“If aliens landed from space and spoke a language that violates universal grammar, we simply would not be able to learn their language the way we learn English or Swahili. We are by nature conceived for English, Chinese and other human languages. But we are not designed to perfectly learn languages that violate universal grammar.”
Proponents of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) estimate that we may encounter aliens within the next several decades. Even if we stick to more conservative estimates - say that the likelihood of encountering alien intelligence in the next 50 years is 5% - the stakes for our species will be high. Knowing that we are not alone in the universe will be a profound experience, and contact with an alien civilization can bring about amazing technological innovation and cultural change.
So we need to ask a question.
What do the aliens think?
And really, how? Are they conscious? How do they communicate?
“The most complex civilizations will be postbiological, in the form of artificial intelligence (AI),” says philosopher Susan Schneider of the Institute for Advanced Study. Then, alien civilizations will take the form of superintelligence: an intelligence far superior to human-level intelligence in any way - social skills, general knowledge, scientific creativity.
When faced with types of AI, can we learn an alien language? The first obstacle will be its environment. People communicate in the range of sound frequencies 85-255 Hz and 430-770 THz of light. This is unlikely to be true for aliens who have evolved differently from humans. However, this problem is mostly technical. For example, fast-tracked whale songs (which would otherwise be inaudible to humans) show that some “alien” signals can still be converted into a form that humans can perceive.
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However, aliens could do without language. It is quite possible that an alien civilization could develop exclusively with non-linguistic communication or proto-language.
The famous linguist Noam Chomsky often said that if the Martians visited Earth, they would think that we all speak dialects of the same language, because all earthly languages have the same structure in depth, notes Doug Vakoch. “But if aliens had a language, would it be similar to ours? This is a big question."
It is extremely unlikely that alien species will have the same parameters as humans. According to Chomsky, a leading proponent of this view:
The next thing we would like to exchange with aliens is scientific information. If the laws of the Universe are the same everywhere, then different descriptions of these laws, in principle, should be equivalent. This is the starting point, for example, of the SETI or METI initiative, whose task is to search for and communicate with aliens.
In the case of language, things are more complicated, because it is the only important factor for cooperation between people. It is communication that allows us to work in amazingly large groups. For this reason, any technologically advanced and flexible civilization will almost certainly have a language.
The more difficult question is whether we will ever be able to learn the internal structure of a foreign language. Psycholinguistics still gives two completely different answers.
The generative approach, which encodes the structure of language in the brain, suggests that this is not possible. It follows that people appear with a built-in universal grammar, which has a certain set of attitudes - each corresponds to an acceptable word order, in which words and parts of words fit into any given language system. The language we hear for the first time in our life activates one of these attitudes, and it then allows us to distinguish between correct and incorrect ways of combining words.
The key point is that the number of different grammars is very limited. Although the rules of human languages may differ, proponents of the generative model argue that they differ only in strict terms. For example, the order in which a sentence is constructed determines whether the predicate will follow the subject or vice versa. In English, strictly the first option ("Bob gave a cake to Alice"), in Japanese, strictly the second ("Bob gave Alice a cake").
The cognitive approach, on the other hand, views semantics (meaning structures) as more important than syntax (grammar structures). According to this approach, sentences like “square drinks procrastination” are syntactically well-formed but semantically meaningless. For this reason, proponents of the cognitive approach say that grammar alone is not enough to understand a language. Instead, she should be married to an understanding of the concepts that the user of the language uses.
We can also take a look at our own world and see that organisms have striking similarities, even if they evolved in different ways and in different environments. This is called "convergent evolution". Wings and eyes, for example, have independently appeared in a wide variety of animals several times over evolution, and birds in ecologically isolated New Zealand have acquired behaviors that are observed in mammals everywhere. The cognitive approach gives hope that the languages of humans and aliens can be mutually intelligible.
Some also believe that the most advanced human concepts are assembled from the basic building blocks that all species have, such as understanding the past and the future; similarities and differences; object and subject. If an alien species manipulates objects, interacts with their own kind and combines concepts, the cognitive approach ensures that we have similar mental architectures to understand each other. However, it is also possible that alien species that reproduce in a non-biological way simply will not understand that such genetically related and unrelated groups.
Which approach is more correct? Neural network studies show that languages can be learned without special structures in the head. This is important because perhaps no internal universal grammar is needed to explain language acquisition. In addition, there are human languages that do not fit into the framework of universal grammar. Although these results are far from definitive (for example, they cannot explain why only humans have language), everything is moving towards a cognitive view.
Thus, it would be reasonable to assume that humans can learn the languages of aliens. Obviously, some aspects of a foreign language will always be inaccessible to us (like poetry). Equally, some species may be in such a different mental universe that it is only to a certain extent equivalent to a human. However, we can optimistically hope that the universal structures of physics, biology, and sociology will be similar enough to link the languages of humans and aliens into a common semantic base.
Ilya Khel
