E.T.! What's Up!

Chances are good that if we talked like that to a being from another world it would not understand us. But what would it understand? How would visitors begin to solve our languages and allow us to solve theirs? All of that surmising, of course, that said visitors were planning on speaking to us instead of serving us for dinner and that said visitors made sounds like ours. Some pretty sensible science fiction features insect-based life forms whose speech comes from clicks made by hard mandibles instead of air expired past a fleshy tongue and lips.

So a conference of linguists gathered a couple of months ago to kick the idea around. The major takeaways seemed to be that we would probably manage to make ourselves understood eventually, provided that our new friends were interested in what we said, and that we could also assume ourselves into complete misunderstanding if we didn't remember we were talking to alien beings.

The initial article at Astronomy also includes a link to a longer exploration of whether or not there could be some kind of universal principles underlying not only our language but also the alien one. It explores how we've previously thought that we might start by sharing basic math concepts, which don't change depending on where you live. But even among different human groups there are languages that approach the concept of numbers differently, like the Piraha tribe of Brazil. They don't really conceive of discreet numbers as much as they do groups of things. You could probably assume that the ability to calculate precisely would be required in order to achieve spaceflight or interstellar communication, but it might not be.

Some studies have also been done of brain development that show how people's brains can change when they change their methods of communicating. People who learn sign language, whether deaf or hearing, see some changes in the way they think and in what parts of their brains do.

So if the aliens are peaceful folks whose language helps stimulate the parts of our brains that apparently prevent us from seeing something on the internet and not completely losing our colons over it, we should wish they would hurry the heck up and get here. Because I can't see a lot of those brain parts getting used.