Alien languages are as easy to speak as Chineese ?

[Sarevok]

This refers to Halo and Predator franchises in particular because the problem is most obvious there. Supposedly the Elites in Halo are Sanghelli and Predators are really Yautja or some crap like that.

Now I have this teeny weeny question. How the fuck does an Elite pronounce Sangheli ? They have four fucking jaws with razor sharp teeth. And the less is said about the Predators disgusting worm like mouth the better. They can communicate by speech alright. But so can whales. And whales got names for each other too. But can you speak whale ? No fucking way without a boatload of equipment. So how come humans in Halo and Predator verse somehow conclude the alien languages are just like like french or german instead of fucking animal sounds ?

In a realistic world the only way people could communicate with something like Covenant hunter would be hand signals. Even then it is questionable if an armored blob of living goo with no eyes, head, torso, ears or anything has enough psychology to comprehend what the hell are limbs and how moving them can be used for messaging.

[loomer]

It's a very old brainbug, and likely results from the general ease of translation between languages - specifically, European languages, since most sci-fi with the brainbug comes from there (or descended countries). It's so very easy to learn French or German if you speak English, but the people writing Alien languages that way don't seem to understand that things rapidly become more complex when translating between language families - English to the more exotic Asian tongues, for instance (Chinese, even, to an extent), or Russian to the African 'clicking' languages.

While it is potentially feasible to translate an Alien language using an intermediate tongue with some similarities to both (as unlikely as it may be to be related, there's still probably more similarities between some kind of Insectoid Mandible Species's click and hiss language and the African 'clicking' languages than to Russian or English, and so forth), you'd get far better results with, ironically, the Star Trek method.

While universal translators are complete bullshit, a sufficiently advanced computer (with some kind of psuedo-scientific mind reading capacity) would probably be able to take the expressions of an Alien language and map them out into an appropriate meaning syntax. An Alien might be saying 'KsgffaaahminarmlimasssH', which means absolutely nothing to us and would be very difficult to pronounce or even comprehend, but if a computer is capable of processing it while reading the thing's mind, it might be able to render it to a human (probably an interpreter, to take care of any idiosyncracies produced by thought interference and such) as '<Hello><Jimnamemine><bananaeat>. The interpreter than supplies the actual English - or whatever - translation as "Hello, my name is Jim. Would you like a banana?"

[Dooey Jo]

Uhm, if the supercomputer can't even magically decipher their language, how is it going to magically decipher their minds, which are going to be way more complex and different? Star Trek's retarded ideas can only work because they aren't reading alien minds, they're reading the minds of humans with strange foreheads (as further evidenced by the fact that most of them can produce fertile offspring with humans, but everyone already knows this, so).

[loomer]

You know, I have no idea whatsoever. They'd have to have a visualization based thought pattern for that idea to work.

[NecronLord]

Uhm, if the supercomputer can't even magically decipher their language, how is it going to magically decipher their minds, which are going to be way more complex and different? Star Trek's retarded ideas can only work because they aren't reading alien minds, they're reading the minds of humans with strange foreheads (as further evidenced by the fact that most of them can produce fertile offspring with humans, but everyone already knows this, so).

Excepting of course, that the first time the Universal Translator was shown in Trek it was used on A FUCKING CLOUD though it required some modification. While that episode was silly, your facts are simply wrong - pointless Trek-bashing.

It was indeed said to scan minds (or rather, brainwave patterns), and while that's silly, umm, yeah. It's a plot enabler so they don't have to make a new, truly alien, language for every weird critter they meet.

[Starglider]

Uhm, if the supercomputer can't even magically decipher their language, how is it going to magically decipher their minds, which are going to be way more complex and different?

This is theoretically possible in the case where the limiting factor is input data, not computing power. You almost certainly can't build a useful translation system from a few thousand words of dialog with little to no context, even if you have infinite computing power. However with high-resolution brain scanning and 'sufficiently advanced' computers you can build a complete model of the species language, psychology, culture and everything else the individual you scanned knows. In fact at a scanner level, the distinction is curiously binary; gross brain activity won't tell you much unless you have a very thorough set of studies of brains of that type (and even then, it won't tell you that much). Scanning has to be at the neuron (or equivalent) level for extraction of semantics from brain patterns to work, and once you are at that level, the main limiting factor on how much information you can get out is your computing capability. In Trek we already know that they have very high resolution brain scanning (since at least two people have been uploaded into Data-style androids, plus there was Daystrom and the M5), so my guess would be that the UT uses the same tech (when operating in a first-contact situation), and 'brainwaves' is just a layman's approximation.

[Zixinus]

OP: Beats me. I'm still mostly hung up why most aliens, that have supposedly evolved entirely independently on a different planet, able to breath our mixture of air. Without at least germ masks to prevent them from getting sick of our germs.

Then I muse on about why are they boarding (wouldn't it take a lot of time and effort to learn how to use our own ships?), why aren't they using robots, why don't they target the life support systems (never read halo)?

Then I think that the author comparing alien languages to languages the author doesn't know but sounds strange, because the author didn't quite think trough what an alien is. That, and hr likely doesn't speak a foreign language and has no idea how fucking hard it can be to translate from one unrelated language to another.

About translators: If there were no handwavium translators, you wouldn't have aliens that regularly communicate with humans. Without them, you'd need aliens that speak and hear in an extremely human-like fashion as well as possibly think like humans so the language structure is similar. Oh wait....

[Dooey Jo]

This is theoretically possible in the case where the limiting factor is input data, not computing power. [...]

Yeah, the computer would basically have to run a simulation of the person on the molecular level, since there is no guarantee that aliens (real ones) would use the same or even similar electrochemical mechanisms as humans. And even after that, it would somehow have to figure out how information is encoded in the mind and how to make something useful out of it. With any sort of feasible computing power, it would be much easier to just have a device (or a fuckton of coordinated devices) study the aliens, look for patterns in their speech and the contexts they appear in, and make educated guesses as to what they mean. It'll take a while, but it requires much less magic than mind reading.

It was indeed said to scan minds (or rather, brainwave patterns), and while that's silly, umm, yeah. It's a plot enabler so they don't have to make a new, truly alien, language for every weird critter they meet.

I know that, that's why I said it's retarded. Going out and scanning and immediately understanding unknown minds is completely ridiculous, but that's what they are supposed to do, and yet they still need Troi for some reason to tell them when someone's lying. I should have said "if" instead of "because".

[Duckie]

Hi I'm here to explode your thread by providing a shitload of food for thought.

Some brainbugs and non-brainbugs in sci-fi depictions of languages that disturb me, along with a point I'd like to make about "Alien"ness of alien languages.

Theoretically in animals who have human-similar mouth organs (or any sort of orfice you can expel air from and manipulate to constrict and modify airflow) you'll get similar sounds, although longer tongues, less rigid tongues (like giraffes whose are long and flexible), etc. will alter it. You need vocal cords to distinguish t from d, k from g, etc. Longer mouths might give more points of articulation for vowels, so instead of a-e-i-o-u as the familiar five you might get a-e-i-o-u-super i-super u-intermediate sound (norwegian 'hus') as the famliar 7 for their languages. A thinner jaw would limit the height of vowels, merging o and u and e and i.

On the converse, creatures with no lips won't be able to say p, b, f, v, and similar sounds, nor w, wh, kw, or other sounds which require liprounding. In english this would be an inconvenience, in certain languages this would merge entire sets of words where pw, tw, kw, etc are just as much letters as p, t, k. An alien lizard named p'ratix couldn't say his own name.

Speech frequencies could mess with whether we could even hear their cries- for some species of bat, humans can only hear their equivalent of baritone noises, and even then only people with good hearing. Good luck hearing whalesong, or producing it with your tiny lungs and inability to hear sounds of that frequency.

However, all isn't lost: some alien creatures might be able to pronounce english- parrots have absolutely no lips or capacity to produce humanlike sounds in the way we do, as their vocal structure is inadequate, however they can produce imitations of human speech by whistling noises that sound similar enough. But as far as non-human things like insectoid mouths and the like, there'd be no way to imitate it. Let alone things that communicate by pheromones or the like.

------------------

However, I am doubtful that alien minds for creatures recognizable as life would produce languages far out of the human spectrum of thought. Languages are very strange things- some of the bizarre syntax and shit I've seen come out of non-english tongues is worthy of alien, like the Pirahã tribe in South America who have no lexical words for concrete numbers (only 'a few', 'more', and 'many'; which varies based on context) and no terms for colours besides light and dark (everything else is done by 'like [object]', like 'blood-coloured' or 'leaf-coloured', which is different and pointless to count as colour, otherwise each language has thousands of colour terms).

"On Venus, they're so peaceful they don't have a word for war" which is a silly Sapir-Whorfism. Even if they didn't have a word for war, or even if they didn't, it wouldn't relate to peacefulness. Further, english had no word for genocide until the Armenian genocide, but you could still explain it to someone from 1800- and indeed, we did later create a word for it. And we were committing it even without having a word for it. We have no word for 'medium forest green with a gray tinge' but I just explained it to you, and we don't have a word for 'third gender which carries the fertilised offspring and cares for it after birth' but I just explained it to you. Truly alien concepts would be things human authors couldn't write about anyhow, because we couldn't percieve them- and that wouldn't even be square circles or other lovecraftian impossible things because I and MC Escher can easily talk about those- it'd have to be something in the human mind's blind spots of which I cannot provide an example.

"Eskimo Snow" similar things deserves a mention: like, "Klingons have 900 words for war". Inuit and Eskimo languages are polysynthetic, meaning similar to german they can form an infinite number of words about snow. Or near-infinite, to be precise. That said, they might have distinctions english might not have, which is fair game- Romanian has two words for 'red' which are used differently and only natives can tell the two apart. Japanese has 3 for green, blue, and 'aoi'. It's a crapshoot whether a given blue or green object in english is 'guriin', 'buruu', or 'aoi', since it's an intermediate (to simplify the actual resoning). Having seperate words for 'war' depending upon the situation, for instance, is a possible thing, in the same way that the Saami reindeer herders have a word for 'reindeer who has copulated into exhaustion' (golggot) or Eskimo has lots of words for sealhunting terminology while english doesn't. (although English does have a lot of sheepherding vocabulary which eskimo doesn't have, by comparision). Things that are important to a culture get fine-grained words, but it's not in the way depicted.

Lexicalisation is another thing- In semitic languages, you speak to females differently by grammar. In basque, verbs are conjugated in ways that tell the speaker's gender. In one tribe in aboriginal australia, they speak differently depending upon whether they're an elder or not. [side note on other weirdities: Women in Pirahã lands actually use a completely different dialect with different sounds, as different as Scottish and Texan english.] Many languages including Hittite have different endings for words and verb conjugations depending upon whether an object is animate or not (including cultural irregularities where certain sacred objects in native american languages like drums are considered 'alive' due to spirits). Romance languages distinguish words on gender, even objects that have no gender- a sella (chair) in spanish is not assumed to have tits by the speakers, it's merely a grammatical concept.

One language whose name I can't remember divides languages into 'genders' by colours, and the two colours (light and dark, or warm/cool colours, depending upon how you translate) have different grammatical paradigms like genders in many language.

A language can easily not mark plurals (Japanese) but instead use verbs to mark, say, how certain the speaker is about a fact with gradiations of probability built into the language. Sounds alien enough, save that many human languages do that.

"Alien" features:
What about a language with no grammatical future or pluralisation? Japanese.
Language with no prepositions? Very close to Finnish if you use all the cases habitually.
Language where each word can have 9 meanings depending upon how you say it? Tonal languages.
Language where everything is spit out as a giant sentence and there's only 2 vowels but 70 consonant types and yet no consonant clusters? Ubykh.
Language with up to 8 consonants or more before you get to a vowel? Georgian. Gvprtskvni. A wise reader may point out that 'r' is a vowel (english 'skirt' or 'girl' could be written gŕl, skŕt), but it's still gvp-.
Language with no vowels? Many words in Salishan languages, written here as best as I can transliterate. Sks means 'seal fat', ps means 'shape', and 'sts'qtstk' means 'that's my animal fat over there'
Language where nearly every single utterance encodes the speaker's social status and gender? Japanese.
Language where it becomes impossible to speak without affirming belief in God in daily situations without verbal gymnastics? Arabic, where certain phrases like "I hope" are actually "May Allah Grant" and similar if I remember correctly.
Language where gender is inescapably indicated by speakers when talking about just about anything? Semitic and Romance languages.
Language where time is inescapable? English and Latin and many other Indo-European languages have a bizarre obsession with exact time, to the point where there is a latin way to say this: Pugnavero. 'I will have been fighting'. Notice english can say it too, just english doesn't have it all fused together into a single -vero ending. Think about the insanity of that- it's a language where you can state that in the future's past's past continually (I will have been fighting) something happened. There's no way to easily differentiate a neutral form of time like "Bananas ripen" or "Gravity pulls objects", which is folded into the present, despite the two being different.

Worse, some of these don't make much sense, so you can't even count on it reflecting their society. The romans were patriarchal, but not all patriarchal peoples' languages have gender in their language. There's no logical reason why some ukrainian nomads who would later explode and conquer europe during the stone age would be obsessed with exact timing, or why javan islanders and japanese alone had social positions be exceptionally important to them.

TLDR: Human languages are plenty alien, even 'familiar' ones like german and english and there's plenty of ways of making them subtly unpronounceable to any human, let alone how alien mouthparts would fuck things up. Any more alien like clouds or sentient rocks or hive minds or the like and you'd have to have ways of thinking that are completely and irrevocably different to the point where we cannot intercommunicate, and then how would we know they had a language at all?

[Duckie]

ghetto edit:
Another fact about english's fetish for time: There's no way to easily differentiate a neutral form of time like "Bananas ripen" or "Gravity pulls objects", which is folded into the present like "Gravity pulls objects right now" and "Bananas ripen before my eyes", despite the two being different. That's pretty bizarre. Many languages have the 'neutral' form be the neutral time and you have to indicate 'now' for it to be the present. Some even have the neutral be the past and you have a specific conjugation for present, the opposite of how we have 'ride' vs 'rode'.

The point I was trying to make is:

I see nothing wrong with an alien language being as hard to learn as Chinese. If I had to bet my life on learning Zeta Reticulan, Nuxálk, Pirahã, or ǃXóõ in a certain period of time or I lose it, I'd investigate how hard the first one is before making any blanket pronouncements about how all human languages are non-alien to the english mindset. Those languages aren't alien because they're human-made and human-understandable is a tautological proposition. What would an alien language look like if it has to be something humans can't comprehend? It'd be like the thing I was saying about indescribable objects. If to be 'alien' a language has to be incomprehensible to a human mind, it'd be pointless to discuss such a thing as with few exceptions we're all using human minds and couldn't understand how or if such a thing could exist.

That said predators and elites shouldn't be using english or even human phonemes because they've got bizarre mouths. Yautja should chitter. I don't even know how an elite's mouth is biologically sensible, let alone how their big lamprey-mouth throat can make noise at all. At my guess they should have roar modulations like big cats instead of human-like phonemes.

But if they think anything like humans, their language will have similarities, and will be about as hard to pronounce for me as nuxálk. We could still analyse it, it'd just be hard to say. The brain bugs of 'completely alien culture = alien language' or 'completely alien creature speaks english' or 'alien language has X weirdity' need to all go.

TLDR: Linguistic nerd rage over, you can wake up.

[Samuel]

Let alone things that communicate by pheromones or the like.

Well be fine- they need to develop a long distance tongue. Unless they use messangers to communicate between ships in which case we can defeat them in detail

like the Pirahã tribe in South America who have no lexical words for concrete numbers (only 'a few', 'more', and 'many'; which varies based on context)

Hunter-gatherers can survive without that. Civilization needs exact numbers.

Truly alien concepts would be things human authors couldn't write about anyhow, because we couldn't percieve them- and that wouldn't even be square circles or other lovecraftian impossible things because I and MC Escher can easily talk about those- it'd have to be something in the human mind's blind spots of which I cannot provide an example.

Than how do we know they exist? If it cannot even be imagined, what makes you think it is possible?

Having seperate words for 'war' depending upon the situation, for instance, is a possible thing,

We have that. Police action, conquest, preemptive strike, defense, regime change, etc.

why javan islanders and japanese alone had social positions be exceptionally important to them.

Isn't it important to all societies and languages? I though that current tongues are odd for not reflecting that as much, but they still do a bit. Sir, Madam, Doctor, Professor, Mr, Ms, etc.

Any more alien like clouds or sentient rocks or hive minds or the like and you'd have to have ways of thinking that are completely and irrevocably different to the point where we cannot intercommunicate, and then how would we know they had a language at all?

We only need to understand them at the most basic level. A pidgen tongue would work.

'completely alien creature speaks english'

They could be using machines. It would explain why they all speak American English

[Duckie]

Let alone things that communicate by pheromones or the like.

Well be fine- they need to develop a long distance tongue. Unless they use messangers to communicate between ships in which case we can defeat them in detail

True, unless they had no civilisation in the proper sense but were still capable of using language and were sentient- although exactly what those two things mean is up for grabs since things as simple as prarie dogs have different inflections of cry for ground and sky based predators and different colours, like a 'meeeep!' for 'brown flying thing attacking close!' compared to 'meeeep!' for 'grey land thing far away!'. We can decipher and to a degree talk to prarie dogs (although only by recording and playing back their cries making them think predators are near by since that's all their cries are used for which sounds kind of hillarious and cruel), but does that make it a language? Most linguists, chomskyan and otherwise, say it doesn't. The common person, I haven't a clue since I have some knowledge of linguistics.

like the Pirahã tribe in South America who have no lexical words for concrete numbers (only 'a few', 'more', and 'many'; which varies based on context)

Hunter-gatherers can survive without that. Civilization needs exact numbers.

Of course, but who says aliens need civilisation? If we showed up at Epsilon Eridani and found hunter gatherers, they might not have numbers. It would be "alien", but it isn't uniquely alien because humans have it, is my point. It's something people would consider "alien".

Truly alien concepts would be things human authors couldn't write about anyhow, because we couldn't percieve them- and that wouldn't even be square circles or other lovecraftian impossible things because I and MC Escher can easily talk about those- it'd have to be something in the human mind's blind spots of which I cannot provide an example.

Than how do we know they exist? If it cannot even be imagined, what makes you think it is possible?

I haven't a clue. I have no opinion on the probability or improbability of concepts humans cannot think of, since I by nature can't think about them. As far as objects humans can't see, we already know at least one variety of matter which works like that (Dark Matter) but we have a word for it. For it to be something completely impossible to talk about in human language, it'd have to be a concept our brain structure doesn't mesh with. Whether such a thing exists is something I'm not smart enough to guess at- I'd have to guess at a no, but that could be humancentrism.

Having seperate words for 'war' depending upon the situation, for instance, is a possible thing,

We have that. Police action, conquest, preemptive strike, defense, regime change, etc.

Good point! Exactly the right thing I was considering- war vs conquest was my mental example.

why javan islanders and japanese alone had social positions be exceptionally important to them.

Isn't it important to all societies and languages? I though that current tongues are odd for not reflecting that as much, but they still do a bit. Sir, Madam, Doctor, Professor, Mr, Ms, etc.

Exactly, but only japanese and javanese to my knowledge explicitly inflect social information, like 'miru' means 'look' and 'mirimasu' means 'look politely'. Which doesn't say anything about the looking, but rather that the speaker is polite (more feminine, more polite, more etc. depending upon situation) in the same way that 'morena' means 'brown-haired [woman]' while 'moreno' means 'brown-haired [male]' when used as a noun, carrying grammatical information as a synthetic inflection.

Any more alien like clouds or sentient rocks or hive minds or the like and you'd have to have ways of thinking that are completely and irrevocably different to the point where we cannot intercommunicate, and then how would we know they had a language at all?

We only need to understand them at the most basic level. A pidgen tongue would work.

True, but I have my doubts as to whether we have any commonality to develop with a sentient creature made of self-sustaining computational arrays in a liquid formed by chance in a gas giant's atmosphere, for instance, let alone if we'd even notice they were alive. (Crystals and Stars and the like all form and reproduce but they're not alive, so we'd consider such a sci-fi creature probably just a natural formation). I meant with that statement you're quoting that we probably wouldn't even recognize truly alien-alien creatures like silicon-based life or said iain banksian gas giant creatures as being sentient, let alone comprehend their speech-equivalent, if they have any.

'completely alien creature speaks english'

They could be using machines. It would explain why they all speak American English

[/quote]
It would be more amusing if they spoke as if it came from babelfish. In fact, they should make star-trek have all the aliens (and humans when in alien POV) speak as if run through babelfish a few times. It would make it hillarious.

[Starglider]

Yeah, the computer would basically have to run a simulation of the person on the molecular level

It's not quite that bad. The procedure would be; you would simulate a neuron-equivalent at the molecular level, under various conditions. You would attempt to abstract out irrelevant detail to make a functional model, which you would check for compliance against the low-level model. You then move up to a block of neuron-equivalents (e.g. a microcolumn in humans) and repeat the process. This is in fact what brain simulation researchers have been trying to do for the last decade or so. It's possible in principle to automate the whole process, and I would expect a mature understanding of the technology to lower computing requirements substantially. It's still very high compared to existing hardware, but really the scanners are inexplicable-pseudoscientific-magic part, not the simulation.

And even after that, it would somehow have to figure out how information is encoded in the mind and how to make something useful out of it.

This is a surprisingly established field; we've been algorithmically extracting information from neural nets since the late 80s. Of course current techniques only work for simple nets up to a few thousand nodes, and can't begin to cope with something as complex as a human brain. In information-theoretic terms though, it's actually pretty plausible, a lot more plausible than warp drives or teleporters.

With any sort of feasible computing power, it would be much easier to just have a device (or a fuckton of coordinated devices) study the aliens, look for patterns in their speech and the contexts they appear in, and make educated guesses as to what they mean. It'll take a while, but it requires much less magic than mind reading.

Well maybe, but the problem is that while we know that the mind simulation approach will work given enough computing power and software expertise, we don't know what the theoretical limits of inference from mere observed behavior are. Human juvenile learning isn't a good example because that relies on strong genetic biases. While I am generally optimistic about the power of general probabilistic analysis, Trek's apparent capability to translate complex and subtle concepts after only brief interactions seems implausible.

Going out and scanning and immediately understanding unknown minds is completely ridiculous

Bear in mind that there are technologies that give you truly ludicrous levels of computing power, e.g. quantum computing with gigabit-plus working sets, that are still quite plausible compared to most Trek staples. The problem with that hypothesis is the fact that Trek civilisations seem to lack the logical consequences of having that kind of computing power on tap, but then Trek is absolutely riddled with such inconsistencies.

[Starglider]

What would an alien language look like if it has to be something humans can't comprehend? It'd be like the thing I was saying about indescribable objects. If to be 'alien' a language has to be incomprehensible to a human mind, it'd be pointless to discuss such a thing as with few exceptions we're all using human minds and couldn't understand how or if such a thing could exist.

The closest example of an 'alien language' I have to hand is the protocol that the system I am working with uses to communicate between AI nodes. Starting at the bit level, ignoring compression, encryption and routing details, you first have to deal with the usual computer protocol stuff, grouping and framing. Then you've got a 'word' set in the millions or billions with no intrinsic structure at all and thousands of new words invented for each 'conversation'. The equivalent of low-level grammar is an unnatural variant of propositional-probabilistic logic, something humans are pretty much incapable of using in casual communication (not least because we can't express a precise 10-digit number in a single word), with various kinds of strange shorthand. Every single 'phrase' is explicitly a qualified analogy, if you equate 'sentences' to unitary inference blocks then the 'sentences' can be hundreds or thousands of phrases long. The equivalent of high-level grammar consists of temporal logic (which is relatively intuitive), model overlays (which exceed human STM capacity and/or LTM recall accuracy) and direct ties into the modeling framework's search and level of detail control, stuff humans can't even reflectively see when concentrating hard on our own minds. Then there's the embedded binary data (sensory and archive), code snippets to be executed by the recipient, the embedded RPC (and potentially, custom subprotocols) used when clustering custom modeling routines...

The interesting thing here is that this is all comprehensible in principle. With complete specs, total knowledge of the situation being 'discussed' and some basic support software, you can decode a brief exchange in maybe half an hour (we do exactly that for worst-case debugging). Reverse engineering it without the specs would be a bitch, it would take at least months, possibly years, but it would be possible because the underlying logical structure is totally consistent and designed by humans. However there is absolutely no way that humans prior to 1960 or so could do this, and certainly no way a human could understand this 'language' directly.

No biological alien is going to communicate like that. However I'm sure there are plenty of ways for languages to be unlearnable/unusable by humans at the conceptual level, while still being comprehensible in theory with computer support and/or a lot of painstaking analysis.

[Junghalli]

It is a brainbug, humans probably would have serious trouble just forming the sounds of a language used by something with very different vocal equipment. How feasible it would be "speak alien" depends on a lot of factors. As has been pointed out, parrots can simulate human speech despite having a very different vocal arrangement, some aliens might be able to do the same for human speech and visa versa.

Assuming they use similar sounds, most likely what you'd end up with is humans might be able to speak alien to some degree and visa versa but no matter how well they know the language they'd have such a thick "accent" you'd probably have serious trouble understanding them. Imagine a creature with no tongue trying to whistle and slur its way through English. It gets substantially worse from there, if they communicate in frequencies that we can't hear or simulate, or worse if they use some totally alien mode of communication that isn't sound-based at all. Really, most communication with aliens would probably have to be handled through speech synthesizers or some similar artificial intermediary.

Heck, even Neanderthals would probably have had trouble with modern human languages, and they were almost identicle to us compared to humans vs aliens.

OP: Beats me. I'm still mostly hung up why most aliens, that have supposedly evolved entirely independently on a different planet, able to breath our mixture of air. Without at least germ masks to prevent them from getting sick of our germs.

That's not so incredible, there are very significant advantages to aerobic (oxygen based) metabolism, such that it's quite plausible that the vast majority of biological sapients would be oxygen breathers. Anaerobic metabolism is, by comparison, pretty low energy. There might be issues with partial pressures of oxygen and nitrogen but (IIRC) humans have reasonably wide tolerances for different partial pressures of gasses so it's pretty plausible to imagine the same is true for aliens. As for germs, realistically they wouldn't be a big worry in a truly alien ecology. The biochemistries would be incompatible and native germs for the most should find your alien body quite an unwelcoming environment. With presumed panspermia scenarios like Star Trek it becomes more of an issue, although even there you'd face much less bacterial and viral danger than on your own homeworld (there'd be nothing adapted to exploit your kind of life).

Wearing an environment suit while exploring an unfamiliar planet still might not be a bad idea though. Better safe than sorry.

[Duckie]

Ah! Another good point about an 'alien' language.

The language Iláksh, or its predecessor Iţkuîl (Ithkuil), are constructed languages which are hyper-efficient philosophical languages* of a certain design goal, and that goal is 'lack of ambiguity and phonological efficiency'. Ilaksh is somewhat more easy to pronounce and has less sounds than Iţkuîl, so betrays its design goals** for a bit more comprehensibility. While I can translate a sentence into Ilaksh or Ithkuil given time, and translate an ilaksh utterance given time (I can't distinguish the hundred-something sounds in ithkuil well enough), I cannot speak it fluently. As far as I know, no human does (as it's a constructed/fictional language), and as far as I know, no human can. The, what I would term... 'tables' are too complex. Here's an example of what I mean by 'table' from latin, of a declension for the word 'agricola'

agricola, agricolae
agricolam, agricolas
agricolae, agricolis
agricolae, agricolarum
agricola, agricolis

Each word in this mental lookup table in a synthetic language like latin encodes a seperate meaning based on the stem agricol- (farmer), and the ending carries grammatical information. Imagine if every single part of a word carried such conjugation, and the root's letters themselves permuted through different forms, like how celtic words (here, welsh) 'cymraeg' becomes 'gymraeg' in certain grammatical situations.

http://www.ithkuil.net/ilaksh/Chapter_2.html#Sec2o3(pictured, a consonant permutation table for turning base roots into more complex roots, like 'being' into 'adult male') require far too much memory space and are too 'efficient' (that is, each piece of the word represents too much information and thus has too many options, like the end of appropinqu- if it had hundreds of endings and the word hundreds of permutations, whereas in latin the root is mostly static and the total endings for all paradigms endings number about 8 dozen IIRC.) This produces very short and detailed utterances which encode a lot of information. The downside is that while there's no scientific study behind it, I would be shocked if anyone, even a native american language or northern caucasian language speaker whose languages are grammatically similar (if simpler) in form, could learn such a language fluently and conversationally.

We can understand it, but we can't speak it well. It'd be the same as a variety of hypothetical aliens studying english, who could understand and form utterances in it, and even pronounce it, but whose brains couldn't comprehend english morphology easily.

*Normally I look down on philosophical languages, but I use philosophical here to mean something like an oligosynthetic language that is not as oligosynthetic as the definition requires, since no oligosynthetic language to my knowledge exists. I don't mean philosophical as in the traditional meaning like solresol of 'linnean hierarchial classificatory language' since those are dumb.
** Ilaksh has the benefit that while too 'efficient'/'information-dense' for a person to understand in realtime, it has far less transmission errors since unlike ithkuil it doesn't have almost a hundred different consonants and dozens of vowels where any one mistake can cause an error in the meaning of the word. Since any language has the additional goal of being comprehensible and having minimal transmission errors, I'd see Ilaksh as more successful in this regard as a Hypothetical Speedtalk than Heinlein's Speedtalk or Ithkuil.

[Broomstick]

However, all isn't lost: some alien creatures might be able to pronounce english- parrots have absolutely no lips or capacity to produce humanlike sounds in the way we do, as their vocal structure is inadequate, however they can produce imitations of human speech by whistling noises that sound similar enough.

I wouldn't say that parrots have an inadequate vocal structure so much as a completely different vocal structure. Birds sounds are very complex - while humans can crudely imitate some bird calls they do so very poorly in most instances. Much like birds imitating human speech.

Birds do not have vocal cords, they have a syrinx which produces sounds via a very different mechanism than in mammals. Unlike humans, which use their throats, mouths, tongue, teeth, and lips to modify the sound produced by their vocal cords, bird sounds are nearly or entirely unmodified once they leave the syrinx. (The hissing s sound may be an exception - I'm not exactly sure if that's produced in the syrinx or through some other mechanism.) It's not "whistling" - birds such as parrots actually do manage consonant sounds (I'm listing to one saying "step up, step up, step up" even as I type this - her consonants are pretty distinct for that phrase). Find some YouTube videos of Alex Pepperberg and others - the African Greys in this clip do more than just make "whistles".

But that's very intriguing, isn't it? Avians, which a completely different manner of producing vocalizations than mammals, actually imitate human speech better than any mammal does, even our closest relatives.

So, it may be possible for two alien species to approximate each other's means of communications, though probably very difficult for either party to use the other's speech, but it should not be routine.

However, there is no doubt in my mind that even if parrots use human words appropriately in context they do not necessarily have to understand those words as we do. When my conure says "step up" does she want to be picked up? Sometimes. Sometimes she seems to be telling another bird to step up (like when I hold out a finger in front of one of the cockatiels and the conure says "step up" before I do). If she says "c'mere (come here) step up-p" (she adds an extra and distinct "p" sound) what it means is that she is pissed off and if you stick a finger next to her she will bite it. It also means she's about to charge unless you back off. WHERE she got that I don't know - it's not standard English, I don't recall teaching her that (but apparently she has taught us that meaning!). And that, right there, is an example of where communication can go off the rails between two species that are both from Earth. How much different would a genuine alien be?

So we probably will be able to communicate something with aliens. It's not inconceivable that an alien species could vocalize, or see in a similar spectrum to us, and we could have enough in common to communicate very basic concepts like "eat", "move", and so forth. That doesn't mean we could achieve any deep understanding.

I suspect that any language we use with a truly alien intelligence is going to be a pidgin or trade language for a long, long time, possibly forever with a whole lot of opportunity for misunderstanding. It's not unreasonable to propose an overlap in perceptions (such as having a hearing/vocal range audible to both parties). What is unreasonable is proposing any sort of easy fluency. I know my birds learn about human body language (given how important we are in their environment, the source of food, water, protection, etc.) and I've certainly learned about them, but there are definitely times when one or the other party is going "What the hell are you doing, and what does THAT mean?" It would only be worse with an actual alien.

[Lusankya]

Don't forget though that when we communicate with an intelligent alien species, the aliens should hopefully be intelligent and motivated enough to modify their speech or behaviour more than our pets do. When my dog goes around rolling in poo, he can't explain to me why it's so fantastic, and conversely, when I give the dog a bath after he's rolled in poo, I can't explain to him why I'm doing that. That's in part because dogs and humans are different, but also in part because my dog lacks the intellectual capacity to undersand anything much more complex than rolling in poo = good. Even if there are more "what the hell does that mean?" monents with aliens, at least we'll be able to ask and get an answer. With animals, our only real option is to watch them for years on end, and even then we can't always figure it out.

[Broomstick]

On the other hand, an intelligent alien species would probably be more adept at deception. Dogs, cats, and birds have only a limited ability to deceive, after all. The ability to lie and lie well adds yet another dimension to communication.

[Duckie]

As far as parrots, what I meant by inadequate was 'inadequate for humaniform speech'. Also, technically what they in fact do is whistling, in a sort of way. It's blowing different modulated frequencies of air through their throat rather than using vocal cords (which they lack) and tongue/mouth articulations to shape the noise. So perhaps I should have said "whistle" in quotes or described it further, but I didn't know the proper way to describe what you just explained as I'm no expert on bird phonology. Thanks for the additional information, it's rather amazing- I wonder, do you know if parrots have trouble with a certain class of noises? I can't see them performing clicks, breathy voiced consonants, or nasal vowels contrasting with oral vowels easily, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if they could make all of those and even some sounds humans can describe but not articulate due to tongue/facial/throat shape problems like epiglottal plosives.

Additionally, Parrots have some amazing brains for linguistics, too. One grey parrot named I believe Nkisi was able to conjugate verbs- he once said he 'flied' somewhere. It's not amazing cause he said that, it's amazing because he was wrong. He generalised the -ed ending of past verbs to a word he'd never heard the past tense of before. I've heard he can even get plurals vs singulars right and many irregular verbs once learning them. The former is more impressive, for the same reason as 'flied', since memorising isn't as impressive as deriving it.

[TheLostVikings]

I wonder, do you know if parrots have trouble with a certain class of noises? I can't see them performing clicks, breathy voiced consonants, or nasal vowels contrasting with oral vowels easily, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if they could make all of those and even some sounds humans can describe but not articulate due to tongue/facial/throat shape problems like epiglottal plosives.

While it's a bit of a non sequitur I suddenly remembered a funny story. Some guys were in the middle of the jungle, off the beaten path, I mean literally far away from any roads at all. When suddenly they heard a large truck approaching in the distance. Perplexed, as no vehicle could possibly drive trough the dense forest, they stopped and waited as the sound gradually drew closer. After getting continuously louder for quite a while they suddenly saw an elephant passing by next to them while making perfect sounding engine noises...

Turns out one of the local elephant trails intersected one of the few roads in the vicinity, a road which had lots of big trucks carrying lumber and logging equipment, driving back and forth. Though not language I still found it pretty hilarious in a unintended consequences kind of way.

[Broomstick]

I wonder, do you know if parrots have trouble with a certain class of noises? I can't see them performing clicks, breathy voiced consonants, or nasal vowels contrasting with oral vowels easily, but then again I wouldn't be surprised if they could make all of those and even some sounds humans can describe but not articulate due to tongue/facial/throat shape problems like epiglottal plosives.

Parrots do clicks just fine. Also beeps, rasps, ringing noises... I think their vocal apparatus, for some purposes, is actually more adept than ours. "ng" seems to give them some trouble, but some of them seem to manage it.

[Zixinus]

I just would like to say that this thread is totally awesome and is a fucking goldmine for stuff about alien languages and ideas regarding alien beings.

That's not so incredible, there are very significant advantages to aerobic (oxygen based) metabolism, such that it's quite plausible that the vast majority of biological sapients would be oxygen breathers. Anaerobic metabolism is, by comparison, pretty low energy. There might be issues with partial pressures of oxygen and nitrogen but (IIRC) humans have reasonably wide tolerances for different partial pressures of gasses so it's pretty plausible to imagine the same is true for aliens. As for germs, realistically they wouldn't be a big worry in a truly alien ecology. The biochemistries would be incompatible and native germs for the most should find your alien body quite an unwelcoming environment.

All very true, however I have to ask: do you think the average trooper wants to find out by first-hand if adjusting to the new air mixture will not harm him? After all, divers have to prepare and spend time adjusting to their different mixture of air. That could seriously hamper combat ability.

Or that the germs cannot interact with his systems? What if you get a nasty germ that does? Perhaps they have chemicals flowing in their blood that certain bacteria that we consider harmless, strive on? What about fungi? All the nasty things that a dead body releases? What if there is something that is common to humans (soap for instance) but might somehow cause an allergic reaction?

It doesn't matter how likely they are, but rather, do you want to find out? Do you want to find out on your own troops?

Let's just step down the paranoia a bit (or up, depending how you look at it): what if humans developed a deadly strain of an alien's equivalent of bacteria but can be nothing more than harmless to humans? What if they did it secretly and spread it around all of their military installations? What if it has a slow lurking time and spreads around you, while the humans don't even have a cough of it and are wondering why are their enemies suddenly so weak and lacking in fight?

Or what about gasses? Humans have developed a disturbing arsenal of deadly gasses and what's preventing them from using those on you? This is an all-species out war, after all.

Or what if during a particularly nasty fight, someone throws a grenade at a weak section of the hull and lets out nasty gasses or water or whatever that are even harmful to humans. Do you want to find out how harmful are they to you and your troops? You could flood the room you're in. Or there is always the risk of explosive decompression. I did not read Halo but I've played the games and I recall that some of the Elite did have suits that could work in different environments and that Master Chief found his suit's air recycling ability very useful.

I conceed that its possible to have aliens that can walk in and breath our air and don't worry about things in the air, no problem, I just don't see it probable.

Then again, I am probably overthinking the standard setting of "MANLY SPACE MARINE MACMANLY (tm) SLAPS HORDES OF TECHNOLOGICALLY SUPERIOR ALIENS FROM SPACE, THROWING THEM AROUND WITH HIS DICK AND THEY RUN AWAY TERRIFIED AT THE SIGHT OF HIS BALLS". From what I can gather, many writers think of sci-fi as space opera, fantasy just in the future and with a vague pretext of science (or enlightenment anyway, unless its a dynastopia because the world is shite and therefore the future is shite-ier, or something). They don't think of aliens as aliens but as different cultures with exaggerated cultures that look weird and speak weird. Humans with strange but interesting foreheads in other words, possibly made out of rubber.

[iborg]

I just would like to say that this thread is totally awesome and is a fucking goldmine for stuff about alien languages and ideas regarding alien beings.

Ditto. Especially Duckie's posts. I have to assume he's an actual linguist or philologist or at least very interested in the subject of languages

[Mayabird]

Duckie is a she, yo (and while I'm here, so is Broomstick, and so am I). And yes, she's very interested in languages.


This is barely on topic; when it comes to alien languages being written down, to keep from breaking suspension of disbelief too much for myself, I assume that written text of alien languages is just the best equivalent that author could figure out or the 'convention' for writing it, however incorrect that may actually be, like writing Chinese words and place-names in English. How many different spelling variations have there been, anyway? (This doesn't work when the language the author is making up is particularly bad or stupid, but that is usually coupled with a particularly bad or stupid story.)