39 ms·

A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

184 points by CarolineW 10y ago

cletus 10y ago
One big issue with communicating with aliens is sensory differences with humans. Humans perceive a sound range, the so-called visibl spectrum and certain limited smells (compared to man animals). Even here there are animals that perceive different spectra and the magnetic field. What's more human communication relies on a basic common wiring (e.g. Paus s between words seem to be basically universal regardless of language and culture). So if an alien landed here what if they didn't perceive sound at all and saw only in the ultraviolet range? I find this subject fascinating and it's certainly rich fodder for sci-fi. Anyway the article asks how the interviewee would handle this situation without touching on this far more pressing problem.
- dennyabraham 10y ago
  Later in the article when describing a practical protocol for a first-contact scenario, they explain this problem as discovering the 'modality' of communication.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  >So if an alien landed here what if they didn't perceive sound at all and saw only in the ultraviolet range? If they were capable of interstellar travel this would be a trivial problem to solve in comparison so yeah highly implausible plots.
  - cletus 10y ago
    Well this is the somewhat depressing part: interstellar distances just seem so vast one has to wonder if it's ever going to be feasible. This is worsened by the timescales just being hopelessly long for how long we live. It seems far more likely that AIs are more viable to send than living organisms.
    - ageofwant 10y ago
      We will not live in meat forever. Once strong AI happens, or maybe even before, human consciousness will be transcribable into more resilient matter. That type of consciousness could be hibernated for millennia in transit. Or play endless games in transit. Its a bit silly to imply "living organisms" a being somehow better, especially when the vast majority of future humanity will live their potential endless lives in smart-matter panels orbiting this and other suns.
    - adrianN 10y ago
      With time dilation the distances are not that vast. But even without, it is plausible to send biological matter in some form of hibernation across the galaxy in a space ship at ~0.3c. The energy requirements are pretty big, but you could use something like black hole star ships to efficiently convert matter into speed.
- Johnbot 10y ago
  That is certainly an interesting problem, one I first saw in a Hackaday post from a few years ago [1]. Personally, I've always wondered how any aliens would interpret the Arecibo message - if they could even decode it, that is. [1] http://hackaday.com/2015/10/06/electronics-for-aliens/ http://hackaday.com/2015/10/06/electronics-for-aliens/
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    I always thought aliens would think the marks on the golden disk are as meaningful as the defects on the semiconductor chips. I can't imagine why they would wonder if it's a message.
    - chc 10y ago
      We get radio bursts from dying stars and try to interpret them as messages. Intelligence as we know it is pretty obsessed with trying to extract information from its environment, even where none may exist at all.
  - new299 10y ago
    Thanks, that's my article! I'm glad you remember it after all this time.
- maxxxxx 10y ago
  This makes me wonder: is there a specific advantage in us being able to see the specific wavelengths we see or is it just a random thing and we would be fine if we could see only other wavelengths like UV or infrared?
  - Robotbeat 10y ago
    Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum: http://plantphys.info/plant_physiology/images/solarlight.gif http://plantphys.info/plant_physiology/images/solarlight.gif And there are other constraints, too. UV is blocked by water (and our lens material) and can induce chemical changes (read: damage) easier than visible light. Damaging sensitive retina. Not that this is an unsolvable problem (bees see UV), but it is a biochemical constraint. Infrared, especially far infrared, doesn't work too well without a cooled sensor. And the energy per quanta is less, which reduces your options for good, high-sensitivity biomolecules that can detect them, kind of the opposite problem of UV. So yeah, there are a few reasons why visible light is visible light and why we can't see UV or infrared. It's not entirely arbitrary or random. But "seeing" with sound is also a viable evolutionary approach, but less effective in a low-density medium like air and more effective (even than light) in a medium like water.
    - yourapostasy 10y ago
      > Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum... Does this mean that our vision system evolved to pick up the most energetic part of the Sun's spectrum that ends up at the surface? Did it evolve this way so our vision systems' cellular agglomerate don't have to expend as much energy gathering that part of the spectrum as opposed to other parts of the spectrum? If so, then is there any linkage via evolutionary theory that imply our vision system might be among the first vision systems to evolve on the planet, because it filled the most-favored evolutionary niche associated with the lowest energy expenditure to gain a evolutionarily competitive advantage over other pre-human species?
      - jcranmer 10y ago
        I would point out that the crystal field splitting energies happen to correspond to the region around visible light, which means that being able to finely distinguish gradations of visible light would lead you to be able to visually distinguish between many different organometallic ions. I suspect that matters more than the flux of visible light in the solar spectrum.
- cnorthwood 10y ago
  We don't actually pause between words as we speak, and there are many languages which don't have spaces either.
inputcoffee 10y ago
Perhaps they should take the time to make a few distinctions in this interview: 1. Perceptions 2. Constructs 3. Language For a creature that doesn't have sight at all, they literally can't talk about certain concepts. Now, does the creature distinguish between objects and actions? If they do, they have a basis to distinguish between Nouns and Verbs. Finally, humans might be hard wired for some aspects of language. It would be a huge coincidence if aliens had the same hard wiring. (For instance, they could have evolved to give their children negative evidence, rather than pre-constrain grammars.)
- mannykannot 10y ago
  It would indeed be a huge coincidence if humans and an extraterrestrial species had the same hard-wiring for language, but I would think it far less of a coincidence if they both had hard-wiring that was functionally broadly similar.
- naasking 10y ago
  > For a creature that doesn't have sight at all, they literally can't talk about certain concepts. Any intelligent species will create instruments for measurement in non-sensory regimes, so they can certainly explore those regimes. And if you're talking about some kind of qualitative experience, it's conjecture that such experiences aren't reducible to some kind of complex third-person account.
mosqutopi 10y ago
Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language. Another suggestion for aliens to understand our language would be first to show then how evolution in earth has happened. Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path. Perhaps studying the neurons they could infer a lot of information about how our mind interacts with the environment. Edited: An interesting novel is The Black Cloud by Hoyle in which the author tries to establish a language between human and an intelligent extraterrestrial electromagnetic cloud.
- breatheoften 10y ago
  I think evolution is pretty insightful -- given that these creatures are capable of engineering a space in which humans can survive they clearly have knowledge of evolutionary biology which must intersect our own knowledge. That seems a space with more identifiably shareable concepts than math.
- js2 10y ago
  > Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language Probably the most famous attempt to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt
- gliese1337 10y ago
  Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path. Why? What bearing does the study of biological evolution have on the physics and engineering of space travel?
seewhatIsee 10y ago
The Himba tribe in Africa have an interesting perception of color which is believed to stem from their language[1]. For example, their language uses the same word for what westerners separately call green and blue. As a result, they cannot seem to distinguish the colors when presented to them. [1] https://vimeo.com/120808489 https://vimeo.com/120808489
- IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
  And Russians see two different colors where Westerners only see "Blue". http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full There are more examples.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  "Grue" is actually pretty common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
- skyisblue 10y ago
  The ancient Japanese also had one word for shades of green and blue.
awinter-py 10y ago
I've never understood the core question of S-W. Is it that you can't have a word without having a concept for it? That seems like a no-brainer. Neanderthals weren't able to build airplanes, and their language probably didn't have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn't the cause of A. The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not able to build airplanes. Most cultures that can build flying machines have one or more names for them. I don't know what it would mean to have the concept for something without having a word (or a sentence) to describe it. If the S-W claim is that 'it's more common for a concept to underly a word than for a word to exist for a concept', I don't agree with that either -- kids who read a lot will often know the part of speech for a word and its context but not much else.
- pebblexe 10y ago
  Are you kidding me? Are you claiming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't true on ycombinator? This is a forum famous for talking about blub languages and lisp. And if it's true for artificial languages, that's a strong indicator that it's true for human ones. But sadly there are very few studies comparing programming languages and I've never seen one comparing human languages qualitatively.
  - awinter-py 10y ago
    I have a fairly large sample set suggesting that claiming to know C++ on your resume is not correlated with understanding the concept of memory allocation.
  - chaoky 10y ago
    No, programming languages are completely different from natural languages. You are conflating some concepts here. There are artificial programming languages which are context free and express computation more or less. Then there are artificial and human languages which express statements in real life and are not context free. Its obvious that some methods of expressing computation are easier for humans to comprehend than others and are formed on a much more mathematically logical basis. For example, the lambda calculus is much more readable than a turing machine and has 3 easy mathematical rules, although it is harder to implement on a von Neumann model. Sapir Whorf applies strictly to natural languages and to some extent constructed ones, but here most modern linguists agree it in its strong form has been discredited in the same way that race instrinsically influencing behavior has been discredited. People are people, and looking at historical sound change should convince that sound changes over a long period of time do not change any absolute measure of "complexity" in a language in a well defined way.
dudeonthenet 10y ago
It's also worth making the distinction between the movie and the impressive short story that the movie is based on, which the article completely fails to mention: Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life [1] I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover. Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himself did a wonderful job with the screenplay, while managing to convey the main ideas and emotion of the book, there are quite a few details about the process of translating Heptapod A and B that didn't make it into the movie, details which would have painted a more complete picture of the situation for the interviewed professor of linguistics that was interviewed in this article. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your-life-and-others https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your...
- shas3 10y ago
  [spoiler] Also, the story clearly has a theme of a person being a helpless observer of their own life (prescience or not (see Gwern's post [0]). The movie has a time-travel twist that's very, to use an indian term, "masala". [0] https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life
  - alanbernstein 10y ago
    I'm intrigued by this use of "masala", can you explain? Urban dictionary has a few options, not sure which of those you mean, if any.
    - GenerocUsername 10y ago
      I can try to shine a light on this idiom. Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US... so popular in fact that it is expected at any indian restaurant. Because of this, the term can be synonomous with 'run of the mill', 'standard', or even 'safe'.
      - setr 10y ago
skizm 10y ago
What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm not a trained linguist or anything, but it seems to me they should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers. Maybe as a CS guy I'm biased (since my language is symbols and numbers), but literally every conceivable language has to contain numbers of some kind (at the very least the concept of singular vs plural). So start with "one" and "two" or maybe even the concept of nothing vs something. Work your way to vocab words related to space and time (again, I would think these universal concepts considering the aliens traveled with the goal of getting to earth), then get into specific human concepts like me vs you vs third person. They essentially worked through language in the same way you would work through language with a human baby, which I think would get you no where when talking to an alien race (who are "adults" at this point you would assume, and have their own fully developed world views). Just my 2 cents though.
- plttn 10y ago
  If I remember the book correctly, they talk more about their attempt at using numbers, but due to the way heptapods think (all of time happening at once), the math concepts are actually harder than physical concepts.
  - lutusp 10y ago
    > If I remember the book correctly ... No book, sad to say. The movie is based on a Ted Chiang short story named "The story of your life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life There are a number of books out there named "The Arrival" or a variation thereof, but they have no connection with the movie. I only post this to keep people from ordering books with that name, hoping to acquire more depth than the movie provides. Not to disparage the movie, which I regard as first-rate.
    - plttn 10y ago
      Right. I meant to say the short story.
YCode 10y ago
> Once she had these splotches, they jumped pretty quickly from “OK, that’s how they communicate a concept” to “I’ve now got a mini-dictionary of a bunch of concepts.” ...they don’t really show the process of how she got from there to understand what chunks mean what. I think the film makers made the right choice artistically. There's a certain potential, a sort of superpositional value in only filling in the details of a plot device that are absolutely necessary to further the plot (i.e. the flux capacitor). So long as you don't fill in the answer it could be anything, but as soon as you provide a concrete answer all that sense of wonder and curiosity is paved over with a simple matter of fact answer that may or may not be fully thought out. And in practical terms the plot becomes more restricted and the odds of creating a continuity error are increased. I suspect, in short that had they filled in that gap in the movie we'd be reading a rant about how the film maker's answer doesn't hold upon closer examination.
thesz 10y ago
I haven't seen Arrival myself but I had a discussion with someone who did and, boy, did he was extremely on the linguistic determinism side! After some reminescence and analysis of the discussion I came to bold conclusion that defending strong Sapir-Worf hypothesis is very much akin to racism. Basically, you prohibit someone not fluent in the language of your choice the ability to see the world just like you do or even better. Just to give one food of thought - most of human languages are two-level (like van Wijngaarden two-level grammar) with the extremely outstanding examples like Nigerian (and I heard there are fixed-grammar languages here and there, but they are rare). Two-level grammars are Turing complete and thusly you can express any concept in most of them. The expression effort will differ at start but if concept is important enough it will be expressed concisely in every one of them. To quote B.Stroustrup "users require LOUD SYNTAX for new features and succinct syntax for familiar ones". Just like real languages evolve.
- zingermc 10y ago
  Maybe I'm being too literal, but how can a grammar be Turing complete? The usual definition of Turing completeness is being able to simulate an arbitrary Turing machine. Typical human languages don't do beta reductions like Lambda Calculus, so I fail to see how a grammar (or the language produced by the grammar) can be said to compute anything.
  - aleeds 10y ago
    From what I understand, the idea is you have some string S and an input T, and running a grammar G on ST will produce an output. Sometimes they won't halt. Just like a Turing machine. In this analogy G is the 'universal Turing machine'
    - zingermc 10y ago
      Interesting! I think I am starting to get it. To double check, is running a grammar the same as parsing?
      - 10y ago
remarkEon 10y ago
One thing that I think always confuses me about any science fiction work that deals with Humans meeting Aliens for the first time is that it seems to assume it's all on us to figure out a common language. I have to admit, my assumption if that if some species is sufficiently advanced to figure out interstellar travel they'd likely be able to decypher our language and find a way for us to communicate.
- shas3 10y ago
  The story sorts this out. Absent an interpreter, you necessarily need to be able to talk to someone who knows the other language so that you can query them, etc. Realistically, there's no way to intercept or interpret communications as the protocols are almost impossible to figure out (that is another layer of 'language'). Let say an alien intercepts a TV signal, can they convert it back to video? It is almost impossible that they will be able to infer the entire set of protocols: signal -> video, aligning video, etc. Especially given that aliens may be so different from us that their technologies may have developed in an orthogonal direction to our own.
  - petters 10y ago
    I and I think many others would disagree that it would be almost impossible to decode a TV signal.
    - eric_the_read 10y ago
      This is what drives me nuts about Star Trek shows where they encounter completely new aliens and they all seem to have compatible video-chat protocols.
    - shas3 10y ago
      I think you forget that you have to completely set aside human assumptions. How will the aliens even know they are looking at signals encoding video and audio? Do aliens have technology and knowhow in the RF regime? Will they even be able to receive, store, or analyze the TV waveforms? Do they have the notion of amplitude and frequency modulation? Also, how will they know that the signal encodes video? Absent ground truth, low entropy (or equivalent measures like bigrams, Markov models, etc.) is the only way one can determine that a sequence is a language. Even if they are able to convert the RF signal to some low-entropy sequence of symbols, there is a very real possibility of them going off on a tangent: mapping the information to a completely different language. A real world example is the symbols of Indus valley civilization. Several decades into the information age, and about a century since the seals were discovered, researchers haven't even conclusively established that the symbols encode a language.
gliese1337 10y ago
I feel like the linguist interviewed may have missed the point of the semasiograms (explicitly not called logograms in the movie). Which I suppose is understandable, as the movie by itself may have not done a sufficiently good job of explaining why they are not like Chinese logograms after all. (I am unfortunately biased by having also read _The Story of Your Life before hand). Logograms, although they do not encode the phonological structure of words in a language, nevertheless do correspond to words, and written sentences using logograms mirror the linear syntactic structure of the spoken language. The distinction between Heptapod A and Heptapod B is not merely a matter of discarding phonological representation and using logograms; Heptapod B is intended to have literally no relation whatsoever to the structure of Heptapod A, being a fully 2-dimensional semasiographic system while Heptapod A is a (necessarily, because spoken) linear system. And while the circular semasiograms developed for the movie certainly look cool, and were probably a good choice for the film-makers to make, they really do not do justice to what's described in the original story, or to the actual real-world 2D writing systems that have been developed (e.g., UNLWS: http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/grammar.pdf http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/grammar.pdf).
deleted 10y ago
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UhUhUhUh 10y ago
It think this linguistic approach remains very superficial in that it only targets vocabulary and ways to represent it and to translate it. It does not tackle the "deep structure" the grammar that underlies and, in my belief, determines everything that sits above. Yes, I know, I'm a chomskian... I also understand that this would have propelled the narrative in a wildly weird area where most spectators would have probably gone to do some other thing than to watch. And "Arrival" is not a bad movie. I just wonder what would a truly alien language, with a truly alien underlying structure, would look like. Much more than vocabulary keys could be needed to even begin to communicate. This is also where the SW hypothesis would begin to really become hugely significant.
- readymade 10y ago
  Seeing as though deep structure is by definition unobservable in its direct form, it would be kind of strange to tackle that before building up a lexicon. A more interesting question, IMO, is whether they even have a deep structure.
civilian 10y ago
> At one point in the movie, the character Ian [Jeremy Renner] says, “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that if you immerse yourself in another language, you can rewire your brain.” And that made me laugh out loud, because Whorf never said anything about rewiring your brain. But since this wasn’t the linguist speaking, it’s fine that another character is misunderstanding the Sapir-Whorf. As a Biochemist-- this is not a misunderstanding! Everything in our brain is rewired as we learn things and as we develop heuristics. So of course thinking differently relies on rewiring your brain. There's no spirit or soul hidden in our brain, it's all wires. This linguist needs a neurobiology course. :3
- 6stringmerc 10y ago
  I like the wiring analogy, and also ones that describe the functional mind akin to vast, complex spider webs upon which information zooms around. Making connections, turns, associations, firing individual bits or entire areas into vivid use. If we didn't "rewire" as you put it, I think we'd have a very big problem as a species learning new things!
sirishn 10y ago
Anal retentive interviewee speaks English
xtiansimon 10y ago
Neophyte impression--Enjoyed the notion of time-less language and the similarities to other series/state issues in langauge theory such as Synchrony and Diachrony[1]. As a neophyte programmer I find networks and version control are also similarly intresting structural contrasts. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_and_diachrony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_and_diachrony
mirimir 10y ago
I was expecting some discussion of S-W hypothesis and coding. Does learning particular programming languages alter thinking more generally? I've read that it's better to know several distinct sorts of languages. Are some languages dangerous to learn?
mcguire 10y ago
"What I gathered is that the written form is not encoding the sounds of the spoken form, right? And certain dialects of Chinese are like that. They have these characters and the characters stand for a word or a concept, but a Chinese character isn’t made up of individual symbols that stand for individuals sounds in the way that English does. In English, the word dog has a D and that corresponds to the sound duh. In Chinese, it’s not quite that way. Now I gather there is a phonetic aspect to Chinese, but largely Chinese uses logograms, where the symbol stands for the word. It doesn’t stand for a sound. "You don’t really pronounce the logogram. "Right, it’s not phonetic in the way that English is phonetic. So I took the alien language to be that kind of writing system. I still took the visual system to be encoding the same concepts of the oral system so that the aliens would have for any given concept a written version and a spoken version. Logographic systems on Earth are essentially similar. The Japanese have three different writing systems. One of them, Kanji, is shared with Chinese. The spoken languages are very different. The Japanese speaker and the Chinese speaker can’t talk to each other, but they share a writing system because the writing system doesn’t actually match phonetically onto the sounds of the language." I began to doubt the linguist here. I understand that many people use 'logogram' as a shorthand to describe whatever Chinese is, but she seems to be taking it seriously. Chinese isn't written with 1 symbol per word (or idea or whatever); it would be more true to say that it is syllabic, where most common Chinese words are one syllable. Many (most?) Chinese glyphs are made up of a root and a radical, where one part indicates the "class" or "topic" of the symbol and the other indicates the pronunciation (at least at one time). She seems to be dancing around the idea that a Chinese speaker and a Japanese speaker could communicate by writing, each in their respective languages, and be understood through the magic of Kanji/logograms. That is not the case, too my understanding. I'm given to understand that one feature of all known natural writing systems is that they are based off of the languages' vocabulary, grammar, etc., however hidden by changes between when the writing system was formalized and now. The idea that a writing system would not record what someone would say is weird.
xbryanx 10y ago
It was interesting to read up more on the Hopi Language Controversy and see how Ekkehart Malotki demonstrated that the Hopi do have a wealth of time related vocabulary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
readme 10y ago

184 points by CarolineW 10y ago

One big issue with communicating with aliens is sensory differences with humans. Humans perceive a sound range, the so-called visibl spectrum and certain limited smells (compared to man animals). Even here there are animals that perceive different spectra and the magnetic field. What's more human communication relies on a basic common wiring (e.g. Paus s between words seem to be basically universal regardless of language and culture). So if an alien landed here what if they didn't perceive sound at all and saw only in the ultraviolet range? I find this subject fascinating and it's certainly rich fodder for sci-fi. Anyway the article asks how the interviewee would handle this situation without touching on this far more pressing problem.

dennyabraham 10y ago
Later in the article when describing a practical protocol for a first-contact scenario, they explain this problem as discovering the 'modality' of communication.
rubber_duck 10y ago
>So if an alien landed here what if they didn't perceive sound at all and saw only in the ultraviolet range? If they were capable of interstellar travel this would be a trivial problem to solve in comparison so yeah highly implausible plots.
- cletus 10y ago
  Well this is the somewhat depressing part: interstellar distances just seem so vast one has to wonder if it's ever going to be feasible. This is worsened by the timescales just being hopelessly long for how long we live. It seems far more likely that AIs are more viable to send than living organisms.
  - ageofwant 10y ago
    We will not live in meat forever. Once strong AI happens, or maybe even before, human consciousness will be transcribable into more resilient matter. That type of consciousness could be hibernated for millennia in transit. Or play endless games in transit. Its a bit silly to imply "living organisms" a being somehow better, especially when the vast majority of future humanity will live their potential endless lives in smart-matter panels orbiting this and other suns.
  - adrianN 10y ago
    With time dilation the distances are not that vast. But even without, it is plausible to send biological matter in some form of hibernation across the galaxy in a space ship at ~0.3c. The energy requirements are pretty big, but you could use something like black hole star ships to efficiently convert matter into speed.
Johnbot 10y ago
That is certainly an interesting problem, one I first saw in a Hackaday post from a few years ago [1]. Personally, I've always wondered how any aliens would interpret the Arecibo message - if they could even decode it, that is. [1] http://hackaday.com/2015/10/06/electronics-for-aliens/ http://hackaday.com/2015/10/06/electronics-for-aliens/
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  I always thought aliens would think the marks on the golden disk are as meaningful as the defects on the semiconductor chips. I can't imagine why they would wonder if it's a message.
  - chc 10y ago
    We get radio bursts from dying stars and try to interpret them as messages. Intelligence as we know it is pretty obsessed with trying to extract information from its environment, even where none may exist at all.
- new299 10y ago
  Thanks, that's my article! I'm glad you remember it after all this time.
maxxxxx 10y ago
This makes me wonder: is there a specific advantage in us being able to see the specific wavelengths we see or is it just a random thing and we would be fine if we could see only other wavelengths like UV or infrared?
- Robotbeat 10y ago
  Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum: http://plantphys.info/plant_physiology/images/solarlight.gif http://plantphys.info/plant_physiology/images/solarlight.gif And there are other constraints, too. UV is blocked by water (and our lens material) and can induce chemical changes (read: damage) easier than visible light. Damaging sensitive retina. Not that this is an unsolvable problem (bees see UV), but it is a biochemical constraint. Infrared, especially far infrared, doesn't work too well without a cooled sensor. And the energy per quanta is less, which reduces your options for good, high-sensitivity biomolecules that can detect them, kind of the opposite problem of UV. So yeah, there are a few reasons why visible light is visible light and why we can't see UV or infrared. It's not entirely arbitrary or random. But "seeing" with sound is also a viable evolutionary approach, but less effective in a low-density medium like air and more effective (even than light) in a medium like water.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    > Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum... Does this mean that our vision system evolved to pick up the most energetic part of the Sun's spectrum that ends up at the surface? Did it evolve this way so our vision systems' cellular agglomerate don't have to expend as much energy gathering that part of the spectrum as opposed to other parts of the spectrum? If so, then is there any linkage via evolutionary theory that imply our vision system might be among the first vision systems to evolve on the planet, because it filled the most-favored evolutionary niche associated with the lowest energy expenditure to gain a evolutionarily competitive advantage over other pre-human species?
    - jcranmer 10y ago
      I would point out that the crystal field splitting energies happen to correspond to the region around visible light, which means that being able to finely distinguish gradations of visible light would lead you to be able to visually distinguish between many different organometallic ions. I suspect that matters more than the flux of visible light in the solar spectrum.
cnorthwood 10y ago
We don't actually pause between words as we speak, and there are many languages which don't have spaces either.

inputcoffee 10y ago

Perhaps they should take the time to make a few distinctions in this interview: 1. Perceptions 2. Constructs 3. Language For a creature that doesn't have sight at all, they literally can't talk about certain concepts. Now, does the creature distinguish between objects and actions? If they do, they have a basis to distinguish between Nouns and Verbs. Finally, humans might be hard wired for some aspects of language. It would be a huge coincidence if aliens had the same hard wiring. (For instance, they could have evolved to give their children negative evidence, rather than pre-constrain grammars.)

mannykannot 10y ago
It would indeed be a huge coincidence if humans and an extraterrestrial species had the same hard-wiring for language, but I would think it far less of a coincidence if they both had hard-wiring that was functionally broadly similar.
naasking 10y ago
> For a creature that doesn't have sight at all, they literally can't talk about certain concepts. Any intelligent species will create instruments for measurement in non-sensory regimes, so they can certainly explore those regimes. And if you're talking about some kind of qualitative experience, it's conjecture that such experiences aren't reducible to some kind of complex third-person account.

mosqutopi 10y ago

Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language. Another suggestion for aliens to understand our language would be first to show then how evolution in earth has happened. Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path. Perhaps studying the neurons they could infer a lot of information about how our mind interacts with the environment. Edited: An interesting novel is The Black Cloud by Hoyle in which the author tries to establish a language between human and an intelligent extraterrestrial electromagnetic cloud.

breatheoften 10y ago
I think evolution is pretty insightful -- given that these creatures are capable of engineering a space in which humans can survive they clearly have knowledge of evolutionary biology which must intersect our own knowledge. That seems a space with more identifiably shareable concepts than math.
js2 10y ago
> Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language Probably the most famous attempt to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt
gliese1337 10y ago
Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path. Why? What bearing does the study of biological evolution have on the physics and engineering of space travel?

seewhatIsee 10y ago

The Himba tribe in Africa have an interesting perception of color which is believed to stem from their language[1]. For example, their language uses the same word for what westerners separately call green and blue. As a result, they cannot seem to distinguish the colors when presented to them. [1] https://vimeo.com/120808489 https://vimeo.com/120808489

IIIIIIIIIIII 10y ago
And Russians see two different colors where Westerners only see "Blue". http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full There are more examples.
jessaustin 10y ago
"Grue" is actually pretty common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...
skyisblue 10y ago
The ancient Japanese also had one word for shades of green and blue.

awinter-py 10y ago

I've never understood the core question of S-W. Is it that you can't have a word without having a concept for it? That seems like a no-brainer. Neanderthals weren't able to build airplanes, and their language probably didn't have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn't the cause of A. The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not able to build airplanes. Most cultures that can build flying machines have one or more names for them. I don't know what it would mean to have the concept for something without having a word (or a sentence) to describe it. If the S-W claim is that 'it's more common for a concept to underly a word than for a word to exist for a concept', I don't agree with that either -- kids who read a lot will often know the part of speech for a word and its context but not much else.

pebblexe 10y ago
Are you kidding me? Are you claiming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't true on ycombinator? This is a forum famous for talking about blub languages and lisp. And if it's true for artificial languages, that's a strong indicator that it's true for human ones. But sadly there are very few studies comparing programming languages and I've never seen one comparing human languages qualitatively.
- awinter-py 10y ago
  I have a fairly large sample set suggesting that claiming to know C++ on your resume is not correlated with understanding the concept of memory allocation.
- chaoky 10y ago
  No, programming languages are completely different from natural languages. You are conflating some concepts here. There are artificial programming languages which are context free and express computation more or less. Then there are artificial and human languages which express statements in real life and are not context free. Its obvious that some methods of expressing computation are easier for humans to comprehend than others and are formed on a much more mathematically logical basis. For example, the lambda calculus is much more readable than a turing machine and has 3 easy mathematical rules, although it is harder to implement on a von Neumann model. Sapir Whorf applies strictly to natural languages and to some extent constructed ones, but here most modern linguists agree it in its strong form has been discredited in the same way that race instrinsically influencing behavior has been discredited. People are people, and looking at historical sound change should convince that sound changes over a long period of time do not change any absolute measure of "complexity" in a language in a well defined way.

dudeonthenet 10y ago

It's also worth making the distinction between the movie and the impressive short story that the movie is based on, which the article completely fails to mention: Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life [1] I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover. Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himself did a wonderful job with the screenplay, while managing to convey the main ideas and emotion of the book, there are quite a few details about the process of translating Heptapod A and B that didn't make it into the movie, details which would have painted a more complete picture of the situation for the interviewed professor of linguistics that was interviewed in this article. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your-life-and-others https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your...

shas3 10y ago
[spoiler] Also, the story clearly has a theme of a person being a helpless observer of their own life (prescience or not (see Gwern's post [0]). The movie has a time-travel twist that's very, to use an indian term, "masala". [0] https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life
- alanbernstein 10y ago
  I'm intrigued by this use of "masala", can you explain? Urban dictionary has a few options, not sure which of those you mean, if any.
  - GenerocUsername 10y ago
    I can try to shine a light on this idiom. Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US... so popular in fact that it is expected at any indian restaurant. Because of this, the term can be synonomous with 'run of the mill', 'standard', or even 'safe'.
    - setr 10y ago

skizm 10y ago

What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm not a trained linguist or anything, but it seems to me they should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers. Maybe as a CS guy I'm biased (since my language is symbols and numbers), but literally every conceivable language has to contain numbers of some kind (at the very least the concept of singular vs plural). So start with "one" and "two" or maybe even the concept of nothing vs something. Work your way to vocab words related to space and time (again, I would think these universal concepts considering the aliens traveled with the goal of getting to earth), then get into specific human concepts like me vs you vs third person. They essentially worked through language in the same way you would work through language with a human baby, which I think would get you no where when talking to an alien race (who are "adults" at this point you would assume, and have their own fully developed world views). Just my 2 cents though.

plttn 10y ago
If I remember the book correctly, they talk more about their attempt at using numbers, but due to the way heptapods think (all of time happening at once), the math concepts are actually harder than physical concepts.
- lutusp 10y ago
  > If I remember the book correctly ... No book, sad to say. The movie is based on a Ted Chiang short story named "The story of your life." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life There are a number of books out there named "The Arrival" or a variation thereof, but they have no connection with the movie. I only post this to keep people from ordering books with that name, hoping to acquire more depth than the movie provides. Not to disparage the movie, which I regard as first-rate.
  - plttn 10y ago
    Right. I meant to say the short story.

YCode 10y ago

> Once she had these splotches, they jumped pretty quickly from “OK, that’s how they communicate a concept” to “I’ve now got a mini-dictionary of a bunch of concepts.” ...they don’t really show the process of how she got from there to understand what chunks mean what. I think the film makers made the right choice artistically. There's a certain potential, a sort of superpositional value in only filling in the details of a plot device that are absolutely necessary to further the plot (i.e. the flux capacitor). So long as you don't fill in the answer it could be anything, but as soon as you provide a concrete answer all that sense of wonder and curiosity is paved over with a simple matter of fact answer that may or may not be fully thought out. And in practical terms the plot becomes more restricted and the odds of creating a continuity error are increased. I suspect, in short that had they filled in that gap in the movie we'd be reading a rant about how the film maker's answer doesn't hold upon closer examination.

thesz 10y ago

I haven't seen Arrival myself but I had a discussion with someone who did and, boy, did he was extremely on the linguistic determinism side! After some reminescence and analysis of the discussion I came to bold conclusion that defending strong Sapir-Worf hypothesis is very much akin to racism. Basically, you prohibit someone not fluent in the language of your choice the ability to see the world just like you do or even better. Just to give one food of thought - most of human languages are two-level (like van Wijngaarden two-level grammar) with the extremely outstanding examples like Nigerian (and I heard there are fixed-grammar languages here and there, but they are rare). Two-level grammars are Turing complete and thusly you can express any concept in most of them. The expression effort will differ at start but if concept is important enough it will be expressed concisely in every one of them. To quote B.Stroustrup "users require LOUD SYNTAX for new features and succinct syntax for familiar ones". Just like real languages evolve.

zingermc 10y ago
Maybe I'm being too literal, but how can a grammar be Turing complete? The usual definition of Turing completeness is being able to simulate an arbitrary Turing machine. Typical human languages don't do beta reductions like Lambda Calculus, so I fail to see how a grammar (or the language produced by the grammar) can be said to compute anything.
- aleeds 10y ago
  From what I understand, the idea is you have some string S and an input T, and running a grammar G on ST will produce an output. Sometimes they won't halt. Just like a Turing machine. In this analogy G is the 'universal Turing machine'
  - zingermc 10y ago
    Interesting! I think I am starting to get it. To double check, is running a grammar the same as parsing?
    - 10y ago

remarkEon 10y ago

One thing that I think always confuses me about any science fiction work that deals with Humans meeting Aliens for the first time is that it seems to assume it's all on us to figure out a common language. I have to admit, my assumption if that if some species is sufficiently advanced to figure out interstellar travel they'd likely be able to decypher our language and find a way for us to communicate.

shas3 10y ago
The story sorts this out. Absent an interpreter, you necessarily need to be able to talk to someone who knows the other language so that you can query them, etc. Realistically, there's no way to intercept or interpret communications as the protocols are almost impossible to figure out (that is another layer of 'language'). Let say an alien intercepts a TV signal, can they convert it back to video? It is almost impossible that they will be able to infer the entire set of protocols: signal -> video, aligning video, etc. Especially given that aliens may be so different from us that their technologies may have developed in an orthogonal direction to our own.
- petters 10y ago
  I and I think many others would disagree that it would be almost impossible to decode a TV signal.
  - eric_the_read 10y ago
    This is what drives me nuts about Star Trek shows where they encounter completely new aliens and they all seem to have compatible video-chat protocols.
  - shas3 10y ago
    I think you forget that you have to completely set aside human assumptions. How will the aliens even know they are looking at signals encoding video and audio? Do aliens have technology and knowhow in the RF regime? Will they even be able to receive, store, or analyze the TV waveforms? Do they have the notion of amplitude and frequency modulation? Also, how will they know that the signal encodes video? Absent ground truth, low entropy (or equivalent measures like bigrams, Markov models, etc.) is the only way one can determine that a sequence is a language. Even if they are able to convert the RF signal to some low-entropy sequence of symbols, there is a very real possibility of them going off on a tangent: mapping the information to a completely different language. A real world example is the symbols of Indus valley civilization. Several decades into the information age, and about a century since the seals were discovered, researchers haven't even conclusively established that the symbols encode a language.

gliese1337 10y ago

I feel like the linguist interviewed may have missed the point of the semasiograms (explicitly not called logograms in the movie). Which I suppose is understandable, as the movie by itself may have not done a sufficiently good job of explaining why they are not like Chinese logograms after all. (I am unfortunately biased by having also read _The Story of Your Life before hand). Logograms, although they do not encode the phonological structure of words in a language, nevertheless do correspond to words, and written sentences using logograms mirror the linear syntactic structure of the spoken language. The distinction between Heptapod A and Heptapod B is not merely a matter of discarding phonological representation and using logograms; Heptapod B is intended to have literally no relation whatsoever to the structure of Heptapod A, being a fully 2-dimensional semasiographic system while Heptapod A is a (necessarily, because spoken) linear system. And while the circular semasiograms developed for the movie certainly look cool, and were probably a good choice for the film-makers to make, they really do not do justice to what's described in the original story, or to the actual real-world 2D writing systems that have been developed (e.g., UNLWS: http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/grammar.pdf http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/grammar.pdf).

deleted 10y ago

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UhUhUhUh 10y ago

It think this linguistic approach remains very superficial in that it only targets vocabulary and ways to represent it and to translate it. It does not tackle the "deep structure" the grammar that underlies and, in my belief, determines everything that sits above. Yes, I know, I'm a chomskian... I also understand that this would have propelled the narrative in a wildly weird area where most spectators would have probably gone to do some other thing than to watch. And "Arrival" is not a bad movie. I just wonder what would a truly alien language, with a truly alien underlying structure, would look like. Much more than vocabulary keys could be needed to even begin to communicate. This is also where the SW hypothesis would begin to really become hugely significant.

readymade 10y ago
Seeing as though deep structure is by definition unobservable in its direct form, it would be kind of strange to tackle that before building up a lexicon. A more interesting question, IMO, is whether they even have a deep structure.

civilian 10y ago

> At one point in the movie, the character Ian [Jeremy Renner] says, “The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that if you immerse yourself in another language, you can rewire your brain.” And that made me laugh out loud, because Whorf never said anything about rewiring your brain. But since this wasn’t the linguist speaking, it’s fine that another character is misunderstanding the Sapir-Whorf. As a Biochemist-- this is not a misunderstanding! Everything in our brain is rewired as we learn things and as we develop heuristics. So of course thinking differently relies on rewiring your brain. There's no spirit or soul hidden in our brain, it's all wires. This linguist needs a neurobiology course. :3

6stringmerc 10y ago
I like the wiring analogy, and also ones that describe the functional mind akin to vast, complex spider webs upon which information zooms around. Making connections, turns, associations, firing individual bits or entire areas into vivid use. If we didn't "rewire" as you put it, I think we'd have a very big problem as a species learning new things!

sirishn 10y ago

Anal retentive interviewee speaks English

xtiansimon 10y ago

Neophyte impression--Enjoyed the notion of time-less language and the similarities to other series/state issues in langauge theory such as Synchrony and Diachrony[1]. As a neophyte programmer I find networks and version control are also similarly intresting structural contrasts. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_and_diachrony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_and_diachrony

mirimir 10y ago

I was expecting some discussion of S-W hypothesis and coding. Does learning particular programming languages alter thinking more generally? I've read that it's better to know several distinct sorts of languages. Are some languages dangerous to learn?

mcguire 10y ago

"What I gathered is that the written form is not encoding the sounds of the spoken form, right? And certain dialects of Chinese are like that. They have these characters and the characters stand for a word or a concept, but a Chinese character isn’t made up of individual symbols that stand for individuals sounds in the way that English does. In English, the word dog has a D and that corresponds to the sound duh. In Chinese, it’s not quite that way. Now I gather there is a phonetic aspect to Chinese, but largely Chinese uses logograms, where the symbol stands for the word. It doesn’t stand for a sound. "You don’t really pronounce the logogram. "Right, it’s not phonetic in the way that English is phonetic. So I took the alien language to be that kind of writing system. I still took the visual system to be encoding the same concepts of the oral system so that the aliens would have for any given concept a written version and a spoken version. Logographic systems on Earth are essentially similar. The Japanese have three different writing systems. One of them, Kanji, is shared with Chinese. The spoken languages are very different. The Japanese speaker and the Chinese speaker can’t talk to each other, but they share a writing system because the writing system doesn’t actually match phonetically onto the sounds of the language." I began to doubt the linguist here. I understand that many people use 'logogram' as a shorthand to describe whatever Chinese is, but she seems to be taking it seriously. Chinese isn't written with 1 symbol per word (or idea or whatever); it would be more true to say that it is syllabic, where most common Chinese words are one syllable. Many (most?) Chinese glyphs are made up of a root and a radical, where one part indicates the "class" or "topic" of the symbol and the other indicates the pronunciation (at least at one time). She seems to be dancing around the idea that a Chinese speaker and a Japanese speaker could communicate by writing, each in their respective languages, and be understood through the magic of Kanji/logograms. That is not the case, too my understanding. I'm given to understand that one feature of all known natural writing systems is that they are based off of the languages' vocabulary, grammar, etc., however hidden by changes between when the writing system was formalized and now. The idea that a writing system would not record what someone would say is weird.

xbryanx 10y ago

It was interesting to read up more on the Hopi Language Controversy and see how Ekkehart Malotki demonstrated that the Hopi do have a wealth of time related vocabulary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy

readme 10y ago