Sahardnieh:
Yo Kla kla ouh kla ouh
Kla kla ouh kla ouh
Kla kla kla klo klo
Kla kla kla klo klo
Kla kla ouh kla ouh
Kla kla ouh kla ouh
Kla kla kla klo klo
Kla kla kla klo klo
The repetition of words is odd from a syntactic point of view, and we have to admit that our analysis did not bring us far when it comes to grammatical patterns. We fared better with the phonology. This text suggests that the lexicon of the language consists of a very limited number of monosyllabic words, and a lot of repetitions. Note also the many k-initial words, and the kl– cluster, just like in the name of the drummer Klek.
What is happening here, is somewhat reminiscent of what people do when they speak in tongues.
That is a phenomenon for which it has been proven that the words in an utterance are remarkably similar in shape (phonemes, phonotactics, stress patterns) to the previous word. That is a pattern unlike any language spoken by Earthlings, where longer and short words alternate. Speaking in tongues is what some Christian and non-Christian groups practice, when they allegedly create a form of communication with God, in a language that they do not know themselves, but that God understands. Luckily, otherwise it would just be gibberish.
Now we can reach two logical conclusions on the basis of the similarity of the text with speaking in tongues. First, these lyrics would not represent a real, meaningful exolanguage. Thus, it would be just fantasy words. The other logical conclusion is that all these people on Earth who speak in tongues, indeed speak a heavenly language, and this language is quite uniform. In that case, Angine de Poitrine would be sent from heaven, with this language. This would imply that God exists, which seems to contradict, however, the state of the world we currently live in.
Interviews
Finally, our team of linguists studied two interviews. One brief interview took place in a talkshow, where Klek and Khn apparently understood Earthian, but they responded in the language of their own planet, which fortunately was subtitled, otherwise we could not understand it.
We can clearly distinguish two dialects here, for each of the two speakers. Perhaps they use different registers of their language or they come from different parts of the unnamed exoplanet. They are said to be brothers, and they arrived on Earth from their planet 333 years ago, but that makes it a bit strange that their speech varieties are so different. One (Khn) produces a range of sounds with different tonal patterns, both stable tones and contour tones, with distinctive vowel length, an occasional glottal stop, extremely long sequences of identical phonemes, not only vowels, but also consonants, such as an overlong apical /r/. There are no symbols in the International Phonetic Alphabet for several of their phonemes. The vowels and consonants are almost invariably produced with a glottal flavor. Khn uses very indistinct vowels rather than extremes of the vowel triangle. The other (Klek) produces a much wider range of phonemes. We heard the vowels /a o e/ and perhaps /y/, and further voiced and voiceless bilabial and dental stops, ejectives, perhaps also /l/. Consonant clusters seem to be rare, despite the frequency of /kl/ in their names and the lyrics. Therefore, it might be speculated that Klek and Khn have spent a considerable amount of time apart from one another without any communication taking place. Could it be that the two brothers fell out a long time ago due to some mysterious circumstances? They were sent to Earth to reconcile, and to spread dance on Earth?
Their gestures are not very unfamiliar when looking at it from an Earthian perspective.
Sometimes they clearly show a triangular shape, an almost universal geometrical shape, and sometimes they combine their hands in ways unfamiliar to most humans. Apart from their head, their lower body anatomy is surprisingly similar to most mammals that trod the Earth. However, their polka-dotted complexion remains a total. We have not found satisfactory answers from biologists we consulted about their bodily properties. In one of the interviews they claim that they were born like that, and maybe that is common in their neck of the galaxy. Here is the second interview, where they speak from the luggage compartment of an earthly means of transportation.
In the other interview, the speech of both extraterrestrials is closer to Khn’s speech in the earliest videos. Long sequences of identical speech sounds, with an eerie nature, which could easily be used in horror films. It does not sound like a medium of human communication. There are inconsistencies between the different recordings.
Conclusion
What is the conclusion of our highly scientific in-depth, triangulated study about the language of these two extraterrestrials among us? Their articulatory organs must be quite similar to those of humans. Mouth, vocal cords, air stream form the lungs, a tongue-like organ and a palate with a similar form observed in all humans. Our phonetic study shows nevertheless that their segmental inventory is quite unusual, as is the use of suprasegmentals like tone, glottalization and (rather extreme) phoneme length. We suspect therefore that Klek and Khn are not really from another planet, but more likely Earthlings trying to fool us into believing they come from another planet. The extraterrestrial language of Angine the Poitrine is deciphered but more as a parody by Earthlings.
Retep Rakbek is a 27 year old linguistics student from Aarhus University in Denmark. Her hobbies are astronomy, dishwatching, mammal anatomy, science fiction books and videogames. Berte Pakker is a musician, polyglot and bird washer. Pratek Beek is a UFO-washer, crossword puzzle fanatic and mother of seven children. Peter Bakker is a linguistics teacher and researcher at Aarhus University, street photographer, unbeaten world champion of whistle wrestling and a specialist in new languages.
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