quote:If you really believe that this cannot be done, then it must be astonishing to you that language even exists to begin with.
Not at all. I see no problems in developing a language when you can use outside referents to begin with. If two cavemen both can see a rock, one of them can label it with a sound, and the other can understand that the sound is a label for that rock. By pointing at another rock and making the same sound, it becomes apparent that the label applies to other rocks. By picking up a rock and throwing it while making a sound, it's possible to label the action. The basis for an entire language can be built by labeling objects and actions. Layers of complexity can be added with modifiers.
But without outside referents, how do you build up a tapping code in order to convey the idea of "rock"? Word order alone -- even if you somehow managed to establish a common grammatical framework with the aliens -- is insufficient to convey the meaning of rock. Without an actual rock to point to, you would have to define "rock" by using other words, such as "hard mineral substance." How do you define "hard" just by word order? How do you define "mineral"? How do you define "substance"?
posted
"Without an actual rock to point to, you would have to define "rock" by using other words, such as "hard mineral substance." How do you define "hard" just by word order? How do you define "mineral"? How do you define "substance"?"
Why would you be talking about a rock to begin with then?
posted
> Why would you be talking about a rock to > begin with then?
Why not? But since the concept of a rock is apparently beyond comprehension within your otherwise almost infallible method of comprehending languages solely by word order, let's look at a word that our human and alien prisoners might need in their communications: "door," as in the door to a cell.
Without pointing to a door, using a picture of a door, imitating a door, etc., -- just using a pattern of taps -- how do you convey the concept of a door? Unless you somehow convey the meaning of "door" directly, you must be defining it in terms of other words, either directly or through context. But unless the aliens understand those other words, they won't understand "door." And you run into the same problem with those other words -- unless the taps can convey their meaning directly (as a simple numerical tapping code conveys numbers), then those words remain undefined.
posted
This debate is meaningless, as you two are talking past each other. To a large extent the problem is that Ravenstarr doesn't understand what Eric means by "without outside referents", and has made no effort to find out what it means.
But Eric is the one that chose that term in the first place and hasn't done much to explain it other than using it in context. Which is enough if you already know what the term means, but not entirely sufficient if you have no clue.
Of course, the fact that Eric and Ravenstarr are having such difficulty communicating proves that Eric is right
Not entirely on the subject, but let's say that the aliens have no sense of rhythm, they can't tell the difference between a long pause between taps and a short one. They can only hear tapping, then can't hear a specific pattern in it because they lack the necessary sense, just as they would have trouble knowing there was tapping if they happened to have no sense of hearing.
posted
RavenStarr understands the concept, Survivor.
quote:I myself have figured out many languages without any visual references (gestures, pictures, English comparisons, etc)... I simply figure out the patterns (that's the harder part to explain without you being in my head).
I'm merely claiming this is impossible once you get much beyond math.
Oh, and as to your claim that there is no theoretical barrier to solving the problem of the play translation, I think you're wrong: I specifically said that translation had to be done without using any outside reference materials. While it might be possible to work out a plausible grammatical structure of the play, I don't think an actual translation is possible without some of those outside referents.
Helen Keller's story proves my position, not yours.
What the breakthrough point? It's when Helen realizes that a certain pattern of fingerspelling meant "water."
Under your theory, Helen should have been able to understand that the fingerspelling meant "water" just because of the way it fit in some pattern of fingerspelling.
But the breakthrough came when Anne fingerspelled water while pumping water over Helen's hand. That gave Helen something outside the fingerspelling language to which she could associate the word.
If all Anne had ever done was fingerspell things for Helen, without associating the words with anything outside the patterns of fingerspelling, Helen would never have learned that the fingerspelling of "water" meant water.
posted
To be clear, I'm not saying that tapping codes (or fingerspelling) can't be used for much beyond simple math. What I'm saying is that you can't get much beyond simple math without using things outside the patterns themselves -- like pumping water over someone's hand while giving them the code for water.
Posts: 1517 | Registered: Jul 2003
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posted
Technically, you can't get any math either. You can only get patterns which could suggest similar patterns found in mathmatics.
That is to say, you couldn't communicate anything about math that the reciever didn't already understand. The essence of communication is for one entity to impart information to another entity which does not already have that information.
For instance, consider if the aliens have no concept of, say, multiplication and a geometric series. You can tap out a geometric sequence all day long, but they won't be able to figure out the pattern.
Anyway, I would like to point out that in both your quote and his own recent post, Ravenstarr has convincingly demonstrated to me that he doesn't know what you're talking about. That's not the same as proving that he's making sense or has a valid alternative point of view that you can't see. I'm just saying I don't see the point of the conversation anymore.
I can see this going into an interesting alternative direction, such as the communication problems that arise if two species don't share certain concepts. For instance, what if we were to meet aliens that didn't concieve of the existence of something like a spirit? Not even that they couldn't imagine such a thing, just that they never had?
One thinks of the Japanese concept "shinikami". "Shinikami" is the Japanese translation of an incoporeal personification of Death, what we would call "The Grim Reaper". But, apparently due to how the Japanese understand the work "kami", they have always thought of "shinikami" as being a type of spirit rather than being a single entity. Of course this is a minor, unimportant translation error, but the result is a unique concept that seems quite novel to westerners but is very natural to the Japanese, so much that they (and we) now recognize it as a new and distinctively Japanese concept different from Death.
Okay, one only thought of that because one was trying to explain Bleach to another earlier today.
quote:The essence of communication is for one entity to impart information to another entity which does not already have that information.
I don't know, a lot of communication seems aimed at trying to fix information that was absorbed, but wrongly.
So have you figured out what "bleach" refers to? Is it spelled and pronounced like the laundry whitener? Or is it a misspelling of "blech" Maybe they tried to back-form a verb out of "bleachers".
[This message has been edited by franc li (edited June 09, 2005).]
quote:That is to say, you couldn't communicate anything about math that the reciever didn't already understand. The essence of communication is for one entity to impart information to another entity which does not already have that information.
You're confusing two concepts here, Survivor.
Both sender and receiver must understand the medium of communication in order for communication to happen, but that does not mean both sender and receiver already have all information that can be communicated via the medium.
For example, let's say I briefly glipse and alien creature I've never seen before in a cell before I'm put into the cell next to it. Shortly thereafter, I hear the following pattern of taps coming through the wall separating my cell from the creature's:
|| ||| ||||| ||||||| ||||||||||| |||||||||||||
The fact that I am familiar with the numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 and 13, and know that they are six consecutive prime numbers, doesn't mean the tapping conveys no information that I didn't know before.
It conveys the new information that the creature doing the tapping is intelligent enough to know what prime numbers are.
posted
Wow, guys!! I just joined this BB today, and imagine my surprise when I found this whole long thread about language! I am a linguist, and I thought I would add my POV concerning some of the topics you've been discussing.
First, let's define what language is. Language is just one particular type of communication system. In talking about communication systems, linguists often make use of the terms SIGNIFIER and SIGNIFIED. A signifier is anything that exists in the physical world that can be perceived. This could be a picture, flash of light, a particular type of sound wave (whether a beep or a spoken word), a smell, a texture, etc. A signified is something that exists in someone's brain -- a meaning or concept. In a communication system, a signifier is paired with one or more signifieds -- by producing the signifier you can evoke in someone else the concept of the signified. In human language, this happens in a particularly complex and versatile way, but idea of signifier and signified remains at the heart of the system. Other types of communication systems include traffic signs, heraldry, and animal communication systems. Codes, such as Morse code, are not really communication systems in and of themselves, since the signifiers there only point to OTHER signifiers. A code is just an alternate way of representing a signifier that exists as a part of some other system.
When a signifier is paired with a signified, this dyad is referred to as a SIGN. There are three main types, depending on the relationship between signifier and signified. If the signifier resembles the signified, the sign is iconic (ex: picture of a gas pump means the highway exit has a gas station). If there is a cause-effect relationship, it is an indexical sign (animal tracks near a river). If the relationship is purely arbitrary, the sign is symbolic. For iconic and indexical signs, it can be possible to "figure out" the sign given your knowledge of the world. For a symbolic sign, this is not possible. You have to LEARN a symbolic sign, not figure it out. To put it another way, for a symbolic sign, the link between signifier and signified is based on convention alone.
Human language almost exclusively uses symbolic signs. There are some iconic aspects of human language, such as onomatopoetic words, but these are clearly of marginal usefulness. This means that there are only TWO ways to come to understand a word that you don't already know:
(1) you observe it being used in context (2) you are told what it means
For (1) the idea is that you perceive the signifier when the signified is present. It could be either physically present (the Chiraffe says "blorble" while pointing to a knife), or conceptually present (the Chiraffe pantomimes using a knife, or a knife is obviously needed to do something, etc.) For (2), you can either have the idea EXPLAINED to you (as in: a "blorble" is a long pointed weapon and cutting device), or you could have it translated into a language you already know ("blorble" means "knife").
Without a context, and without an already shared communication system, it is impossible to understand what an unknown word might mean. In the case of the Rosetta stone, mentioned by EricJamesStone, the crucial thing that is provided was translation into a shared communication system -- the same text was engraved on the stone in two languages, Egyptian and Greek (and for Egyptian, in two orthographies, one of which was partially decipherable using knowledge of a third language, Coptic). Since Greek and Coptic were both known, the Egyptian could be figured out. In linguistics classes, we often have our students "decipher" an unknown language (much as, I believe, Ravenstarr is referring to), but in order for that to be a possible thing to do, we have to provide English glosses (translations) of at least some of the sentences we provide. For example, consider the following hypothetical sentences of Chiraffe:
Flimatumbi. "I see you." Maflitumbi. "You see me." Flivotumbi. "I see him." Voflitumbi.
From this, you can hypothesize that "fli" means "1st person", "ma" means "2nd person", "vo" means "3rd person masculine", and "tumbi" means "see". Further, that the subject is placed in the first position, the object in the second position, and the verb after that. You can also figure out that the last sentence I provided means "He sees me" even though no translation is provided. But without the translations for the first four sentences, you can't get anywhere. By observing the patterns in the Chiraffe sentences, you can deduce which bits of Chiraffe correspond to which bits of English, and what the grammar of Chiraffe is like, but that's it.
There are, by the way, gifted linguists who would be able to figure out the above example without the translations, given only a monolingual speaker of Chiraffe to interact with. To do that, you would need to observe the sentences being used in context, as explained above. This would obviously take a lot longer, and would probably only work well if the Chiraffe were willing to cooperate with you. (This should also make you a little skeptical of the idea that the Antags could decipher English well enough to make a useable translation machine only through observing their captives, but hey, lots worse things have been done in the name of fiction. If the Antags also have access to the earthlings spaceship, with a computer and so forth on board, it would be a lot more believable.)
By the way, a lot of people were making reference to sign languages like ASL as a possible means for communication between species. For the record, natural human sign languages like ASL are exactly like spoken languages is every significant way except modality -- signed languages are visual while spoken languages are, well, spoken. Use of pointing, gesticulating, pantomiming, etc., to communicate is so different from use of a sign language that they are not properly referred to using the same term. ASL is a sign language (or signed language) while pointing/pantomiming is just "gestural communication". Not even a language.
One of the similiarities between signed and spoken languages is the almost exclusive use of symbolic signs. If you already know what a given ASL sign means, you can often see some sort of shadow of iconicity in it. However, for the vast majority of signs, if you just see it, you have NO CLUE what it could mean. And there is good evidence that, even for signs that you or I would see as clearly iconic, native signers treat them as symbolic. A good example of this are the signs for "you" and "me" and the phenomenon of pronoun reversal. In ASL, these consist of pointing towards youself to mean "me" and pointing towards your interlocutor to mean "you". The phenomenon of pronoun reversal is something that happens with young kids -- hearing kids, originally -- who were learning a spoken language, such as English. If you think about it, in the language that is directed towards a child, "you" always means the child, and "I/me" always means mommy or daddy. A certain % of children acquiring English (or any spoken language for that matter) will not quite realize that the meanings of these pronouns are supposed to shift according to who is talking: "you" means whoever is being spoken to, for example. When you ask such a child "Do you want a cookie?" they'll respond with "Yes, you want a cookie." Very common. Now, flashback to ASL. Remember the 'clearly iconic' signs for 1st and 2nd person pronouns? Turns out a certain % of children acquiring ASL as their native language reverse them in exactly the same way! The only way to make sense of this is that they are processing the signs symbolically, not iconically. I also remember a good example of the symbolic nature of ASL from when I was a TA for a big introductory linguistics class. A guest lecturer, a hearing child of deaf parents, came in and talked about ASL. She started by demonstrating a particular ASL sign. To make this sign, first make a fist, then without unbending any of your fingers, cause the knuckle of your index finger to stick out from the others. Now put that knuckle on your jawbone and pivot your hand at the wrist back and forth in a circular motion. She asked people, what could this sign mean? A lot of people gave guesses. What would your guess be? Well, I'll tell you at the end of this post what the actual meaning is. The point is that, none of the guesses were right, and furthermore, once you know the right meaning, you can see a shadow of iconicity, but it is of no practical value in deciphering a previously unknown ASL sign. So the idea of using ASL or any other signed language for communication between species is just about as hopeless as using English, Greek, or Russian. Case in point: signers of ASL cannot understand other sign languages (like British Sign Language) without having studied those languages just like you or I would study French or Italian.
For the record, I have always thought that the most likely, most believable universal translation device ever conceived by science fiction is the babble fish!
In answer to the question, the main objectives of the communication are a) to get off the antagonists ship, b) to gain access to the FTL prototype, and c) to rescue the alien so the residents of the planet don't think they are hostile.
posted
I recall a discussion about the variety of forms that supposedly onomatopoetic words take. Like roosters for starters. We use cock-doodle do but the Germans say Kikiri kikiry and I believe Arabs say dik dik. But Arab roosters might be a lot thirstier.
Posts: 366 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
Wow Katherine, now you've gone and made me learn something. Shame on you! I'm kidding, thanks for the info.
Spaceman - OK, so the first thing they need to do is to get out of the cell. Put yourself in the situation. Pretend you and an alien are locked in a cell. You want to get out. Maybe, you start looking around for hole in the mortar (if it is some sort of building) or stick a piece of your clothing in the forcefield or something (if it's a Star Trek type cell). Maybe the Chiraffe sees what you are doing and becomes curious, so he starts trying to help. He must be reasonably intellegent, right? Surely he can see you are up to something. Why would you really need to translate anything? You both want out of the cell. Maybe you have differant reasons for it, like maybe you want to get out and steal the ship, and maybe he wants to get out to release his commander. But you both have the basic goal of getting out. Work it from there. If your human character needs the chiraffe to help with something specific, then gesture to it or mime it. You might want to read Enemy Mine (by Barry Longyear), or at least watch the movie. That had a situation that might be similar. Also a good source is Barry Longyear's book titled - Science Fiction Writer's Workshop 1: An Introduction to Fiction Mechanics
[This message has been edited by NewsBys (edited June 09, 2005).]
posted
Hah, and I thought this conversation was dead-ending!
By the way, I can understand Eric's confusion over what I meant by "about math". I don't commonly count the fact that a given person understands some mathmatical series as a fact "about math", but it can be classed that way.
And I still don't know why the show is called "Bleach". My best theory is still that it is Engrish for "Breach", which would make some sense. It also might simply be because the main character has blond hair, but this is supposedly his natural color (and not in the same way that green, blue, pink, and interpolations of these colors also seem to be "natural" in anime).
Anyway, Kate, you might want to try out our discussion of universal tranlators...that also invoked the "babel fish". My own answer was something about "decompiling the subject's brain" or a similarly distasteful sounding notion.
posted
Ahavah-- Wow! That is the sign that I remember being demonstrated. But I'm sure the guest lecturer said potato! Maybe it's a dialectal variant? After all, American sign language derives historically from French sign language, and in French, as we all know, a potato is an "earth apple"... :-) No, I'm just kidding -- thanks for the correction! (No one guessed apple either, as you might expect.)
Survivor -- decompiling the subject's brain? Does sound distasteful, but OK, I'll go with that as a possibility. Have you checked into human subjects approval for that?
Spaceman -- sorry to lead your discussion off on a tangent. A suggestion that hasn't been given yet is to simply back off on the first contact assumption. Maybe one of the Chiraffes has had some exposure to earth tv and radio broadcasts, or maybe a janitor on the Antag ship is a space hippy who hung out on Earth for a few months back in his youthful adventuring days and can translate. Could the Chiraffes have found a Voyager (I forget your time line)? Maybe we found a deep space probe of theirs? Only thing that comes to mind right now. Best of luck!
posted
No, I'm pretty sure there's no way the two would be different depending on the dialect. More like some words have multiple signs, and one is more particular elsewhere. Either it was a misunderstanding, or your speaker had it wrong (coming from hearing parents?) I'd vote for misunderstanding, one way or the other. But yeah, it's definitely apple.
Anyways, you're welcome for the clarification. I'm a signer, and your description was very good, so I recognized the sign from the paragraph. But you're the linguist, and I almost didn't say anything. Thanks for being cool about it.
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She was the hearing child of deaf parents, but they didn't want her to learn ASL. She had to learn it when she was older and could take things into her own hands, literally and figuratively. Maybe she signed both apple and potato and I just got them mixed up and only remember one. Either way, thanks for information. That ASL dictionary on the web is cool, too.
posted
OK, to try an atone for going off on such a tangent, I've tried to think up some things that might be helpful to the original question. They're probably all completely useless, but it was fun thinking of them, so I'll post them anyway.
1. The Antags are relying on machine translation, and that has its pitfalls. If the humans realize this, they can do things to slip up the machines. If the Antags learned English by observing their prisoners, their translations will be limited. Even if they fully grasp English grammar, there is no way the machines can translate words the prisoners have never used in captivity before. So, "there", "good", and "water" can be translated, but the machines are stymied with "yonder", "copacetic" and "aqueous libation", especially since the humans are smart enough to use such words only once. Problems likewise pop up with "Whither goest thou?". The machines go offline for an hour altogether when the humans decide to go into Pig Latin. A human interpreter wouldn't be bothered by that for over a few minutes, but the Antags' reliance on machines lays them open to such things.
2. The Antags are the type of cold, cruel race that do not allow "imperfect" children to live beyond infancy. If a deaf antag baby cannot have its hearing restored surgically, it is put to death. There has never been a community of deaf Antags that needed to communicate with one another, hence the idea of a signed language is unknown to the Antags. They know about gesture, surely, but do not realize that this can be developed into a full-fledged language. The humans and the Chiraffe could be holding a meeting of the United Nations in their cell using a signed language, and the Antags would never realize that they are doing anything other than point-n-grunt type of stuff. If the information the Chiraffe and humans need to share is detailed, complex, or abstract, all the better, since the Antags would think precisely that sort of thing cannot be conveyed through the modality of sign.
3. Chiraffes and humans have different linguistic abilities. Human children can learn language with amazing ease and speed, but this ability wanes with age, until for adults, learning a new language is somewhat painful. This is not so with Chiraffes, who maintain this ability throughout their lifespan. Even a pretty stupid Chiraffe speakes at least 12 languages. And they do that naturally, just like human babies do, simply from interacting with others who speak the languages. Chiraffes would have no use for foreign language classes, except possibly those Chiraffes going into diplomacy and politics. Such callings would naturally attract those Chiraffes who are exceptionally linguistically gifted.
4. Back off on the first contact idea. Maybe the Chiraffes studied our radio and TV broadcasts, but ultimately decided we are too violent to make contact with. In any event, the captive Chiraffe knows English. To make that work, there has to be some reason the Antags would let him be in with the humans. How about if he is injured by the torture? He is now deaf and mute -- the narrow-minded Antag conception of language makes them think that this means he cannot use language. Maybe the humans are bound with their hands behind their backs, and one of them does fingerspelling to keep his fingers from being numb. The Chiraffe, being linguistically gifted, realizes after a while that he recognizes English words in those gestures.
OK, those are the ideas I came up with. Maybe there is something useful in there, but probbably not. I just thought I would put them out there -- it was fun thinking about it in any event.
I've settled on what I'm going to do, and here it is.
The Antags are pretending to be peaceful to gain the trust of the Chiraffes. As part of this plan, the Antags leaves one of the junior officers on the planet to live with them for a year. This junior officer discovers that these Chiraffes are people with culture, class, and taste. He grows to like them over the course of that year.
Now, at the end of the year, when the Chiraffe president is taken aboard the Antag spacecraft and they revert to their normal selves, the junior officer has conflicting loyalties, and ultimately abandons his people in favor of the Chiraffe and humans (who arrive about this same time). He aids them using his Antag-issued translator.
Now, the question I have is whether all of the Antag-related chapters should be in this junior officer's POV. In chapter one, a junior officer that COULD be this guy abducts a Chiraffe, takes her up to the ship, and is the one who tortures and kills her. The events will stand, but right now, it is written in third person, light penetration with the Chiraffe as the POV character. It moves to limited omnicient so the torture and death can take place offstage.
The Chiraffe character offers some interesting opinions about being the first Chiraffe in space. I also like the idea of killing a POV character early. It sets a precident that the writer is willing to anything.
I originally planned to stay omni or light penetration because in the first two thirds of the book, there are no humans in this story line. After bootcamp, I'm not so sure that is the right approach.
Would anyone be willing to read chapter one and tell me their opinion on POV? It's 1139 words. I'm not looking for crits, just a quick read and tell me what you think about the POV question.
Thanks.
[This message has been edited by Spaceman (edited July 15, 2005).]
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