Is there a way to translate a language that includes words for things we don't know?

Question

I saw some ideas of translating an alien language, like in the movie Arrival. The steps make sense, but I thought of another scenario:

Imagine you meet aliens in space. They speak, but you can't understand them. Tthe normal way to learn their language is to point at things and try to get what they are called. But what happens when the things they point at are things we don't even know or understand? What if they see things in another perspective (maybe they have just one word for, light, fire, energy because in their eyes it's the same thing)?

Is it possible to learn their language in these cases?

Edit: Just want to add an example so people understand my point, imagine the aliens would see and travel through the fourth dimension, could we ever learn about it as human just by talking? Other example, the aliens have more colors than we have, our eyes don't see everything but their might see more, what would be it like if they try to explain us an additional color? We can't imagine it in our heads so it would just be random words right?

Answer 1

It is absolutely possible for a trivial reason: everyone does it.

When we are young, and learning our first language, we absolutely don't understand the perspective of the adults speaking around us. Yet 100% of us learn to speak our native tongue.

The trick is that you have to actually learn the language. In school, we often kinda-sorta learn a language. We learn to map it to the way we think, word by word. As you point out, that can fail when we try to learn a language that groups things differently.

To learn such a language, you have to learn it as it's own entity, and slowly develop your own translation over time. One place I've had to learn this is in learning Chinese martial arts as an American. I'd say some of their concepts don't map 1:1 to English, but I'd be lying. Of the important concepts, almost all of them don't map. They simply view the nature of life (and thus combat) differently. It is almost completely impossible to learn concepts like Yin, and Yang, with their proper constantly-entwined-opposite nature just through lecture, much less pointing at things. Concepts like Chi are even harder; Shen may be hardest of all. (disclaimer: still trying to get a handle on that last word, myself!)

Such difficult terms are taught through interaction, not just one way communication. Not only will the teacher use terms like "chi" in their instruction, but they also observe your actions and strive to identify moments where their terms may be more meaningful to you. You may be struggling with tension at some point in a posture, and the teacher realizes that you "know" what to do, you just need a nudge. They might, in a commanding tone say "use the chi!" and that tone alone nudges you into doing what your body knew to do all along, you just weren't doing it. You then start to associate "chi" with the particular correction you just made.

Over years of practice, you eventually will develop your own understanding of the word and tie it back into your life. I, myself, have concepts of what "chi" is which stem from my scientific background, but that's only because that's a convenient way for me to think about it. I prefer to think of it as its own concept, and not translate it into scientific thinking if possible. That way I can continue to understand the nuances which I might miss if I assume that my scientific definition of chi is the definition of chi.

SO I would say the solution to this problem is interaction and persistence. Not only should one be trying to learn the language, but you should try to let them help you find situations which make it easier to understand their language. As they say in language classes, you'll know you've got it when you start dreaming in their language.

The hardest words to capture in this way would be those related to the warrior spirit or the fundamental essence of a society. The former is tricky because you must be put in stressing situations to uncover it, and the latter is tricky because you aren't them.

Answer 2

Interesting concept for sure. I Believe though for your perspective of an Alien pointing out an object we don't know doesn't mean we can't learn that word. Think about the English language. We have words like Croissant that never got "translated" into English but left as their French wording and we adapted to use that word in relation to that food. Through context you would understand that XXX does XXX as you watch that object work/interact. Not everything has a direct translation.

Another example is the Navajo who used their language to talk in WW2. They didn't have words for things like a grenade so they used other words like eggs to represent the object.

In regards to your question about if they have the same word to represent 4 different meanings, though uncommon, we already have this in our own Earth languages. Buffalo for example can be used like 5 different ways depending on context.

It's not impossible to learn any language, but certain words may need to be just accepted as the name of something or the common tongue needs to come up with a nickname for it so they can use it in context.

Answer 3

This is a hardy perennial of Science Fiction. It’s basically always possible to communicate with the aliens in the end, because otherwise you get an unsatisfying anticlimax. When the humans never do figure out how to communicate, you get a Big Dumb Object story. But even Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama and 2001 eventually got sequels where the aliens finally do talk to us and explain what was going on. Someone else already brought up the Star Trek: TNG episode, “Darmok,” which anyone who thinks about questions like this should definitely watch. (I’ll happily poke holes in it afterward, but it’s great.)

Learning alien languages has been handled a number of ways. Suzette Haden Elgin is a linguist whose feminist SF novel, Native Tongue, is written from the premise that this is only possible if you take an innately gifted child and teach her to see the world the alien way while she is still young enough. A major part of the plot of the novel is the invention of a language for the thoughts of women, Láadan. The author really invented this language and taught it to people to see what would happen.

Another, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s short story, “Three Worlds Collide” (originally, “The Babyeating Aliens”) is about first contact with two alien species with very different modes of thought. I’ll give one of the few SFW examples of his approach (the others are more, uh, interesting).

In the early days of my species there were those who refrained from happiness in order to achieve perfect skill in helping others, using untranslatable 3 to suppress their emotions and acting only on their abstract knowledge of goals. These were forcibly returned to normality by massive untranslatable 4. But I descend from their thought-lineage and in emergency invoke the shadow of their untranslatable 5.

On a side note, having one word where English has three or vice versa isn’t a big obstacle in practice: English has an especially large vocabulary with a lot of synonyms, so this happens often, and most other languages make distinctions somewhere that English doesn’t: Spanish or French have at least four ways to say was, with different verbs for temporary and permanent conditions and different tenses for completed and continuing actions.

Answer 4

It already happened in the past on our planet. Think for example of when the first pioneers explored the present United States territory or some island in the Pacific Ocean and wanted to negotiate with the natives "right of property" or "exclusive usage", concepts that they didn't possess, and for which you can't even "point at things".

Nevertheless natives learned the language (and also the concepts, though through the hard way...).

Answer 5

Another story you should read is Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper.

As the story points out, even pictures with captions are not necessarily helpful, giving the example of a picture of a man using a hand saw. The caption could mean anything from "man sawing wood" to "Kaiser Wilhelm in exile".

The story is about discovering that there is common ground after all: natural physical science, and the chemical elements in particular.

In the story I’m working on, the sender doen’t presume anything about the senses of the recipient. Being a message, the recipient will naturally prepare it into a form that can be examined. A 2D diagram or schematic is a picture to us, but could be scent ot tactile or who knows what. Diagrams and maps and charts, in content, should be more universal.

And it’s not some guy on the street trying to spontaniously understand it. It’s a team gathered to ponder and study the project.

And, the two parties want to overcome this communication issue. So don’t point to an everyday object that is not itself known to your counterpart! Instead, start with things they both do know. This isn’t simply pointing, but requires preparing a set of diagrams.

In my story, an annotated map of the solar system (of the recipient) showing mass, periods, distances, etc. and a table of properties of chemical elements and isotopes, are “Rosetta Stones” representing things that the recipient does already know what it is.

But what happens when the things they point at are things we don't even know or understand?

If you meet an alien and you start by pointing to the TV remote control, the dog, a slice of pizza (things immediatly at hand) and trying to share words for those, you are quite simply doing it wrong.

Start by finding things (and “things” may be abstract) they do have in common. Starting with a word for the remote control is silly, but if I opened the entertainment center cabinet door to show him a periodic table of elements I have hanging on the inside of the door, then it might take a little pondering because his culture formats it differently, but he might indeed know what that is.

If it's not a random introduction of two individuals, but teams of people working on the problem (complete with Internetlibrary-computer access), then you bet they can figure out what the periodic table is.

Answer 6

Pointing to objects and naming them works - as long as the aliens are speaking (rather than a multitude of other ways to communicate - posture, gesture, odors, skin tone, hair/skin patterns, emr, etc. etc.) in our audible hearing range - and only in that range. The problem with this is that the aliens must think in terms of "thing-action-result" like our languages. I think a video (YouTube) would be much more effective than one-to-one pointing; at least to start. You've probably seen the movie First Encounters. The language there was colors and tones, and was learned (apparently) by computer-to-computer communication rather than person-to-person. Meaning digital communication would probably be much quicker than the very primitive "Me Tarzan, you Jane" approach. Your question assumes the stuff the aliens talk about is "things". Physics is more about processes and fields than "things" (arguably). So, we have no assurance that what we observe is relevant to the information they are attempting to convey. (I've not seen Arrival, yet). I expect that through repetition, we would eventually be able to understand the patterns which their language is based on. As long as ALL of the information necessary is perceptible to us. (For instance, we are just beginning to (crudely) be able to encode smells into language via computers. If they used smells (or chemical emissions) as an important part of their language, we'd have a real problem understanding them. But even that would eventually be cracked, I think. So, to answer your question. Assuming they communicate vocally in the same frequency range as we do is a real stretch (because even we use gesture and context, as well as the sex, age, and status of the speaker and listener, to determine what words we use). But assuming we can capture their language with our ears/eyes (and they ours)? Then we should be able to eventually understand them, I think. It would, imho, be a really dumb way to solve that problem.

Answer 7

The main problem with the movie Arrival is that she's a linguist. So that creates the problem, she knows languages, but not the foundation she can lay it on.

To explain I will use the first anthropologist problem. They think that because "savages" didn't have words for something (like describing history) they don't know how to describe it. In fact they just told the story in form of a dance or carvings.

The second example would be pineapples - which I can guarantee are not called pineapples in native language.

The third example is potatoes - In English this is a word from batatas while in French they are "earth apples".

The fourth is Helen Keller - She didn't see water, she didn't hear it. She had no visual concept of it. Just like aliens with no eyes.

So to answer your question: you learn it as any other languages. They point to energy beam and call it pewpew so you assume energy beams are pewpew but later you learn that pewpew means beam while energy made from cold fusion used in energy beam is called fiu.