Universal languages

Being understood here on Earth is hard enough. Could we understand aliens?

If we are ever lucky enough to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life, one of the difficulties will be communicating with them—or even understanding what they say (whatever form that takes) as intelligent communication.

The problems with such contact, between not just different cultures but different species, were addressed in one of the most iconic episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation—“Darmok.” (If you don’t believe me about its iconic status, go up to any fan of science fiction and say, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” I can nearly guarantee you that they will respond, “Shaka, when the walls fell.” Or possibly “Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk.” And if they say the latter, they will follow it up by bursting into tears. Amirite, Trek fans?)

The Tamarians, it turns out, always speak in myth-based metaphor; the classic phrase “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” is from a story of their culture and represents two people coming together to fight a common foe. If you don’t know the myths, though, the phrase makes no sense—as Deanna Troi points out, if you know Shakespeare, “Juliet on the balcony” might represent doomed love, but if you don’t know the play, it’s completely without meaning.

Much as I love this episode—and, like most TNG fans, ugly cry at the end of it—as a linguist, it’s always struck me as a little off. It’s hard to see how a race that speaks entirely in metaphor could become technological. If to say, “Hand me the torque wrench” you had to come up with some kind of arcane analogy from a folk tale, fashioning anything more complicated than a slingshot would be pretty much out of the question. Languages—all languages, as far as we know—have both denotative meanings and connotative meanings, and it’s hard to imagine a language that was all connotative. (If you’re unclear about the definition of those words, consider the following pairs of phrases that have identical denotative meanings and entirely different connotative ones: “Have a nice day” versus “I hope you somehow manage to enjoy the next 24 hours,” and “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned” versus “I’m sorry, Daddy, I’ve been bad.”)

A more realistic take on the alien communication thing (but in my opinion, not nearly as good a story) was the 2016 movie Arrival, in which the alien race “speaks” by drawing patterns in the air that are a little reminiscent of Circular Gallifreyan from Doctor Who. A linguist (played by Amy Adams) is hired to decipher what they’re trying to say, and head off a war—the typical human assumption being, “If I don’t know your motives, they must be bad.” The cool thing about this scenario is that the movie’s creators came up with a mode of communication that’s really alien, that shares essentially nothing with human speech (and damn little with human writing).

The topic comes up because of an article that appeared in Aeon last week, by linguist Nikhil Mahant, called “Extraterrestrial Tongues.” Mahant explains that all languages share four features: signs/symbols, structure, semantics, and pragmatics (the last-mentioned including the cultural context that was so important to the Tamarians). And while those commonalities may seem to give some hope that communication might be possible, Mahant points out that the details might well prove to be insurmountable:

[A] radical problem of untranslatability would arise when one or more expressions of a language have a kind of meaning that no expression of another language does. As humans with a certain set of evolved cognitive abilities, we perceive the world as structured in a certain way. For instance, we perceive it as containing objects, actions, properties and processes. The kind of meanings that the elements of our languages have reflects our way of structuring the world. For instance, proper nouns have objects as their meaning, verbs refer to actions, and whole sentences represent facts.

But what if an alien species, which has evolved differently, perceives the world totally differently? The language of this species would reflect its own way of classifying the world with categories that we do not have the cognitive capacities to grasp. Unless we know what element of the world a fragment of an alien language corresponds to, coining a new word in our language would not help. The elements of such an alien language are radically untranslatable, not because we cannot know what they mean, but because we would not even know what kind of meaning they have.

Still, there’s been research that should give us some hope. Consider, for example, the paper by Christine Cuskley in Nature that looks at the human capacity for elucidating patterns, both from spoken or written language and from stimuli that aren’t generally considered language at all (such as the tones of a slide whistle), when we have no referent at all for meaning. Repeated experiments using a variety of different types of communication show that we’re pretty good at abstracting and generalizing patterns from what we’re given. One example of the many given—and you really should read the original paper, because it’s freakin’ cool—is that in a test where people are given words for geometric shapes of different types, colors, and movements, within short order the test subjects figured out that if the word ended with the suffix -plo it designated a shape that was bouncing.

Cuskley writes:

A cornerstone of experimental studies in language evolution has been iterated artificial language learning: studies where participants learn of artificial ‘alien’ languages, and the product of their learning is then passed onto other participants successively. Results over the last decade show that some defining features of human language can arise under these experimental conditions, which use iteration to simulate processes of cultural transmission... These results have implications for how forms and modalities might constrain language systems, and demonstrate how the use of truly novel alien forms might be extended to address new questions in cultural and linguistic evolution.

Then there’s the fascinating study that came out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing research by Manuel Bohn, Gregor Kachel, and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The researchers showed that the drive to communicate is so strong it can lead to the invention of a new mode of symbolic communication. The researchers set up Skype conversations between monolingual English-speaking children in the United States and monolingual German-speaking children in Germany, but simulated a computer malfunction where the sound didn't work. They then instructed the children to communicate as best they could anyhow, and gave them some words/concepts to try to get across.

They started out with some easy ones. “Eating” resulted in the child miming eating from a plate, unsurprisingly. But they moved to harder ones—like “white.” How do you communicate the absence of color? One girl came up with an idea—she was wearing a polka-dotted t-shirt, and pointed to a white dot, and got the idea across.

But here's the interesting part. When the other child later in the game had to get the concept of “white” across to his partner, he didn't have access to anything white to point to. He simply pointed to the same spot on his shirt that the girl had pointed to earlier—and she got it immediately.

“Sokath, his eyes uncovered!”

Language is defined as arbitrary symbolic communication. Arbitrary because with the exception of a few cases like onomatopoeic words (bang, pow, ping, etc.) there is no logical connection between the sound of a word and its referent. (Dog, chien, cane, hund, and inu all mean “dog,” in English, French, Italian, Norwegian, and Japanese, respectively, but none of them are inherently doggy words.) Well, in the Bohn et al. study, we have a beautiful case of the origin of an arbitrary symbol—in this case, a gesture—that gained meaning only because the recipient of the gesture understood the context.

All of which makes me hopeful that if we ever are confronted with something like the scenario in Arrival, we might actually have some hope of figuring out what the aliens are saying. Can you imagine how exciting that would be? Not just deciphering a non-human language—something that gives linguists like me multiple orgasms—but being able to find out what goes on in the brains (or whatever equivalent they have) of a species that shares no commonality with terrestrial biology at all?

Man, if we find it hard to conceive how people from other cultures on Earth think, this would stretch our capacity to the limit. And it would knock us even further off our idea, which persists despite everything science has discovered, that humans are special creations, and our thoughts, needs, desires, and hopes somehow lie at the very center of the universe.

Which is all to the good. Our species could use a little more humility. Maybe it’d allow us to take our place in the cosmos with a little more grace.

Who knows? Maybe we’d even be able to say, “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel.” And mean it.