How artificial languages can help you connect with aliens

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Russian linguist and popularizer of science Alexander Piperski, in an interview with RT, spoke about natural, artificial and fictional languages, the reasons for their spread and disappearance, the convergence of oral and written speech, the appearance of messengers with ideograms and emoticons. The scientist explained at what age it is better to start learning languages and why children learn them more easily than adults, and also revealed the secret of how to become a polyglot and whether it is possible to establish verbal contact with aliens.

Alexander, there is a hypothesis that people are genetically programmed to master the language perfectly, but after reaching a certain age, about 12-14 years old, this ability disappears. Is it so? Does it make sense to learn foreign languages as an adult?

- According to the so-called critical period hypothesis, a child up to a certain age easily learns the language that he hears. He perceives and studies his grammatical system without any rules or textbooks. Adults feel that their cognitive abilities are better. But if people start talking around them, for example, in Hungarian, they will not understand and learn nothing. A three to four year old child in a similar situation will only take a few weeks to start communicating with him. Up to about 12 years old, children are able to learn from two to four languages. After this age, learning is more difficult. There is no one method for all. Some imitate oral speech well, quickly catch intonation. Others, on the other hand, like to learn languages from books.

Is there an age after which it is impossible to learn a foreign language?

- After adolescence, it is difficult to master it perfectly. Don't believe the stories about 18-year-olds who are taught the language in a reconnaissance school and then thrown into enemy territory. Usually one who learned the language as a child becomes a scout. Otherwise, you can very easily impersonate. Even if you learn a language well, a native speaker will understand that you have not been proficient in it since childhood.

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Some parents speak three to four languages with their children. Is there a safe limit for a child?

- Nothing is known about this. Children learn two languages without any problems. It is believed that bilinguals tend to start speaking later than their peers, but this is not a speed race! It is quite rare when a family speaks four languages. At the same time, the situation when the mother speaks one language, the father speaks another, and those around them speak a third, is considered normal.

Until what age do children need to learn a language in order to know it perfectly?

- If a child loses access to a language at the age of five or six, then he can easily forget it. On a conscious level - in fact, completely, but subconsciously he will sometimes understand something. And then the question of the level of ownership arises. It is one thing to be able to pronounce basic phrases, it is another thing to know the language at the level of an educated person.

How many languages can one person learn? They call different numbers - 19, 24, even 54 …

- The first two numbers don't seem so big to me, the third one is more serious. It should be borne in mind that such records are very difficult to measure. If we ask a polyglot to read a text in any language, then 50 is not too much of a problem. If you can read Russian, Serbian and Polish, you will understand all Slavic languages - Slovenian, Macedonian and others.

• Russian linguist Alexander Piperski
• © sochisirius.ru

If a polyglot knows 54 languages, this does not mean that he is fluent in all of them?

- It is completely unknown what this means. Will he be able to read the text, talk in a natural situation? I know a number of outstanding people who speak many languages. The remarkable Bulgarian linguist Ivan Derzhansky speaks several dozen, in Russian - completely fluent. But then gradations already begin, like any of us. You can learn a couple of phrases in different languages. This is enough to impress a wide audience, but clearly not enough to be considered a true polyglot.

Today we know about seven thousand languages. Two-thirds of the world's population speaks 40 of the most common, 400 are considered endangered. Why do languages die?

- A similar situation can be observed in many areas. Few big cities, many small villages that lose their inhabitants and disappear from the map.

There are fewer and fewer languages. This is a process of globalization. The ethnic language brought to the metropolis turns out to be economically ineffective and is easily lost. Dying languages can be compared to biological species from the Red Book.

There are a huge number of natural languages, but artificial ones also appear. Some of them are formalized languages of science and informatics. And some are created for international communication: Esperanto, Interlingua, Inter-Slavic, Afro. Why did none of them become widely known?

- It is necessary to distinguish between the degrees of their success or failure. Esperanto is now spoken by about 2 million people - more than many natural ones. Another thing is that it has not become a popular means of communication between people on the planet. Note that Esperanto had worse starting positions than English or French - 130 years ago only a small group of people studied it. Its developer, Ludwik Zamenhof, wanted 10 million people to speak Esperanto, but failed to achieve his goal. However, this project can be considered successful in its own way. The situation is much worse with the inter-Slavic - an average language. It turned out to be unnecessary, because the Slavic languages did not diverge very far, and their speakers either understand each other well, or use English. Practice has shown that there is no sense in averaged languages.

It turns out that now there is no need to create a language of interethnic communication?

- At any moment in the history of mankind, there was a language that performed such functions in different parts of the world. In ancient times in the south of Europe it was Greek, then Latin. In the 19th century, French became the interethnic language for Europeans; now it has been replaced by English.

Esperanto includes borrowed elements of natural languages, but there are others, which are based on a new system of signs and a logical philosophical idea. One language, solresol, consists of musical notes, while the other is so complex that it includes 81 cases. Why are they created?

- Solresol is composed on the basis of a musical scale - words are combined from seven notes of one octave. It was created in the first half of the 19th century for international communication, but did not receive recognition, since it cannot be learned. However, Esperanto was much more successful in design. His words are familiar to educated Europeans because they are taken from Romance and Germanic languages. The difficult language you mentioned is called Ifkuil. It is designed to test the boundaries of human capabilities. It contains all the most complex phenomena that are in languages. Its creator, John Qihada, did not expect that ifkuil would be spoken of. It was a pure experiment.

• Artificial tongue transcript Solresol
• © Wikimedia Commons

People now spend a huge amount of time in instant messengers. Correspondence with the use of emoji - ideograms and emoticons - has become popular. Do we need a special language for written communication?

- It existed before. In pre-Petrine Russia there was the so-called diglossia. People spoke Russian in everyday life, and solemn communication took place in Church Slavonic. It was the language of books and the church. There is a difference between the Russian spoken and written even now. In the modern era of instant messengers and social networks, a channel has formed between them, they "collapse" together. We write to a friend or even a colleague in the messenger in a language similar to our spoken language. Emojis, gifs and stickers can hardly be considered a full-fledged language - they are decoration. Previously, they also drew flowers in the fields.

An interesting layer of artificial languages - aesthetic and artistic, which are created for fictional universes. Elvish and other languages in John Tolkien, Dothraki in Game of Thrones, Klingon in Star Trek. Who are these people who create languages for entire worlds?

- The fashion for fictional languages began with Tolkien, who claimed to create worlds for them. He was a philologist, specialist in the history of ancient Germanic languages. Tolkien's worlds contain elements of Ancient Greek, Finnish, Germanic, and Celtic languages. The first linguist in the film industry was Mark Okrand, who invented the Klingon language. Paul Frommer invented the language in’vi for Avatar, David Peterson in Dothraki for Game of Thrones. Now languages for films are created by specially hired linguists. These are professionals with whom they sign contracts. In the past, languages were invented by philosophers and enthusiasts who wanted to change the world.

• The language for communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations is called lincos, its author is Hans Freudenthal
• Gettyimages.ru
• © Colin Anderson Productions pty ltd

Tell us about attempts to create a language for communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. What criteria are important, because we are talking about contact with a completely different species?

- The ideas of communicating with alien intelligence began to appear in the 1950s-1960s as astronautics developed. People began to think about what message could be sent into space. Nobody knows what senses the creatures with which we are going to interact with.

One of the ideas was to send pictures. The most famous are plates of anodized aluminum with images of the solar system, which were sent into space on the ships "Pioneer-10" and "Pioneer-11". They also depicted a man and a woman and showed the units of measurement. What happened next is unknown, since no one tried to contact us.

There is a language for communicating with extraterrestrial civilizations, which is called lincos. Its author, Hans Freudenthal, figured out how to teach the representatives of the extraterrestrial race mathematics, transmit natural numbers by radio signals, and add and subtract operations. If the aliens can decipher such signals, then we can hope that they will communicate with us.