Animal Intelligence and its Implications for Alien Life Part 3: Language

Part 1, Part 2

I changed the name of the series so it'd be more legible and less cumbersome.

Any discussion of extraterrestrial intelligence would be woefully incomplete without addressing the topic of language. It's by far the most effective form of communication on the planet, and is largely responsible for our conquest of the world- even over the domestication of the wolf or the harnessing of fire. A technologically capable alien species would almost certainly require some sort of comparably effective form of communication in order to adequately coordinate their efforts at advancement.

The alien Dathon, from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Darmok. Even if you're not a Trekkie, Darmok is worth watching if you're interested in the idea of communicating with alien life at all. [Image source]

There's a lot of contention right now over whether species other than humans on Earth have language. Dolphins, whales, and even meerkats have words in the sense that they have specific sounds that stand for specific concepts like 'food' or 'predator'. Bird song exists largely to communicate danger, or seek mates, or claim territory- it's a clear tool for communication. Some species of parrots actually name one another. Is there a real difference between these animal forms of communication and human language?

There are a couple of different explanations for the the claims that animal language is a different, lesser type of communication than human communication. The most widely used one is the claim that the animals lack the ability to articulate new ideas- that is, to organize collections of words (or whatever the base unit of the language is) in a way so as to describe something in a novel manner. Meerkats or prarie dogs, as the critics claim, only have the small collection of words that describe threats, food, etc.

The prairie dog, a rodent native to the American Great Plains, is a highly social rodent that lives in 'towns' taking up potentially hundreds of acres with 20 or more large family groups. [Image source]

That, of course, runs into a problem. Prairie dogs, it turns out, have an incredibly descriptive language. They have "words" for not just predator- they have words for hawks, coyotes, and humans. They differentiate between coyotes and domesticated dogs. They can describe whether a human is wearing a blue or green shirt, and differentiate between some shapes. It's hard not to think of their ability to articulate precise threat descriptions as the ability to articulate new ideas. On top of that, prairie dogs chatter at one another all day long. We've only translated a very small amount of it, and only with computer assistance. It seems extraordinarily unlikely that it's all gibberish, and without further analysis it would be arrogant to claim that it's all mating calls and food related discussions. (Though I personally doubt they're discussing deep philosophy- prairie dogs are hardly among nature's geniuses.)

Other thinkers have tried much more specific approaches. Noam Chomsky, for instance, labeled the defining character of human language as recursivity. Human language is recursive in a way that animal language is not- you can jam a sentence into another sentence quite easily. "Mom said to watch out for the angry dog on the street, it tried to bite her," is a good example of this. There are multiple sentences inside it- "mom said", "watch out for the angry dog on the street", and "it tried to bite her" are all complete thoughts on their own. "Watch out for the angry dog on the street" even essentially contains two of its own sentences- "watch out for the angry dog" and "the angry dog is on the street."

Noam Chomsky and Scrooge McDuck have never been seen in the same room together. [Image and joke source]

Even this definition of human language has come under fire- but this time, not from animal cognitive researchers. Daniel Everett, a missionary turned linguist, is largely responsible for translating the Pirahã language. The Pirahã people, residents of the Amazon rainforest, appear to have a completely recursion free language, which is causing real problems for Chomsky's theory. So recursion perhaps isn't so much a definitive attribute- instead, it might just be an incredibly useful tool for many languages.

I could go on for an entire post about the Pirahã- and I almost certainly will in the future- but their case study is pretty indicative of the difficulties of precisely defining the borders of human language. The two attempts to define human language I discussed are just the tip of the iceberg. While doing so remains a worthy task for linguists, for our purposes it might actually be something of a distraction, and by focusing too heavily on it we might actually be lessening our ability to understand nonhuman language- and not just in a metaphorical sense. We might be physically reducing the ability of our brain to understand animal language.

Members of the Pirahã people. Fair use image. [Image source]

Linguistic relativism- also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis- is without a doubt one of the coolest areas of research around. Quite a few scientific studies have indicated that, in fact, the language we speak and the words we use actually affect the way we think. Notably, we've found that speakers of languages with more names with colors are better able to identify and separate different colors, and that when people are taught more color names, they become better at identifying those colors. Similar research has been carried out on a variety of other traits, and the language we speak- or, at the very least, the first language we learn- has a definitely impact on the way we think. The tricky part is in dividing it out from the impacts of biology, culture, and personal history- no small task, if it truly is even possible. (I should be note that the Pirahã language is being used to attack the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in a claim that culture has more effect on language than vice versa.)

So in a very real sense the language we use to discuss animal language might affect our ability to translate and understand it, with obvious implications for when we finally meet extraterrestrials. It goes even beyond that as well. Human languages are often spoken at very, very different speeds. Spanish tends to be spoken much more quickly than English, for instance. They both, however, have around the same rate of information conveyed in the same amount of time- even though English is spoken with fewer syllables per second, each syllable has a higher information density. Mandarin, possibly the data-densest language per syllable, is spoken much more slowly than many other languages. All of them still convey about the same amount of information in the same time, though. There appears to be a specific rate of information density that our brains are able to handle, regardless of the language spoken. It's even true for artificially constructed languages. This rate is definitely different for other animals- dolphins, for instance, seem to have a much higher rate than we do, which is a big part of our communication difficulties with them.

There's a type of anatomical map known as a cortical homunculus. It's a representational map of the body based off of the amount of processing power the brain dedicates to processing input from each area, or, alternatively, the amount of processing power it expends to control various areas of the body.

Cortical homunculi. The hands and lips are disproportionately large in both types, being a major center of our interaction with the world. These homunculi were derived from actual brain scans and manipulation of living brains of patients in brain surgery. [Image source]

This is where things get really speculative on my part. Last time we discussed umwelt, a German term meaning someone's world. It's my personal contention that a person's umwelt can, in effect, be modeled somewhat like a cortical homunculus. Each person has, in effect, a world they live in distorted like the homunculi, only along every single sensory channel- sight, hearing, touch, temperature, etc. Even our sense of the flow of time is distorted this way- it runs slow when you're bored, etc, as well as culture, technology, and language playing an immense role in how we perceive time. This ties into the data density of language, too. On top of that, the distortions exist on an intellectual plane as well, and are altered by our culture, by our language in the above Sapir-Whorf sense, etc. Even on an instinctual level these distortions exist, prioritizing food, mates, and other biological imperatives when the brain is processing the sensory data around it. The average person (non-geologist) just isn't going to spend much time thinking about a rock when an attractive potential mate is nearby- to the point where the brain physically perceives the rock less.

This umwelt homunculus is- and again, this is highly speculative on my part- responsible for a great many of our difficulties in understanding the Other. When our umwelt homunculus has distortions too different from another person's it makes mutual comprehension immensely difficult. With an animal? It certainly explains why we have so much trouble. To our ears, for instance, prairie dog calls are almost indistinguishable. We need computers to tell them apart- our brains are literally not up to the task.

An 1844 drawing of a prairie dog town. [Image source]

So what must the umwelt homunculus of an extraterrestrial race be like? How alien can aliens get? Go back to the very first paragraph of this post, and you might notice that I carefully avoided discussing alien language. It's entirely possible that aliens might have a form of communication allowing information transfer at densities comparable to our own, and yet that still could not be at all understood as language.

Next time: How do aliens do math?

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Bibliography:

• Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, by Daniel Everett
• Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day, by G. J. Whitrow
• https://www.npr.org/2011/01/20/132650631/new-language-discovered-prairiedogese
• http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_maps
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_language
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion#In_language
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate