Raymond Hickey (Cambridge University Press)
WHAT language might an alien use? As a speculative answer, Denis Villeneuve鈥檚 epic sci-fi movie Arrival couldn鈥檛 be more intriguing. Louise the linguist is asked to board a spaceship to interpret circles of ink spattered onto glass by ghostly, seven-limbed heptapods. Their circularity expresses the aliens鈥� non-sequential view of time.
Advertisement
One of the many robust joys of Raymond Hickey鈥檚 magisterial Life and Language Beyond Earth is the blunt confidence with which he dismisses Arrival鈥榮 circle-language. 鈥淣o animal would use such a short-supply resource as their ink for primary communication,鈥� he writes.
Hickey doesn鈥檛 have much time for genuinely 鈥渨eird life鈥�, as he calls it. His mission is to hypothesise about how 鈥渆xobeings鈥�, as he calls them, might acquire languages, and he starts from the one test case he is sure about 鈥� us.
Just like humans, says Hickey, in order to be sentient and purposeful, an alien would have to develop a 鈥渞unaway brain鈥�, one with capacities beyond those needed to survive. To construct machinery such as communication devices, they would need dexterous limbs and digits 鈥� and 鈥渁 language-like communication system鈥� to coordinate their activities, he says.
As he considers the ways aliens might hear or produce noises, or how their ability to move their bodies in space might shape the metaphors in their discourse, Hickey鈥檚 exobeings form in your mind. But they are more like the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise than Arrival鈥榮 heptapods. That is, Hickey imagines language-using aliens will be essentially humanoid entities, with some minor evolutionary divergences.
He makes clear that, out of all possible 鈥�contact鈥� events, only receiving a signal from beyond our solar system is remotely likely. The next most probable is discovering exoplanets that don鈥檛 just emit 鈥渂iosignatures鈥� of life, but 鈥渢echnosignatures鈥� too.
So, no encounters with time-bending heptapods, writes Hickey. But maybe meaningful blocks of patterned, language-like information will reach us 鈥� if exo-civilisations are, or have been, beaming them out.
Hickey鈥檚 teeming yet coherent study makes the claim that, if we assume they are language-users like us, we will be better able to pick the alien needle out of all those intergalactic haystacks.
Pat Kane is a writer based in Glasgow and London
