‘Babelfish’ to translate alien tongues could be built
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15:30 18 April 2008
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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
."
Astrobiology – Learn more in our out-of-this-world special report.
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