Aliens: "What the fuck is 'adenosine triphosphate'? Our bodies use lithium hydride to store energy, which is of course the natural and obvious way a biological system *should* do"
Disappointed you didn't bring up the idea of impossible phonemes, or phonemes that the human vocal tract cannot produce but that an alien vocal tract might produce naturally. I'm interested to know just how versatile humans are at making sounds compared to the space of all possible sounds.
Genuinely this is something I think about a lot. I find myself imagining aliens that are similar enough to us in sapience but with differently shaped mouths and vocal tracts which create sounds we cannot and vice versa. And how we would approximate the sounds of theirs we couldn't make and they would do for ours. Godddd... alien phonetics would be cool
Did you guys like the film Arrival? Iirc it mostly deals with trying to translate a written language, but the actual spoken language is impossible for humans
I have to disagree with you on the space cat point. There are plenty of animals on earth who are named similarly due to superficial visual similarities as opposed to genetic relations. I am sure that if there was a little fuzzy thing with a long tail that lived on Mars we would call it the Martian Mouse
Yeah, I think that was a poor example. People would definitely be inclined to call it a "cat" unless the native word was easy to say, which I doubt. We're talking about aliens. It might not even be a "word" produced with sound. People already talk about possible alien species as being "analogues" of Earth species, so even scientists would be inclined to at least make the comparison.
What if their primary sense was hearing, and would use advanced echolocation to get around, and to speak they would manipulate the arrangement of a series of flaps on their faces to communicate. The manipulation of these flaps would be picked up by the sonar and could form a language.
@@TOBAPNW_ No, I think there's a key difference here, which is that the "speaker" isn't projecting anything out, they are dependent on the listener to actively listen by echolocating in the speaker's direction. If they don't, there's nothing the speaker can do to make the listener understand. This probably wouldn't be too different from how sign language works, but it's still an interesting deviation you could imagine some neat societal stuff arising from
For a vocal species to communicate to a visual only species; an individual could carry a deck of cards containing the "phonemes" of the visual language and flash them in a way that's intelligible to the visual-speaker. They could be printed with any type of ink etc; even colors invisible to humans could be portrayed on the cards. Tablets could also be used that have something akin to talk-text. It takes your spoken language and translates it into visual phonemes in real-time.
I definitely think that if we saw something that vaguely looked and acted like a cat, we'd definitely call it a cat (or other language equivalent), that seems fairly natural to me. Nobody's going to be thinking about "oh it's not genetically related to a cat at all, being alien" because people normally just don't think about that kinda stuff, and even if they did likely wouldn't overly care anyways. Also worth pointing out that grammatical gender and actual human gender systems (i.e. culturally, not linguistically) aren't the same thing and are less tied together than a lot of people think. The way you described what I believe was likely actual gender, often called natural gender, seemed to be conflating them together. Also notable that grammatical gender isn't that common outside of indo-european and afro-asiatic languages (and apparently dravidian ones too according to that map), with many languages having no such system at all or having a bajillion more noun classes that are actually productive like in many Bantu languages in Africa (grammatical gender is also a noun class system, just named differently because Reasons) That map as well is a bit misleading because of well... the huge spread of indo-european languages, in this particular case especially Spanish and Portuguese, which can skew an understanding of how common grammatical gender actually is cross-linguistically.
I strongly disagree with the space cat thing. I live in Australia and every second animal or plant is named after some European thing it only slightly resembles, I can easily imagine that happening for alien flora and fauna too.
Excellent summary of some of the possible difficulties which might be found in extra-terrestrial languages. Even within the realm of auditory language, there is the possibility for phonemes which are essentially impossible for a human to replicate. An alien species may possess a vocal tract with so vastly different an anatomy that their language, while still able to be heard, might contain combinations of sounds outside human vocal capability. The film District 9 did a good job showcasing such a scenario with its “prawns,” whose language could seemingly be deciphered and understood by humans, but where the humans were unable to speak it. Great video, and loving your channel!
blasted to the past when you brought up area 51, checked the date & wow you've been at this for three years at least, I assumed you were one of those instant rising stars of youtube
I'm pretty sure aliens with wheels would have to be impossible, as to have a wheel and an axle, you'd need 2 non-closed surfaces (basically two entirely separate entities.
That's relatively easy to solve, just make them symbiotic. Maybe their wheels are a common fruit that they wear out and discard (spreading its seeds in the process) and have to regularly replace, otherwise they have to just awkwardly shuffle around on their bare axles.
they might communicate with chemicals like ants, trees and bacteria; or with magnetic waves, like uhm i don't know but at least sharks and birds can "see" magnetic fields but we should be able to at least register that with our technology. One other problem with communication might be with them living in a different time scale than us i.e. bacteria who live and die within minutes. Or trees, with reaction times much slower than humans.
Very random thought, but a long, long, long, time ago, I was working on a world where the whole idea was that their equivalent of LUCA (last universal common ancestor) was able to do photosynthesis, and therefore, all of the lifeforms could do photosynthesis. The problem with this is that logically, sentience never would've formed. Look at how on earth, no producing lifeform has ever evolved any intelligence, let alone full sentience. If a lifeform can produce its own food, what's the point in being able to think or even being aware of your environment? I chose in my world for my sentient creatures to evolve from a branch of life that had lost the ability to produce photosynthesis and had instead evolved "legs" and became animal equivalents, because that's the only logical way to do it. TL/DR: logically, no sentient life would ever produce its own food, because there's no point in evolving sentience.
That is not logical at all. It is biased from your experience of living on earth. What's the point in being able to think? That is not how evolution works. Here's how it works: randomly mutated creatures in a hostile environment die or reproduce depending on usefulness of their random mutations and 90% luck. So the correct question would be: "how would ability to think be useful to a creature that can produce its own food?" And the answer to that might be: "Such creature could avoid being eaten" And in a constantly evolving environment of creatures that eat and other creatures that are being eaten all of them could evolve sentience. Why then, you might ask, didn't the trees evolve the ability to think? Well, they produce the oxygen we breathe, so if they die, we die too. The trees aren't required to change anyhow to guarantee their own survival. But that is not necessarily true on other planets.
@@randomguy9241 plants evolve as much as we do. They just fill a different niche to animals. The reason there's so much variety in plant species is precisely because they're subject to natural selection. A plant that gets eaten in the juvenile stage cannot reproduce; like any other organism, and so, like animals, they develop numerous strategies. Some create large amounts of 'offspring', and others make their progeny hard to consume, or undesirable.
@@randomguy9241 hmm. but this would require something that can eat plants to exist, and there are maybe 3 species of plant that actually eat other plants in any meaningful way, and those eat leaf litter. so most likely there are animals, which breaks the original premise of a world where everything photosynthizes anyway, and those eaters would be consuming more energy which allows them to evolve thought. brains are pretty big energy drains, so the things most likely to evolve anything like one to begin with would be a consumer.
4:26 I'm not coming at you, but quite a few scientists are actually doubtful of the rigid binary system of sex that we're used to. For instance, it has no place for intersex people. Even among those we would not typically define as intersex, there is a good deal of variability in hormone levels, sexual dimorphism, etc.
Whatever the science says, this is a linguistics video, not a science one. 99% of people can either be classified as male or female, and our LANGUAGES have evolved around this fact, while alien languages may have not. That's all he's saying.
4:34 I don't understand why the Dravidian languages are shown as different from English in gender distinctions. Yes, Tamil has masculine, feminine and neuter with animate and inanimate distinctions, but doesn't English have all of those too? (He, she, it vs avan, avall, athu). It works the same way. Neither English nor the dravidian languages use he/she equivalents for inanimate objects and animals most times, it's always 'it' and equivalents. I speak Tamil and Kannada BTW, both belong to the Dravidian family.
The difference between English and the Dravidian languages is that the Dravidian languages change the verb conjugation depending on the gender. I just learned Telugu, so I’ll give you for example, prajalu tintāru “the people eat”, vs pillulu tintāyi “the cats eat” (human vs. nonhuman). English gendered pronouns are basically a trace of an older system, but you won’t find English doing something like Telugu. We could hypothetically say that English had grammatical gender if like, a blanket was “he” and a cloud was “she”, but we don’t, so we rly can’t say that English has a productive grammatical gender system. On the note about Telugu and its gender system, I didn’t make the map at 4:34, but I don’t think it did a good job of representing the Telugu gender system. Idk if the rest of the Dravidian languages also do it like this, but Telugu has two different gender systems, one for singular and one for plural. Singular nouns are divided into virile (male humans) and nonvirile, but plural nouns are divided into human and nonhuman. Honestly I’m interested if Tamil and Kannada do the same thing, or it’s slightly different
We ran into languages we never heard here on Earth, dozens, if not hundreds of times without a single dictionary. I understand where you are coming from, but this argument is pretty weak. Furthermore, in many languages here on Earth both concepts and vocabulary can differ drastically yet somehow translations were done. Yes, an extraterrestrial species will have far more differences to humans than any two people groups here on Earth, but there will also be many similarities as well. Just as we do here at home, we would figure out and use the similarities in our early translations and proceed from there. It for sure will not be easy but the best linguists, biologists, astrobiologists, body language and other non-vocal communication experts, cryptologists, diplomats and many others would be employed to accomplish the task. I concede that extreme differences in biology may be the most difficult to overcome but, I don’t think it is impossible and I’ll explain why. Several reasons. The most glaring is that if this is a first contact scenario, it very well may be the single most profound scientific, cultural and global issue ever so every resource from every corner of our planet will be utilized. This alone still is no guarantee, but it’s a gigantic first step. Second, it’s not just us who would be trying to translate. Our alien counterparts surely would be doing the same to us. And one of these species very well discovered how to travel the universe (even the galaxy is daunting enough) which absolutely uses physics and engineering (perhaps chemistry and biology too) that is currently way above our heads. It’s very likely whichever one was that advanced, is also way more advanced in fields such as linguistics, artificial intelligence, and computation among others, all of which ease the burden of this problem. It’s also very likely they already studied, modeled, and developed techniques to communicate with the other prior to arrival. I find it curious that you mention why an alien species couldn’t communicate with us, or vice versa, but not why they very well could. In a way, I think it’s rather parochial and the limitations are very human-centric.
