The Packbats' Weblog

In 1990, Sandia National Laboratories convened two teams of cross-disciplinary experts with a question: how can we mark a disposal site for nuclear waste in a way that will successfully warn people off for ten thousand years? The two teams went off to develop their strategies, and by 1992 had returned their reports; in 1993, the final paper, "Expert Judgment on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant", by Kathleen M. Trauth, Stephen C. Horal, and Robert V. Guzowski (doi:10.2172/10117359, OSTI 10117359), was published.

Appendix F - the report from Team A, made up of Dieter G. Ast, Michael Brill, Maureen F. Kaplan, Ward H. Goodenough, Frederick J. Newmeyer, and Woodruff T. Sullivan, III - contains the following passage:

This place is a message...and part of a system of messages...pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor...no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here ...nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

I don't think that it's surprising that, decades after this report was written, this ominous and urgent warning caught the imagination of many.

And I think that, if they aren't already doing it, conlang enthusiasts should add this to their repertoire of standard example texts, alongside the Tower of Babel story from Genesis, "The North Wind and the Sun" from Aesop, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights from the United Nations, and others.

1. It's memorable and popular;
2. It's evocative and interesting;
3. It is simultaneously a very modern message (being concerned with radiation poisoning) and one intended to be understood by an audience without a modern understanding of science (and therefore possible to convey in most languages);
4. The intent of the message - that people understand that they are not to dig here lest they release radioactivity into the local environment - can be clearly understood by we the translators;
5. Communication of that intent is more important than perfect word-by-word translation, allowing a degree of artistic liberty in translation;
6. It (or, more precisely, something like it) was always intended to be presented in multiple languages, for obvious reasons; and
7. It is reasonably short, and therefore not too onerous to translate.

None of that is a coincidence, either. If you read (or skim, in our case) the original report, you will find that this passage is what Team A intended to convey "non-linguistically (through the design of the whole site), using physical form as a 'natural language'" - it is a translation into English of the emotional impact on (they hoped) any human of an ominous field of spiky obelisks engraved with warning messages and human faces expressing horror and disgust. (A place that is both a message and part of a system of messages, you may note.) The actual messages they proposed to write on these obelisks are much more straightforward and direct, and the actual languages they propose translating them into are much more popular.

So it's not useful to Sandia National Laboratories to translate this into a conlang ... but I think it is useful to creators of conlangs to do so. I think very few standard passages pose similar challenges to this one - it speaks of things that many such messages do not, in a manner that many such messages do not.

And I think it would be fun if it existed in lots and lots of languages.

• Use a regular structure for absolutely everything. Irregular verbs/nouns/adjectives/anythings should be scorned. It is an artificial language in any case, and there is no reason to expect any.
  
• Use word-order for as much as possible. Anything which requires making variations of words may add confusion, and is therefore a priori undesirable.
  
• Use compound words for many concepts. If "water" and "stuff" are already familiar, then "water-stuff" being hydrogen is a relatively simple step, if you know your chemistry. ("sour" + "stuff" = oxygen might be harder, but you don't have to ape German in everything.)
  
• Make concepts helpful to first-contact teams easy. "Plant", "animal", "person", "me", "you", and so forth are probably on this list – the Extraterrestrial Encyclopedia will have good suggestions.