if they really only used it for tabular record keeping, why are scholars convinced that there exists a (written) grammar to be deciphered? maybe they only used writing for record keeping and not for anything else.. the article mentions some "cultic" texts but says they are mostly just repetitive word combinations, doesn't sound like there are much in the way of "sentences" at all.
Among the most significant ones, Yves Duhoux demonstrated that the language behind Linear A makes heavy use of prefixes and suffixes for word-formation (that is, the individual syllables added at word-start or word-end to convey additional information, such as gender and number.)
I just watched a movie on Prime (most of the movie, anyway) about the centuries-long effort to decipher the Mayan hieroglyphics. They've done a pretty good job of it, but it was really hard. They do not have a Rosetta Stone to work with.
I think the only saving grace there is that the sentients sending such transmissions would presumably want to be understood, and would ensure a Rosetta Stone of sorts was packed along with the message; the common element of reference probably being the mechanism of the transmission medium itself. Contrast that with the Minoans here, who were just writing for other Minoans. But given how much culture and biology is inevitably encoded into even our human languages, one does sometimes wonder if we're even asking the right questions.
I hope I live long enough to see one of the various SETI initiatives pan out into such an amazing discovery. As a child, I thought it inevitable; pushing fifty, I'm rather less sanguine.
We _might_ share a set of universal constants with any other intelligence that they also care about. PI, the speed of light, binary, etc.
In a weird sense specific to decoding transmissions we might share more of interest with them than Minoans, who were mostly likely recording the names of gods/heroes and accounting records for commodities that may no longer even exist.
…or Earth animal languages. We’ve managed to communicate with dolphins, but only to train them in the concepts we want, and they were smart enough to learn what we meant. But AFAIK, we still can’t understand any wild dolphin pod languages or dialects, let alone man’s best friend, elephants, other primates, or birds.
More like animal codes. Humans are the only species known to be biologically capable of language (expect for one controversial case of a chimp maaaaybe doing it). To be a language you need things like syntax and recursion.
Why do you need syntax and recursion? From a very mathematical point of view, languages are just a set of words. And human language rules are not really grammatical rules for the most part - there are an endless number of exceptions.
Because that is the definition of a natural language. All human languages exhibit these features (except debatably Pirahã, but that's a weird case and is literally the only known example out of ~7000 languages).
It's like the difference between a finite state machine and a Turing machine. For simple cases it may appear like they are equivalent, and with enough pattern matching and brute force you can always get by, but one will always be fundamentally more powerful than the other. This is the same with human language and animal communication. Animal brains are fundamentally incapable of grasping these concepts.
> From a very mathematical point of view, languages are just a set of words. And human language rules are not really grammatical rules for the most part - there are an endless number of exceptions.
I would say they're more like a complex partly logical partly statistical model than a set of words. Grammar is much, much more complicated than adjective-noun-verb. Once you create a good, comprehensive model of it for a language, true exceptions are very rare. Even accepting that there are expceptions, it doesn't make sense to say that just because humans don't use language with 100% predictability and rigor that it's equivalent to a random bag of words. This is true of programming and logical languages too. You need syntax which must be adhered to at least the vast majority of the time. Deviations have to be limited and understandable. Any sentence somebody says will be at least 95% known grammar with only a tiny bit of true innovation.
> Because that is the definition of a natural language. All human languages exhibit these features (except debatably Pirahã, but that's a weird case and is literally the only known example out of ~7000 languages).
I am no linguists, my question was genuine curiosity, sorry if I sounded argumentative.
> This is the same with human language and animal communication. Animal brains are fundamentally incapable of grasping these concepts.
I agree with it on a fundamental level (with perhaps the exception of chimpanzees? I would not be surprised if they could get closer to us. It probably depends on whether language is the fundamental distinctive feature of intelligence or not).
Regarding bag of words, I meant to use word as combinations of characters (including whitespace), so an English sentence would be a “word” in the English language with this definition. And yeah, just because it is not a formal language, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have other sort of structure.
> I am no linguists, my question was genuine curiosity, sorry if I sounded argumentative.
Oh sorry, I didn't mean to come across as argumentative either.
> I would not be surprised if they could get closer to us. It probably depends on whether language is the fundamental distinctive feature of intelligence or not.
Yeah I'd really like to see more research done on this. The chimp I referenced is actually a bonobo called Kanzi, I misremembered the species. He seemed to be a prodigy able to do things no other apes can. It would be interesting to know how far this could go if we found even more talented apes, or selectively bred them.
That is certainly not the "mathematical point of view" of what language is. Not sure if I completely agree with the other commenter, but languages are not just "a set of words".
One big hope is it would include video to give context.
Volume of text and consistency should also make decoding easier. Our Linear A samples are mostly fragments without context and they contain various inconsistencies.
I don't think sending video is a likely scenario if the sender wants to be understood. There are too many ways video could be encoded, even assuming the aliens have the same perceptual capabilities we have.
Flipping it around, if we were going to do send a message to the universe would we send an h.265 bgr video with aac audio in streaming mp4 format?
The only thing you can know for sure you have in common with someone receiving your radio signal is that they can receive radio signals, so using something about radio transmission would be a good bet for building a lexicon. Then there's the universal constants and mathematics which we could assume are known in common.
We could bootstrap the format. First repeatedly send a p × q bit stream (with p and q prime) that teaches the aliens about a compressed format F1, then send a larger F1-encoded description of format F2, send a F2-encoded description of F3, …, send a Fn-encoded description of mp4, and then send a mp4-encoded video.
For a simple version of that, see https://rosettaproject.org/, which uses large print to make it much more likely intelligent life will discover the small print.
I don’t see video as high on the list of things we would like to send, though. There’s lots and lots of stuff we should send earlier, such as data on physical constants and chemical elements (things we expect any aliens to know, and that they could use to decipher our language)
on the list? how about close to pointless? i don’t see how bootstrapping the decoding gets you to anything other than another inscrutable format of data.
without context about the point and use of the data i can’t imagine it would have any use. you need to know about the display devices and human audio, visual sensory and perception capabilities to make any use of the data.
it would be like receiving some complex data format meant to generate a symphony of seismic waves that the observer enjoys through various specialized sensors, without knowing anything about this purpose of the data to begin with, let alone the many details specific to the use of the data by whatever devices “play” the data and how it’s perceived by the observer.
If you manage to tell the other party how compression format X works, you can use it after that, and send information faster and using less energy (if we’re talking interstellar communication, broadcasting likely takes way more energy than any message preparation does)
If you intend to send lots of data (which, as you point out, you will have to, to give the receiver any chance of making sense of it), that may be a net win, even if you spend lots of time getting there.
You could, for example, teach that the bit pattern of ‘=‘ signals equality by sending simple math expressions
.. = ..
. + . = ..
and later try to convey how run-length encoding works by reusing = in that context
aaaabbc = 4a2bc
Easy for the receiver to figure out? Absolutely not, but if you give them a chance, they may figure it out, and if the alternative is that you can only send a third of the data, that may be the better choice.
You don’t need to decode video signals as RGB values to be meaningful.
The value is simply the abundance of data and the patterns that show up within it because most images are close to the ones before them. Suppose you sent every book ever written in English as ASCII data and someone tried to decode it as an audio signal. There is nothing in the data that’s going to show someone is on the right track or not. However with uncompressed video you can find patterns and the closer you get the more obvious it becomes.
