If Little Green Men are one day discovered they’re certainly not going to speak fluent English. Scientists fear this may make any alien contact impossible to understand and could create some very awkward circumstances for the rest of us.
Leeds Metropolitian University’s Dr. John Elliott has devised software he believes will decipher the structure of any alien’s language which would be the first step in understanding what the potential invader of Earth may be saying, declaring or demanding. Elliott’s program is
designed to compare an alien language to a database of 60 different known languages in the world and search for ones that have similar structure.
Leeds Metropolitian University’s Dr. John Elliott has devised software he believes will decipher the structure of any alien’s language which would be the first step in understanding what the potential invader of Earth may be saying, declaring or demanding. Elliott’s program is
designed to compare an alien language to a database of 60 different known languages in the world and search for ones that have similar structure.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by whitespace.
Also: What Johnald said. Animals are pretty alien. How about deciphering babies?
Take for instance Scottish, Irish, and English - these three languages exist in the United Kingdom only miles of each other, yet they are completely distinct from each other.
The language tree is a fascinating subject. You can find out more about it at Daniel Short's website.
What about just English in England? Liverpudlian to West Country, the words, the pronunciation, slang and meaning change etc
I agree with Johnald. When we can translate whales chat and they can tell us about the Martians then I will believe. (2 intertubes for who guesses the book).
Most Americans don't even understand what their next-door neighbors are saying, who needs aliens?
E.T. did a pretty good job at speaking English. Maybe we can enlist him as a translator?
IF the structure remains the same but
THEY have a different way of looking at the world and
SPEAK in ways we've never encountered or make
STUPID reference we know nothing about (Darmak and Jilad)...
FOIL
HATS
TOM
CRUISE
The problem is that linguists since the 1950s have acknowledged that language-production is under-determined by environmental input, and have concluded that much of language consists of an innate 'universal grammar' that particular languages then fill in with their own syntax, lexicon, morphology, semantics, etc. This is all relatively uncontroversial.
Any species with a different evolutionary history will not share this 'universal grammar' unless there are very specific constraints on what language can possibly be. The '60 human languages' sampled here are all human languages, that is, languages sharing in the evolutionary history of the species.
Just as there are many ways to evolve sight (compound? lens? pinhole?) the innate linguistic structures of alien species may or may not have anything to do with ours. It's a neat idea, but we have no idea of how likely it is that linguistic evolution is constrained tightly enough that structures similar enough would have independently evolved.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_grammar
Hehe...Don't run. We are your friends.