The Babelfish Translation from one Alien Tongue to Another
“In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, aliens communicate to humans through prime numbers,” says Deacon. “Why? Nature doesn’t use prime numbers. But the numbers are intrinsic to the mathematical system, just as certain structures are intrinsic to language.”
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A fictitious fish, the Babelfish, translates speech from one language to another, originating in Douglas Adam’s 1979 book, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galax.” The fish is a reversal of the Bible’s version of the original Tower of Babel, where God confused the human beings by making them unable to understand one another when they attempted to build a tower that would reach the heavens. According to the book, the Babel fish lives on brainwave radiation from every source but its host, excreting energy in the form of the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was being said.
Recently, a United States linguist and anthropologist by the name of Terrence Deacon of the University of California, Berkeley, US, states that a more advanced understanding of language needs to be required than what is currently available. On Thursday, April 17, 2008, Deacon proposed his ideas at the 2008 Astrobiology Science Conference in Santa Clara, California, that it may be possible to invent something that uses complex software to decode alien languages instantaneously.
According to what we know, an alien race would speak a different language than we do—because of a completely different evolutionary process. But Deacon disagrees, arguing that all languages arise from a common goal—which is describing a physical world, limiting a language’s construction. A common thing would be something that describes objects, such as odor of a particular item or pointing to something in particular. Deacons refers to this as an underlying universal code that can be deciphered.
To break it down even more, pointing directly to something will refer to that object, and when we invent that object’s name—the word becomes a symbol. After this, the symbol will convey that object’s meaning even if they are not present in our immediate environment, not matter how abstract that symbol becomes. To test the theory, Denise Herzing of Florida Atlantic University of Boca Raton, US, points out that it may be tested on dolphins. “Our work suggests that dolphins may be able to communicate using symbols,” Herzing told New Scientist. “The word’s not definitively in yet, but it’s totally possible that we might show universality by understanding dolphin language.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Space Agency News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
