So let’s talk about aliens.
When we look up at the night sky, we can get a sense of the enormity of the universe, and
that leads us to thoughts of whether other intelligent life is out there.
But how could we communicate with them?
And would their languages look anything like ours?
There’s a lot we might or might not have in common, and that’s worth exploring.
I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
There are lots of ways to communicate something.
An expensive suit might advertise your wealth, while a scowl could mean someone just spilled
coffee all over it.
A cat’s meow can tell you she’s hungry, but a hiss is probably a good sign you should back away.
And while a major chord on the guitar often conveys a sense of happiness, a minor shift
can really bring down the musical mood.
But even if some kind of information has been passed on in each case, you probably wouldn’t
want to call it language, at least not how linguists define it.
The same could be said about the amazing and fascinating waggle dances and trail pheromones
produced by bees and ants, telling members of their colony where to find food and to
be wary of predators.
We probably want to pass on adding “Bee-ish” and “Ant-ish” to the list of over 6000
human languages, but there’s no denying it serves some communicative purpose.
Which makes you wonder: Would we even recognize alien language if we saw it?
To try to get a handle on these kinds of questions, back in the 1960s, linguist Charles Hockett
came up with a list of 13 ‘design features’ for language.
A handful of these features apply to non-human animals, for sure, but many are completely
unique to us.
And yeah, some of them are a bit out-of-date, like, he doesn’t take into consideration signed languages.
But, with more features being added on as new discoveries come in, they still give us
a good launchpad to use to talk about what makes language language.
So let’s take a closer look!
One key feature of language is its discreteness.
Not in the sense that it’s good at keeping secrets, but that it can be broken up into
individual pieces that make up its smallest parts.
A good example of this is a language’s inventory of phonemes -- the basic speech sounds used
to tell words apart from one another.
Sounds themselves may flow into each other in our speech, but our brains ruthlessly cut
them apart in order to make sense of them.
By contrast, a bee’s dance can vary along a sliding scale, speeding up or slowing down
depending on how far away the food is from the hive, but it can’t really be broken up into chunks.
It’s more continuous than it is discrete.
Another vital property of language is its productivity.
When the elements of a system can be combined in different ways to form new expressions,
without any real upper limit, we say it’s productive.
Human language puts together original sentences all the time, and it’s constantly letting
in new words - even the Oxford English Dictionary gets updates, recently including words like
‘afrofuturism’, ‘agender’, and ‘FODMAP’.
Bee dances show some productivity, too, since they can point out food in any direction from the hive.
But other kinds of animal communication are much more closed off.
The alarm calls used by vervet monkeys to warn of predators, for instance, do hit that
discreteness target, but even they aren’t productive.
They form only a small set that never seems to grow, no matter the monkeys’ experience.
So we do see some examples of discreteness and productivity outside of humans, but they
never seem to combine quite like they do in us.
And that combination actually hits upon one of the most important aspects of human language:
its so-called ‘digital infinity.’
Linguist Noam Chomsky has gone so far to say that “language is, at its core, a system
that is both digital and infinite,” meaning that we only need a small collection of discrete
components and rules to be able to express a seemingly unlimited range of thought.
So, it really looks like our own human language is something special.
But how does this help us talk to aliens?
Well, one way to think about what an alien language could look like is to take what we
know about human language and then fiddle around with the details.
Not just on the surface, though, since we can still find plenty of variation from one language to the next.
We’re going to want to dig a bit deeper, to see if we can come up with something that’s
still for-sure language-like, but altogether out-of-this-world -- wrapping up the features that
we want to keep, inside a distinctly non-human package.
To get started, it’s good to remember what we’ve been arguing for since our first episode:
that languages are really more similar than they are different.
In fact, it’s been claimed that an alien scientist studying our world might discover that
we all speak basically the same language, albeit with some extreme dialectical differences.
But what exactly does this mean?
What is it that unifies us, and how could it end up different?
What sorts of things don’t we find?
Let’s start with sound.
All spoken languages draw on a set of sounds we can make with our mouths.
But there are some sounds that because of how our vocal tracts work, we just can’t make.
Like, we can’t make nasals behind the uvula at the back of the mouth, because we’d cut
the airflow from our lungs off before it can get out to the nose.
And there are some sounds that we can make with our mouths, but that languages don’t
use, like the raspberry.
But for creatures with different physiologies, or machines to synthesize sound, the acoustic
patterns they create could be totally different.
We’d expect to find something, but it could take a lot to analyze.
Another setting we might play around with in our quest for an alien language lies in
the idea of structure.
In our discussion with the linguist Lisa Pearl, she pointed out that one universal truth about
language could be that it has hierarchy.
That is, expressions of any given language have some organization to them -- be they
sounds, syllables, or sentences.
For example, in something like “Amy kissed Jeremy,” we know we’ve got more than just
a flat string of words on our hands.
We can tell that the verb “kiss” is grouped more tightly together with “Jeremy” than
“Amy,” since we can’t separate them to say “Amy kissed quickly Jeremy” in
the same way we can say “Amy quickly kissed Jeremy.”
That means that sentences have to built up in stages, with some words ending up closer
together than others.
Now, it might be hard to imagine an alien language working very well without some level of organization.
But it’s not too tricky to picture a language with rules that are downright alien compared
to anything we see on Earth.
For instance, since hierarchy plays such a central role, we tend not to find rules that
skip the structure to go straight for linear order.
Like, when we give orders or make requests in English, we usually leave out the subject.
So, if something really interesting was happening on TV, I might call my friend and say “turn
on the news!”, instead of something like “you turn on the news”.
So that’s a rule that deals with structure: it’s the noun phrase just before the main
verb that gets dropped, even if other stuff comes before, like in “if you want to see
something cool, turn on the news”; we can’t just count and say “cut out the eighth word,”
since that number will be different every time.
But we can just as easily imagine a rule that, say, moves the third word to the front, instead,
giving “on you turn the news!”
Or maybe a rule that flips the whole sentence on its head to give us “news the on turn you!"
Or even one that deletes every word whose position is a prime number -- so the second,
third, fifth, et cetera.
It can get pretty crazy if you’re inventive enough, and we’d definitely need to keep
an open mind for there to be any hope of understanding these sorts of patterns.
None of these rules could occur in a human language, but there's no reason that
an alien language couldn't use them.
And, of course, language is about much more than structure!
After all, the words we use convey meaning: We can use them to pick out all kinds of objects
and events and relationships.
But it actually turns out there are concepts we can’t communicate -- limits built into
what we can say -- limits an alien might not have.
One restriction we’ve touched on in the past has to do with quantifying words like
“every” and “some” and “most.”
In a sentence like “every octopus lives in the sea,” that “every” cares a lot
more about the first phrase - octopus - than the second - lives in the sea.
In other words, it groups everything in that first phrase together, and places it inside
the second, without peeking in to see what else might live in there.
It doesn’t much care whether or not there happen to be any whales or fish or lobsters around.
Now, that might not come as much of a shock, but it’s actually pretty easy to imagine the opposite.
Like, there could be a word “schmevery” which works the other way round, taking up
the second phrase, and placing it inside the first.
“Schmevery octopus lives in the sea” would mean every sea-dwelling critter down there’s
an octopus -- no whales or fish or lobster allowed!
What’s surprising is that even though it’s easy for us to invent such a word, we never
see anything quite like “schmevery” in the real world -- not in English, and not
in any other language.
We can’t even teach them to kids who are smack-dab in the middle of acquiring language!
When we try, they just don’t pick them up, as if they run counter somehow to the way
our brains naturally work.
This emphasis on the first phrase over the second in these cases seems to be universal
to language as we know it.
Since it could have been otherwise, it isn’t so crazy to think that an alien language could
work differently, with backwards words like “schmevery” building up their vocabulary.
But all of this is playing it pretty safe.
After all, we’re sort of assuming aliens have the same kind of linguistic machinery
we’re used to, just with a few exotic tweaks.
But how different can we go, to get something we can still call language?
Shows like Star Trek have imagined languages relying so heavily on posture, that communication
just can’t happen without it.
And ones that are so deeply couched in metaphor, that even word-for-word translations
just miss the point completely!
And even if the sounds and syntax of a language closely matched our own, what if instead of
using words and tense markers like "will" or "-ed" to locate events in time, different odours
or magnetic fields were used?
Would we even know what to look for?
What if the amount of eye-contact fundamentally affected a word’s meaning?
How could we tell?
Linguist Mark Liberman recently speculated that, except for the laws of physics and biology,
there’s no telling what kinds of communication could develop.
Aliens might talk to us by simulating people we know, like in the novel Solaris, or through
music, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
As long as it has the right features, just about anything you can think of is possible.
And with all this uncertainty, there’s really only one sure thing: when it comes to preparing
for alien communication, imagination is our biggest asset!
So, we’ve reached the end of The Ling Space for this week.
If you made contact, you learned that features like discreteness, productivity, and displacement
make human language unique down here on planet Earth; that we can use these features as a
guide to what an alien language might look like; that the rules that unite human languages
in sound, structure, and meaning might not apply to visitors from another world; and
that we might have to get pretty creative if we ever have a close encounter!
The Ling Space is made by all these amazing people over here.
If you want to learn more about how technically complex alien languages could be, check back
on our website!
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And, see you next time! Hayalovay!