“If aliens landed from outer space and spoke a language that violates universal grammar, we simply would not be able to learn their language as teaching English or Swahili. We are by nature designed for English, Chinese and other languages people. But we are not conceived for an ideal learning languages that violate universal grammar.”
Supporters of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) estimate that we may encounter aliens in the next several decades. Even if you stick to more conservative estimates say that the probability of meeting with extraterrestrial intelligence in the next 50 years will be a 5% bet for our species will be high. The knowledge that we are not alone in the Universe, is a deep experience, and contact with an alien civilization can produce amazing technological innovation and cultural change.
So, we need to ask the question.
Do you think aliens?
Really, how? Do they have any conscience? How do they communicate?
“The most complex civilization will be post-biological, in the form of artificial intelligence (AI),” says philosopher Susan Schneider from the Institute for advanced study. Then an alien civilization will take the form of superintelligence: intelligence far beyond the intelligence of human level by any parameters — social skills, General knowledge, scientific creativity.
Meeting with the types of AI that we can learn an alien language? The first obstacle will be his environment. People communicate in the audible frequency range 85-255 Hz and 430-770 THz light. This is unlikely to be true for aliens who evolved as a people. And yet, this issue is mostly technical. For example, a whale song in the accelerated playback (which otherwise inaudible to humans) show that some “alien” signals, you can still pay into a form that can perceive people.
However, the aliens could do without the language. It is possible that an alien civilization could develop only with non-linguistic communication or Prochazka.
Well-known linguist Noam Chomsky is often said that if Martians visited Earth, they would think that we all speak dialects of one language because all languages are one of the earth’s structure in depth, said Doug Vakoch. “But if the aliens had a language, he would have been similar to ours? This is a big issue.”
It is highly unlikely that alien species will have the same options as men. According to Chomsky, the leading proponent of this point of view:
“Many scientists believe that alien life exists. For them the question is we will meet with her in the near future or in the distant, and not meet it at all. So let’s imagine that we suddenly come face to face with members of an alien species. What are we to do first? Of course, to communicate and come to a peaceful agreement would be the priority. But can we ever understand each other?”.
The next thing we would like to share with aliens, it is scientific information. If the laws of the Universe are the same everywhere, and different descriptions of these laws, in principle, should be equivalent. It is repulsed by, for example, the initiative SETI or METI, task search and communication with aliens.
In the case of language more difficult, because it is the only important factor for cooperation between people. That communication allows us to work in surprisingly large groups. For this reason, any flexible and technologically advanced civilization will almost certainly have a language.
A more difficult question is whether we ever learn the internal structure of a foreign language. Psycholinguistics while giving two completely different answers.
Generativity approach in which the structure of the language encoded in the brain, suggests that this is impossible. It follows from this that people come with built-in universal grammar, which has a specific set of plants — each represents the acceptable order of words, in which words and parts of words are stacked in any given language system. The language that we hear for the first time, activates one of these installations, and it then allows us to differentiate between right and wrong ways of combining words.
The key point is that the number of different grammars is very limited. Although the rules of the languages of the people may vary, generativists supporters of the model claim that they differ only in the strict framework. For example, how to build a sentence determines if the verb to follow the subject or Vice versa. In the English language strictly first option (“Bob gave a cake to Alice”), strictly in Japanese second (“Bob gave Alice a cake”).
Cognitivist approach, on the other hand, considering the semantics (structure of meaning) as more important than syntax (grammar structures). On this approach, sentences like “squaring drinks procrastination” is syntactically well formed but semantically meaningless. For this reason, supporters of the cognitivist approach say that one grammar is not enough to understand the language. Instead, she should marry the understanding of the concepts used by the language user.
We can also look at our own world and see that organisms have striking similarities, even if developed in different ways and in different environments. This is called “convergent evolution.” Wings and eyes, for example, have independently emerged from a variety of animals at several times during evolution, and the birds in the environmentally isolated New Zealand has acquired the behavior that is observed in mammals everywhere. Cognitivist approach gives hope that the languages of people and aliens can be mutually comprehensible.
Some also believe that the most advanced human concepts are assembled from basic building blocks, which are available for all types, for example, understanding past and future; similarities and differences; the object and subject. If an alien species is manipulating objects, interacting with their own kind and combines concepts cognitivist approach ensures that we will have similar mental architecture to understand each other. However, it is also possible that an alien species that reproduced by non-biological, just do not understand that such genetically related and unrelated groups.
Which approach is more correct? The study of neural networks show that languages can be studied without any special structures in the head. This is important because you may not need any internal universal grammar to explain language acquisition. In addition, there are languages of people who do not fit into the framework of universal grammar. Although these results are far from final (for example, they cannot explain why the language is only in humans), everything goes to the cognitivist view.
Thus, it is reasonable to assume that people can learn languages of the aliens. Obviously, some aspects of a foreign language will always be inaccessible to us (like poetry). Equally, some species may be in a different mental Universe so that it will be in some ways equivalent to a human. However, we can with optimism to hope that a universal framework for physics, biology and sociology are similar enough to tie the tongues of humans and aliens in a common semantic base.
Would like to know how to communicate with aliens? Tell us in our chat in Telegram.
Whales and aliens: the extraterrestrial structure of a language can be unknown
Ilya Hel