Lately, I've been thinking about the movie "Arrival". A brief summary if you have not managed to catch it yet. Linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) leads an elite team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down in 12 locations around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must race against time to find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors. Big Hollywood productions in the past have been sure to employ specialists, but was this also true for Arrival? Linguistically speaking would we ever be able to decode any Alien language at will? Some researchers believe that extraterrestrial societies exist. New breakthroughs in the field of science that are allowing us to see into the far corners of our galaxy and discoveries of potentially life-sustaining planets are strengthening scientists' belief about the existence of aliens. Would we be able to converse with aliens? Language is often an important part of cooperation, key in large numbers for teamwork and coordination.
A particularly pressing question would be if we could learn the deep structure of an alien language. Linguists such as Noam Chomsky say that we would not be able to understand alien languages because there is no way we could understand a language that did not follow our human rules of grammar. Generativists believe that structure of language is inbuilt in us from birth, it allows us to distinguish between acceptable word structure and order, between acceptable ways to combine words. All languages on earth follow these rules. Humans are able to speak so many languages because at the basic level we all live the same way, have similar urges and biological processes, we even share similar emotions and experiences. When encountering someone who doesn’t speak your language, it would be easy to learn how to say nose, happy, sad, etc. With trial and error, we would further pick up more words in the language.
How would this be possible with aliens? What about aliens who don’t use senses in the same way as us, maybe they use echolocation to see. How would we explain concepts such as color? What if you hold a tomato and say “red”, maybe they can identify the texture, then you hold up a green tomato and then still say “red”. What if the aliens show us two identical objects that they call different things because of an electromagnetic property we can’t see.
Dolphins are highly intelligent and share experiences such as bullying, social hierarchy, tantrums, yet we still can’t decode their language. Phonemes are the building blocks of human language, but we struggle with dolphins because their language doesn’t have basic units that we can decode like Sanskrit or Latin.
Aliens will have evolved in a completely different environment to us. We had trouble translating hieroglyphics until the rosetta stone was discovered. Our language works with basic building blocks and grammar and experience, making it difficult to understand an alien language. I'll call Arrival an enjoyable escapist linguistic fantasy.
What Arrival was able to do was rekindle the interest in linguistics among a new generation. I give the movie a lot of points for showcasing the math behind linguistic breakthroughs. Linguistics is really math with words…you have to look at it as a puzzle, and you're solving this mathematical puzzle to figure out what the language is doing, what it's capable of doing, and how its sentences are structured. I hope to see more linguistic-based movies from Hollywood in the future.
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