Comments on: First Contact

By: Fernando Rodriguez

Fernando Rodriguez — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 03:06:51 +0000

A common trope is that the aliens have a translation box (usually in their chest or hanging around their necks), they utter sounds or make light patterns and the box speaks English. I don’t think all of these are examples of the “universal translator”.

A TV series, Farscape, got around the problem with “translator microbes”, when the human protagonist arrives with the aliens maintenance bots immediately detect he is not “infected” and injects him with the microbes. All alien races are supposed to speak their native language, all understand each other.

C.J. Cherryh also had an interesting take on the role of translation on the “Foreigner” series of books, after humans are stranded in an alien planet their ambassador to the aliens is a linguistics expert, and all human-alien communications are through them.

By: Claire

Claire — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:32:21 +0000

Considering how hard it is to understand the communications of other species on this planet, it’s daunting to imagine communicating with alien species. I just discovered and highly recommend a video of the scientist Bonnie Bassler explaining her research into how bacteria “talk” using chemical signals – at http://www.ted.com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html

By: Claire

Claire — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:45:37 +0000

Another example is Hellspark by Janet Kagan. She writes about a species on a newly discovered planet that turns out to communicate by ruffling their feathers in complex patterns, instead of speaking (similar to Mike G’s scenario). She also has a created language that is made up of all possible sounds from all known languages – so people brought up speaking it can learn to speak any language without an accent.

By: David Cairns

David Cairns — Sat, 16 May 2009 05:22:33 +0000

I really want aliens to exist so that the problem of communicating with them, and thereby avoiding our probable destruction by them, can be tackled head on by the world’s most eminent linguistic experts.

http://www.eloquentbooks.com/devolution.html

By: Mike G in Corvallis

Mike G in Corvallis — Sat, 02 May 2009 17:25:14 +0000

And then there was Fredric Brown’s classic short story “Politeness,” in which the Venusians were telepathic; this allowed them to respond to greetings and questions in any Earth language — but every Venusian replied only with an insult and broke off further attempts at communication. Then an intensely frustrated anthropologist yelled out “Go **** yourself!” one day to a Venusian that had been rude to him. It turned out that there was only one greeting that the hermaphroditic Venusians did not consider deeply insulting …

Considering that aliens almost certainly would not have lips, tongues, larynxes, vocal cords, and tracheas similar to ours, I have to wonder how likely it is that they would communicate via anything that we would recognize as speech. We could talk at them all day and they could ripple their cilia back at us, and both sides would be clueless. Our brains have evolved sophisticated faculties for extracting phonemes from audio noise; speaker-independent computer-based speech recognition is not an easy thing to implement. It might be that two aliens of a single species and culture might ripple their cilia to express a single concept in patterns that wouldn’t appear at all similar to a human, because we wouldn’t understand which features of the patterns were meaningful and which were irrelevant.

By: ron terry

ron terry — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 07:21:18 +0000

an article in ‘astounding science fiction’, october 1955, titled ‘how to learn martian’, by charles f. hockett, addresses some of the problems associated with communicating with aliens.

By: Chris Welch

Chris Welch — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:15:34 +0000

For learning to speak dolphin, I highly recommend “Startide Rising,” book 2 of David Brin’s “The Uplift Trilogy.” He somewhat gets around the problem, but also shows how these different thought patterns can be quite useful, e.g., as a space pilot.

There’s also the classic Far Side cartoon wherein the dolphins speak Spanish and the linguists studying them have no idea what these sounds mean….

By: Santa

Santa — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:11:49 +0000

Douglas Adams also said that

”
… the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

By: Gordon Paterson

Gordon Paterson — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:36:10 +0000

Anyone wishing to get started on alien communication can start learning to speak Dolphin.

You will need to aquire the ability to hear and generate ultra-high frequency sounds. Even then, as a surface-bound terrestrial you will find their ideas shaped by their unbounded three-dimensional lifestyle in ways you will find totally incomprehensible.

Good luck, you’re gonna need it!

By: Mrs Stevie Hobbs (Aged 79)

Mrs Stevie Hobbs (Aged 79) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 12:25:15 +0000

Michael Quinion is an amazing man. I read World Wide Words every Saturday and have learnt so much, and enjoyed much of the “sic” section which is a collection of hilarious mistakes which have often become public. I don’t know how he fits everything he does in while still producing this weekly article. I have a couple of his books which are excellent reading and look forward one day to purchasing Gallimaufry.