SPEAKING to extraterrestrials is probably the alien hunter鈥檚 ultimate dream but first we have to understand what they鈥檙e actually saying. A good place to start would be recognising that an extraterrestrial signal will probably be made up of words and sentences.
John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, has done just that by devising ways to decipher the structure of an alien tongue. For him, the vast differences between us and an alien intelligence do not necessarily preclude the notion that alien languages might have a recognisable grammatical structure. Last month in Paris at a conference on Searching for Life Signatures, Elliot described a software program for detecting a syntax in the string of ones and zeros that might one day wing its way to us from outer space.
Elliott鈥檚 work is based on the fact that all languages have patterns that can be statistically analysed. 鈥淟anguage has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it will be inefficient and unwieldy,鈥� he says. Dolphin, ape and bird sounds also share these patterns, though the notion of animal languages is controversial.
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While previous research has shown that it is possible to determine whether a signal carries a language rather than an image or music, Elliott鈥檚 program can analyse the message further, picking out what might be words and sentences.
All human languages have 鈥渇unctional terms鈥� that bracket phrases. In English, these are words like 鈥渋f鈥� and 鈥渂ut鈥�. Elliott has found that in any language, such terms are separated by up to nine words or characters. This limit on phrase length seems to correspond to our level of cognition: that is, how much information we can process at once. If Elliott can detect such terms in an alien language, he might be able to gauge whether they are smarter than us by how many words they pack into their phrases.
鈥淲e might be able to gauge whether aliens are smarter than us by finding how many words they pack into their phrases鈥�
Elliott also believes he could parse a language into crucial words such as nouns and verbs without knowing what they mean. The program can locate, for example, adjectives by the fact that they are almost always next to nouns. Each language has slightly different word orders, so Elliott is amassing a library of the different syntaxes of 60 human tongues. If a message arrives from outer space, we could compare it against this library and pinpoint it as looking like a mix between Zulu and Inuit, for example.
When it comes to translating what aliens are actually saying, Elliot admits that it may still be impossible without some sort of code book. But 鈥測ou have to start somewhere,鈥� says linguist Sheri Wells-Jensen of Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who thinks it 鈥渇iendishly clever鈥� to use functional terms to break apart an unfamiliar language. 鈥淢y money is on being able to understand the aliens鈥�.
Astrobiology 鈥� Learn more in our out-of-this-world .
