Post by auntym on Jan 24, 2017 15:11:19 GMT -6
www.inverse.com/article/23423-arrival-talk-to-aliens-amy-adams-linguist-xenolinguist?utm_source=huffpo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=outreach
Scientists Are Already Trying to Talk to Aliens
'Arrival' offers one answer that linguists say is actually not too far from the truth.
by Tanya Basu / www.inverse.com/user/122-tanya-basu
November 11, 2016
In the new Denis Villeneuve space-opera Arrival, 12 pods from outer space land at various locations on Earth, each operated by a strange species of alien. The American government enlists a linguist — Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams — to try to figure out what these extraterrestrials want, but it’s not going to be easy.
The first, and most significant, hurdle is language. How is someone who’s learned only Earth-based languages supposed to communicate with a group of beings that gurgle out croaks and write in what look like inky floating coffee stains?
Studying alien languages might seem like a silly, science fiction fantasy. But at the rate we’ve discovered more habitable Earth-like worlds, we are bound to encounter an alien species pretty soon. Sheri Wells-Jensen, an associate professor of linguists at Bowling Green State University, is one of a tiny group of people who has actively thought about how an alien species will communicate with humans.
The only thing she knows for sure is that there’s no way to know how they’ll communicate.
“It’s profoundly humancentric to think they’ll talk like us and look us,” Wells-Jensen told Inverse. The fact that most sci-fi revolves around aliens who speak through voice boxes like us, are bipedal, and even have vaguely anthropomorphic faces limits our imagination as to how extraterrestrial beings will speak when they get here. In reality, more likely than not, their bodies won’t operate or look a single thing like ours. And that means their communication mechanism will be wildly different from ours.
“We’re only beginning to understand that the way we think and communicate and what we build is determined by the way our bodies are shaped and our sensory apparatus,” Wells-Jensen said. For example, if we didn’t perceive sound waves, then our use of sound as a communication device would not exist. Consider the way deaf people communicate so expressively with their hands and faces, and are unable to lasso their voices into the pitch and tone the way hearing humans do when they talk.
Anatomy and physiology do more than dictate how we speak; it’s our way of understanding the world, which is vital to how early humans developed the language, and how we comprehend the world around us. “What if you had a race of aliens that couldn’t see? In what ways would that change the way they built their civilization and how they understand their world?” Wells-Jensen proposed. “We have some data to suggest that the way we are physically built might influence the way our language is structured. It’s because we walk erect, our top appendages are free, and we have to use our hands to do things.”
Language, after all, is a verbal reflection of how we understand our world through our bodies: We crawl, we stagger, we cry, we laugh. We look to see the stars, taste our morning coffee, smell the garbage on the streets, rub our hands in nervousness. Which makes the heptopods that Louise Banks deals with in Arrival an especially hard one to understand, given that they experience the world with seven fingers, no obvious eyes or ears, and a language based purely on sound reverberations.
There’s also the fact that even if we did come to a point where we could speak the same language as an extraterrestrial species, we wouldn’t have the language to express certain concepts. “You see this with those lists of things in English that we don’t have a word for,” Wells-Jensen points out. And it could happen the other way around too — extraterrestrials might have phrases for concepts that they don’t have words for, which means we’ll have a rough time getting their worldview as well.
CONTINUE READING: www.inverse.com/article/23423-arrival-talk-to-aliens-amy-adams-linguist-xenolinguist?utm_source=huffpo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=outreach
Scientists Are Already Trying to Talk to Aliens
'Arrival' offers one answer that linguists say is actually not too far from the truth.
by Tanya Basu / www.inverse.com/user/122-tanya-basu
November 11, 2016
In the new Denis Villeneuve space-opera Arrival, 12 pods from outer space land at various locations on Earth, each operated by a strange species of alien. The American government enlists a linguist — Louise Banks, played by Amy Adams — to try to figure out what these extraterrestrials want, but it’s not going to be easy.
The first, and most significant, hurdle is language. How is someone who’s learned only Earth-based languages supposed to communicate with a group of beings that gurgle out croaks and write in what look like inky floating coffee stains?
Studying alien languages might seem like a silly, science fiction fantasy. But at the rate we’ve discovered more habitable Earth-like worlds, we are bound to encounter an alien species pretty soon. Sheri Wells-Jensen, an associate professor of linguists at Bowling Green State University, is one of a tiny group of people who has actively thought about how an alien species will communicate with humans.
The only thing she knows for sure is that there’s no way to know how they’ll communicate.
“It’s profoundly humancentric to think they’ll talk like us and look us,” Wells-Jensen told Inverse. The fact that most sci-fi revolves around aliens who speak through voice boxes like us, are bipedal, and even have vaguely anthropomorphic faces limits our imagination as to how extraterrestrial beings will speak when they get here. In reality, more likely than not, their bodies won’t operate or look a single thing like ours. And that means their communication mechanism will be wildly different from ours.
“We’re only beginning to understand that the way we think and communicate and what we build is determined by the way our bodies are shaped and our sensory apparatus,” Wells-Jensen said. For example, if we didn’t perceive sound waves, then our use of sound as a communication device would not exist. Consider the way deaf people communicate so expressively with their hands and faces, and are unable to lasso their voices into the pitch and tone the way hearing humans do when they talk.
Anatomy and physiology do more than dictate how we speak; it’s our way of understanding the world, which is vital to how early humans developed the language, and how we comprehend the world around us. “What if you had a race of aliens that couldn’t see? In what ways would that change the way they built their civilization and how they understand their world?” Wells-Jensen proposed. “We have some data to suggest that the way we are physically built might influence the way our language is structured. It’s because we walk erect, our top appendages are free, and we have to use our hands to do things.”
Language, after all, is a verbal reflection of how we understand our world through our bodies: We crawl, we stagger, we cry, we laugh. We look to see the stars, taste our morning coffee, smell the garbage on the streets, rub our hands in nervousness. Which makes the heptopods that Louise Banks deals with in Arrival an especially hard one to understand, given that they experience the world with seven fingers, no obvious eyes or ears, and a language based purely on sound reverberations.
There’s also the fact that even if we did come to a point where we could speak the same language as an extraterrestrial species, we wouldn’t have the language to express certain concepts. “You see this with those lists of things in English that we don’t have a word for,” Wells-Jensen points out. And it could happen the other way around too — extraterrestrials might have phrases for concepts that they don’t have words for, which means we’ll have a rough time getting their worldview as well.
CONTINUE READING: www.inverse.com/article/23423-arrival-talk-to-aliens-amy-adams-linguist-xenolinguist?utm_source=huffpo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=outreach