Could We Understand Their Language?

Can there be intelligence without language?

• 'Intelligent' behavior of animals
• Insightful behavior of prelingual children
• Neurologically normal deaf people who do not sign or possess only rudimentary signing ability
• Stroke victims with impaired language ability whose other faculties (like math and abstract reasoning) are intact

Can there be a technological civilization without language?

• Living in a technologically sophisticated civilization may not require language (see above) but the construction and maintenance of such a civilization requires cultural transmission of complex, abstract ideas.
• 'telling' takes less time than 'showing'. I could explain how to perform a complicated task (especially one involving several steps and branching options) much more quickly and efficiently than I could demonstrate that same task without accompanying words. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a few hundred words can tell the picture's history, detail the motivation of its painter and explain exactly where you should hang it when you get home. Language allows you to abstract away from your physical surroundings, refer to things that are not physically present and produce counterfactual or hypothetical ideas. Crucially, language is handy for making plans and setting goals.
• The traditional concept of telepathy is not a replacement for language. Science Fiction writers have a tendency to use telepathy as a work-around so they do not have to deal with language or communication problems. What they usually mean by this is 'The alien spoke to me (in my language) without moving his lips". They usually mean some kind of brain-to-brain transmission of linguistic material. Although it is possible to 'think in pictures' and many of our insights do come to us without the mediation of language, much of our learning and abstract thought is linguistically mediated.

  What will their language be like?

  All societies will experience natural limits on and constraints imposed by time, space and materials.

  Every intelligence must develop symbol-systems for representing objects, causes and goals and for formulating and remembering the procedures it develops for achieving those goals.--M. Minsky (1985)

  • must have the idea of 'thing' to manage resources and thus will have nouns.
  • must have the idea of acting on objects (working toward a goal) or things changing and thus will have verbs.
  • any description or situation already expressed, however complicated, can be treated as a single component of another description. This ability to represent prior thoughts as things gives our minds their power! It also gives us basic sentence recursion.

    Example:
    Once upon a time, there was a little green alien.
    He broke my mom's lamp.
    That got me in trouble.

  We can count on (at least) these familiar language components being present in ET's language.

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