Scientist Designs Program to Translate Alien Languages

1. Johnald
   January 26th, 2009 at 11:56 pm

   get back to us when it works out what another animal is saying, eg. whales...

2. caitlin13
   January 26th, 2009 at 11:59 pm

   Elll-eee-ottt....

   Also: What Johnald said. Animals are pretty alien. How about deciphering babies?

3. BJN
   January 27th, 2009 at 1:08 am

   Find similarities to other human languages? That's incredibly obtuse. Human languages have innate similarities and they're all produced by human vocal anatomy. It's unlikely that an alien species would have evolved to make sounds even as comprehensible to us as dolphins or whales make. And to expect any structural similarity, much less any common root words from a species that evolved on another world seems unlikely in the extreme.

4. CjGuitarist82
   January 27th, 2009 at 2:07 am

   Why don't they work on something to help us understand what People are trying to say?

5. Alex
   January 27th, 2009 at 2:14 am

   BJN: Actually it's more complicated than that. There are languages from geographically close locations that do not share common origins.

   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.

6. Larfin Jackarse
   January 27th, 2009 at 3:26 am

   @Alex

   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).

7. gnarley
   January 27th, 2009 at 3:37 am

   Great! Now all we have to do is find some aliens to try it out on!
   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?

8. Felipe Astolfi
   January 27th, 2009 at 4:22 am

   well that reminds a lot the movie "Mars Attack!"

9. Gerry
   January 27th, 2009 at 9:37 am

   WHAT the software programmer doesn't take into account
   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)...

10. Scooter
    January 27th, 2009 at 10:14 am

    Shaka when the Walls fell. so A Universal translator isn't far off?

11. Gauldar
    January 27th, 2009 at 10:40 am

    TIN
    FOIL
    HATS
    TOM
    CRUISE

12. mallory
    January 27th, 2009 at 12:02 pm

    That seems like a waste of resources...

13. Nic M.
    January 27th, 2009 at 12:13 pm

    I think a more principled objection can be made to this project: it's not just about the sounds aliens make, since structural similarities can be easily distinguished from sounds. A series of high-pitched beeps might be an easily decodable binary language. Nor is the issue about the phenomenology of the aliens and their interests.

    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

14. Otto
    January 27th, 2009 at 1:57 pm

    well that reminds a lot the movie “Mars Attack!”

    Hehe...Don't run. We are your friends.

15. Otto
    January 27th, 2009 at 1:58 pm

    whoops that should be @ Felipe

16. Dan Smith
    January 27th, 2009 at 5:09 pm

    60 human languages which are unimaginably different from any alien language that we could possibly exist.

17. Kavin
    August 27th, 2009 at 7:22 pm

    SEND ME IF IT WORKS OUT!!!!!!1

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