In the movie "Arrival," which was recently released in theaters, twelve alien ships fly to Earth. Aliens - seven-legged creatures of "hectapods" - allow several people to board and talk, but there is no universal translator that would help "foreigners" and "natives" communicate. Therefore, each country turned to its best linguists, and the main character was Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams.
Banks is taken to the nearest spaceship in Montana and tasked with unraveling the language of the hectapods and finding out why they came to Earth. To find out how linguists might react when faced with an extraterrestrial language, the filmmakers consulted with Jessica Kuhn, a professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal.
“These are not your typical Star Trek aliens with two arms and legs and a vocal system like ours, except in a strange color or with strange bumps on their heads,” says Kuhn. “They don't look like humans at all, and the sounds they make are completely inhuman. Most likely, this would be expected."
Why can an alien language be difficult to decipher? What will linguists do in this case?
Aliens will have their own rules
If aliens ever land on Earth, their language is likely to present us with puzzles that we have not encountered in any language on Earth.
“Linguists have learned that even though human languages may sound completely different and their grammar differs, they will still follow certain patterns,” says Kuhn. Therefore, by collecting bit by bit information about the language of people, linguists can make quite accurate predictions about other properties of the language.
Promotional video:
Take word order, for example. In languages where verbs come before nouns, prepositions like "na" are often found before nouns. For example, “ate an apple” and “on the table”. In other languages, like Japanese, both schemes go backwards. Most of the world's languages follow either one pattern or another, Kuhn says.
It is unlikely that the languages of aliens will follow the same rules as the languages of humans. Everything points to the fact that the ability to learn the language in people is "sewn". Because it is part of our genetics and part of being human, and it is very unlikely that other creatures will have restrictions of the same kind, or their languages will show the same similarities as ours.
And the experiences that can be represented in every human language may not be reflected in someone else's. In any human language, there is a way of representing intentions, Kuhn says. “The kids are going to want to be able to say, I didn't mean to break that cup,” a prefab hodgepodge of intent. But as Banks explains to his colleagues in Arrival, if alien species act instinctively, there may be no concept of free will in their language, or there may be no distinction between acting accidentally or intentionally.
Linguists cannot even say for sure that there will be nouns, verbs, questions and other elements in an alien language that underlie our speech. “We can only hope that they will have recognizable elements in their speech and substitute them for what we see,” says Kuhn.
Even our own biology can prevent us from understanding the language of aliens. Even if we assume that our guests have mouths, we may not even recognize that they are making some kind of speech. In Ted Chung's Story of Your Life, which was filmed for Arrival, the character Banks notes that people's ears and brains were created to understand the speech that exits the vocal tract. But in the case of aliens, it may be that their ears are simply not adapted to this.
And although Banks and her colleagues managed to achieve some progress in studying the unique writing of the hectapods, they were unable to reproduce the noise made by aliens. With spoken language, everything is complicated, because we simply cannot reproduce strange sounds, such as the purring of cats or the hum of whales.
How can we make friends?
During her first fieldwork assignment, Kuhn spent a month in Mexico studying the Mayan Chol, the Chol language. “Getting to the site of a recently arrived UFO is not at all like going into the jungle in Chiapas,” she admits. Nonetheless, Kuhn says, Louise Banks' attempts to decipher the languages of the hectapods in Arrival show very accurately how we would act when trying to translate the speech of aliens.
If future linguists come face to face with intelligent extraterrestrial species, they will need to introduce themselves, communicate their intentions, and practice writing or speaking with aliens. Like Banks, linguists will start small and try to understand basic terms before moving on to more complex issues.
“The film doesn’t really touch on the very essence, the details of how she decoded the language, but overall it turned out well - they made a scene in which Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner work together and separately, receiving translations of simple things, on that you can specify, and you see how it reads into the logogram in search of patterns,”says Kuhn. “I think this is what linguists will do if they want to talk to aliens.”
When decoding human languages, most linguists take with them a few simple tools, a voice recorder, possibly a camera, a few pencils and paper, and any information available about the target language or related languages. The first task is to build hypotheses about how grammar works, and then to refine them and refine them in the process of communicating with native speakers.
What can you learn from afar?
So, in fact, the important step will be interaction with aliens. But what if we fail to get close enough to strike up a conversation with our extraterrestrial guests?
In the film, Banks got his first chance to hear the new aliens arrived when a soldier played a small audio file and asked if she could learn from what she heard. “This is obviously an impossible task; you need at least some correspondence between the sound and the essence of what is said,”says Kuhn. But if Banks could access more of the longer video footage, she could look for sounds that closely match certain actions. “With enough information, you can try to build the core of the grammar of a language,” says Kuhn.
Ancient human languages were deciphered without the help of living native speakers. If there is enough information, if there is history and context, there is also hope to decipher the language even without direct communication.
Does this mean we could pick up the alien language from their radio broadcasts, or they could learn our own? “I wouldn't be surprised if creatures capable of building giant spaceships can easily learn and understand our language from the multitude of radio broadcasts we send into outer space. And we could do the same with the resources and information,”says Kuhn.
ILYA KHEL
