- 15:30 18 April 2008
- NewScientist.com news service
- Michael Reilly, Santa Clara
If we ever make contact with intelligent aliens, we should be able to build
a universal translator to communicate with them, according to a linguist and
anthropologist in the US.
Such a "babelfish", which gets its name from the translating fish
in Douglas
Adams‘s book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, would require a
much more advanced understanding of language than we currently have. But a
first step would be recognising that all languages must have a universal
structure, according to Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US.
How language develops is highly controversial. Some theories argue that the
process has been built into the human brain through evolution, and that the
sounds we use to communicate are arbitrary.
If that is true, there could be an infinite set of possibilities for
expressing an idea through language. An alien race that developed through a
completely different process of evolution would probably speak a language
indecipherable to humans.
But Deacon argues that all languages arise from the common goal of
describing the physical world. That limits the way a language could be
constructed, he concludes.
Scented words
An alien race could use a strange medium like scents as their language,
Deacon says, but the scents would still describe objects in their world. An
odour that communicates "rock" or "tree" would be analogous
to our words for the same objects. So there must be an underlying universal
code that can be deciphered, as in mathematics.
"In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, aliens communicate to humans through prime
numbers," says Deacon. "Why? Nature doesn’t use prime numbers. But
the numbers are intrinsic to the mathematical system, just as certain
structures are intrinsic to language."
One of our most basic forms of communication is pointing, he says. Pointing
directly references a physical object. When we invent a word for that object,
that word is a symbol. Symbols can then convey meaning about objects even if
they’re not present in our immediate environment.
Abstract symbols
Deacon argues that no matter how abstract a symbol becomes, it is still
somehow grounded in physical reality, and that limits the number of
relationships it can have with other symbol words. In turn, this defines the
grammatical structure that emerges from stringing words together.
If that is true, then in the distant future it might be possible to invent a
gadget that uses complex software to decode
alien languages on the spot, Deacon said. He presented his ideas on
Thursday 17 April at the 2008
Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara, California, US.
Testing the theory might be tough because we would have to make contact with
aliens advanced enough to engage in abstract thinking and the use of linguistic
symbols. But Denise
Herzing of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, US, points out that
we might be able to test it by studying dolphins.
"Our work suggests that dolphins may be able to communicate using
symbols," Herzing told New Scientist. "The word’s not
definitively in yet, but it’s totally possible that we might show universality
by understanding dolphin
language."
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