Is it possible to learn a language entirely by observation?

Question

It is the age of exploration. Intrepid European colonists have come to settle the Americas amidst a storm of interest over the wondrous materials that may be found in the New World. Unfortunately for them, the indigenous have spent thousands of years cultivating their magic, distinguishing themselves in appearance, thought, language, and most severely: power. By the time of Christopher Columbus, the gulf has become so wide that the indigenous cannot even recognize people from the Old World as rational beings - regarding them instead as curiosities and pests beneath consideration.

These unfortunate circumstances have stymied European expansion into the continent, and unable to meaningfully combat the indigenous, the colonial powers have instead sought to broker communication between their peoples in the hopes that the use of familiar language will elevate themselves in their eyes. This is no easy task, given the usual methods for learning learning language through immersion are infeasible; intrepid linguists must observe from a distance lest they be discovered and potentially killed.

Altogether, the question stands: is this possible? Can a dedicated force of 16th century linguists learn an alien language through observation alone, given any sort of contact is likely to result in death? On what sort of timescale can this be achieved? I will accept any answer giving a historical example of any language having been successfully studied (grammar, lexicon, etc. to fluency) this way at any point in history.

Misc.:

• Capturing indigenous is impossible
• It is possible to remain hidden within earshot of the indigenous
• Infiltrating indigenous camps, towns, and other kinds of settlement or buildings is very dangerous
• Acquiring indigenous artifacts is incredibly difficult, even if they have been abandoned
• For simplicity's sake, we can imagine there's only one language
• The indigenous language is not too far removed from real ones
• The colonists are fielding technology roughly in line with what their real counterparts had
• The colonists are allowed to have anachronistic culture or knowledge, however
• Europe is desperate for successful colonies; the wondrous materials native to the continent are as valuable to them as modern technology would be to Rome

Answer 1

The real-life process corresponding to the requirements is learning a foreign language by watching TV shows in that language (without subtitles). This ranges from trivially easy if the foreign language is closely related to a language that the learner already knows (e.g., a Romanian learning Italian from watching La piovra on Bulgarian TV), to relatively easy if the languages are closely related but not very (e.g., the same Romanian watching Escrava Isaura and Avenida Paulista on the same Balgarska televizia), to somewhat difficult if the two languages are only distantly related (e.g., learning enough Bulgarian to follow football commentary of live matches), to very difficult but far from impossible if the target language is completely alien (e.g., a Romanian attempting to watch Hungarian TV).

^{In the 1980s, Romanian state television had degenerated to such a great extent that it went on air only two hours per day, and those were dedicated to Communist propaganda. This created an environment where everybody who could watched TV shows from neighbouring countries; Bulgaria in the south, Yugoslavia in the south-east, Hungary in the west; and even Soviet TV was watched in the east.}

The point is that humans have a built-in ability to learn foreign languages. This ability is highest in childhood, but it never goes away completely; and moreover, if instead of casually watching foreign TV shows the learners do have an actual incentive, the results will be even better and the learning faster.

As for formal examples, we do now know several dead languages which were desciphered entirely by closely examining ancient texts; for example, Hittite.

Answer 2

Some people in real life speak Klingon. There is even a popular story in the internet about a couple who only had Klingon as a common language between them, and they married.

Elvish is also a con language and some people speak it.

Even The Elder Scroll's Dov language has some enthusiasts.

I doubt that Tolkien and the producers for Star Trek and Skyrim were giving Zoom classes. Somebody had to reverse engineer each one before people could use them.

Answer 3

Is it possible to learn a language entirely by observation?

Yes, mere observation can be enough to learn a language... but that method will absolutely require much more time to do so than traditional immersion.

For example, there are plenty of anecdotal examples of children who seem basically mute until suddenly showing the ability to speak in full sentences. Usually, though, those full sentences come at a time that lags years behind the normal development of their peers who've progressed through basic words, to broken sentences, to simple sentences, quite some time ago.

There might be a bigger barrier to deal with, however...

"... regarding them instead as curiosities and pests beneath consideration..."

"... any sort of contact is likely to result in death..."

This is perhaps the trickiest bottleneck for your story/setting; depending on where you draw the line for "enough fluency to not be killed".

If something like "We, a Lesser People, ask your Great People to teach us your wonderful language!" is sufficient to pique their curiosity, then you can probably reach that level in a relatively short time frame (maybe a year or so, more depending on the language's particularities and difficulties). And from there, they can throw a kindergarten-level teacher at your explorers and start a more typical language-immersion process.

If you need to come out strong with a fancy spiel in full-legalese like "On behalf of King X of Y, heir to the Z of Q, conqueror of the R, Lord over the protectorate of S, long may he reign, we, his hired explorers, beseech thee to parlay on the matter of his vassals being deigned vermin in your lands and holdings, etc. ..." then that will be much harder and take substantially more time to develop. The particular thorniness of the issue being that you just won't have access to much of that vocabulary when eavesdropping on farmers near the outskirts of civilization. So, not only would you have to sneak further into dangerous territory to learn the important stuff... but you'd probably need a significant time investment to learn just the basics beforehand to understand any of the more complicated stuff by building off of context clues.

Answer 4

In many ways, this is what the Generative Pre-trained Transformer series of AI projects is doing in practice. Feed the algorithm an incredibly large body of English text, and it leans how to converse in English.

While not exactly what you are looking for, and doesn't really answer if it is possible for a human, it does show the task is in and of itself possible.

Answer 5

If your idea was the old science fiction cliche idea that an alien civilization can learn our languages just by watching TV shows I should say that no, you can not learn a language entirely by observation.

But I remembered a good movie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_13th_Warrior where Antonio Banderas character learned Vikings language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangians just by observation.

In the movie, Banderas is a noble Arabic language speaking Muslim. I was told by an old English language teacher of mine that Arabic speaking people have facility to learn foreign languages. So, may be, there was cases people can learn a language entirely by observation.

Any way, if you are dropped into a place where no one knows your language, the written system is totally different (think on Japanese or Hebrew) and you are left there forever, well, you ought to learn your new home language entirely by observation:).

Answer 6

I cannot approximate the exact amount of time it would take to learn a language that way. However, you can make things easier for yourself by inducing some luck in your story.

And by that I mean, you can have your linguist find and listen to the conversations that are happening inside one of their school. If they have any. Where they are teaching small children to speak their language.

Or any kind of family with a toddler where the parents or some adult is trying to teach their own language to the child.

And by listening to their conversations, which are meant to teach their own language to one of their children. The hopes of learning their language and learning it way faster than listening to casual conversations are way higher.

Answer 7

Learning language is a very developmental process. It is the easiest when we are young and harder when we're older if the language's seperation points referred to as phonemes, differ considerably from our native language.

Its possible however simply because most language speakers tend to use the same phrases over and over with same filler words. You'd have to find someone who could point our nuances however.

Lets put it this way, we have translation dictionaries and europeans learned to communicate with each other.

Answer 8

As described it seems a immensely difficult task if it weren't you waved anachronistic knowledge. The colonist need to overcome several conditions basic to the learning of a new language:

Understanding the social context: values, traditions, institutions (political or civil) etc all that give it utility and reason to the use of language. Without it the misunderstanding might be endless.

Sociolinguistical background: learning a language implies social differentiation. Colonists would like to set their sociolect to the right social group and social situation.

Learning grammar: grammar rules might have a high degree of complexity because of exceptions adding to the learning time.

So the colonists would need modern knowledge of anthropology, socio-linguistics and formal linguistics to overcome the lack of direct contact to language use.

They would be able to perform crucial experiments when they'd hit a block to the cost of getting some junior researchers killed.

I think they might be able to form a group of children in an isolated community where they'd only speak the target code. With this they might be able to show a "civilized" face after 30 to 40 years.

If they didn't have all that anachronistic knowledge it would take a social and scientific revolution to obtain them.

Answer 9

Frame challenge. The whole situation can be basically boiled down to decryption of extinct language (obviously you can't speak with dead people who spoke said language), when there is no grammar textbook on said language.

One way to help this research is to find closest relatives for languages of Americas. And then use knowledge of said relatives for decryption of American languages.

It can be possible, as such relatives were found, or at the very least, were suspected to be found, see links below (maybe there are more):

Dené–Yeniseian is a proposed language family consisting of the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia and the Na-Dené languages of northwestern North America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Yeniseian_languages

The Eskaleut (/ɛˈskæliuːt/), Eskimo–Aleut or Inuit–Yupik–Unangan languages are a language family native to the northern portions of the North American continent and a small part of northeastern Asia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskaleut_languages

Dené–Caucasian is a proposed language family that includes widely-separated language groups spoken in the Northern Hemisphere: Sino-Tibetan languages, Yeniseian languages, Burushaski and North Caucasian languages in Asia; Na-Dené languages in North America; and the Vasconic languages from Europe (including Basque).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den%C3%A9%E2%80%93Caucasian_languages

And once you figured out some of American languages this way (i.e. learned it), you can use said knowledge to help decrypt other American languages, especially language of neighbors of speakers of said American language.