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A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

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Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#81

Post by Florin_Andrei »

Robotbeat wrote: post #16
maxxxxx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum: 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, esp…

> UV is blocked by water (and our lens material) and can induce chemical changes (read: damage) easier than visible light. Damaging sensitive retina.

Perhaps in an environment where UV provides the best illumination (due to the star being hotter, etc) creatures would evolve disposable eyes.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#82

Post by tlb »

katamaritaco wrote: post #43
skizm wrote: post #25

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 som…

For what it is worth, numbers are not necessarily a 'universal concept'. One of the most talked about examples is Piraha[0], a language which doesn't really represent numbers. This is interesting because a study done by Everett and Frank[1] shows that this can actually have effects on cognition, providing some evidence for the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis[3] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language [1] http:/…

The Piraha language is probably inadequate for developing interstellar travel. As was English hundreds of years ago. You need numbers, and names for concepts like energy, mass, momentum, and time.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#83

Post by js2 »

mosqutopi wrote: post #7

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…

> 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

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#84

Post by IIIIIIIIIIII »

Udik wrote: post #75
Razengan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we make music without having a name for each frequency? Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified.. The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their…

Yes. "How much acceleration can this part withstand?" "I'd say violet, but with a shade of pink". "Perfect!". I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.

So it doesn't work because you can't imagine a way different from what you know. Okay.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#85

Post by kbenson »

jcranmer wrote: post #46
pebblexe wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have to manipulate text? Perl is probably better than C for that. Do you have to write a program that operates on lists? Lisp probably is better than Java. Do you have to write a formal proof? Coq is probably better than Python. Do you have to write distributed networking code? Erlang is probably better than PHP. How can the strengths of each language not be direct support for linguistic relativity? All that m…

> How can the strengths of each language not be direct support for linguistic relativity? All that means is that certain concepts are easier to manipulate and understand in certain languages. The principle of linguistic relativity is that language (particularly L1) influences the thought patterns of those who use it. It does not state that certain thought patterns are easier to express in various languages. To demons…

> You'd have to say first that Perl programmers tend to view generic programming problems (say, how to route email messages) as questions of text manipulation rather than other paradigms.

Which I think you could actually make a strong case for. It's very natural in Perl to reach for a regular expression instead of other tools, and to join data into and split data out of strings, since the core data types don't distinguish between numerical and string data, the operators do.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#86

Post by Razengan »

Udik wrote: post #75
Razengan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we make music without having a name for each frequency? Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified.. The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their…

Yes. "How much acceleration can this part withstand?" "I'd say violet, but with a shade of pink". "Perfect!". I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.

http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/space/9909/30/mars.metric.02/

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#87

Post by alpha_squared »

Udik wrote: post #75
Razengan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we make music without having a name for each frequency? Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified.. The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their…

Yes. "How much acceleration can this part withstand?" "I'd say violet, but with a shade of pink". "Perfect!". I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.

That seems like an awfully ethnocentric perspective. It sounds like, "we understand things this way, therefore things can only be understood this way." I'm not saying there is or isn't more than one way to understand complex topics, but that it's possible there may not be only one way.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#88

Post by eric_the_read »

petters wrote: post #77
shas3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imposs…

I and I think many others would disagree that it would be almost impossible to decode a TV signal.

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.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#89

Post by shas3 »

petters wrote: post #77
shas3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imposs…

I and I think many others would disagree that it would be almost impossible to decode a TV signal.

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.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#90

Post by eric_the_read »

awinter-py wrote: post #61
thefalcon wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My city is grid based, but downtown is rotated 45 degrees from the cardinal directions. This leaves me constantly confused and confounded while downtown, not least because the transition streets from downtown to the rest of the city are all at crazy angles (that is, unlike anything where I grew up). As you say, this isn't a language feature. For me the concepts of N,E,W,S and the easy visualization matters more than…

fascinating. what city? It sounds like you're not a native -- in your observation, is the ability to navigate easily in the 'rotated downtown' area correlated with having grown up nearby? That would make a cool study.

Denver does this; not sure if that's the OP's city, but you can see the relevant bit here: https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7565211,-104.99244,14z
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