'ET phone home? Chomsky’s Universal language theory could help us chat'

www.rt.com...

how come so many earth languages have some variations of M_ for mother?

is it just to coincidence? may we find similarity in et species?

or will they communicate without sound anyway? maybe maths in the multiverse? (for me was music during NDE and telepathy with orb beings, intermittent with loud, noisy dimensional shift interruption while between) or clicks and sonar, consider the waters of inner and outer space on this plane.

There is a universal language throughout the cosmos that, once cracked, could allow us to speak to aliens. That’s the opinion of linguistics icon Noam Chomsky, who presented his theory at a space science conference.
Chomsky, a linguistics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has long argued the case that the same basic grammar underscores all languages, meaning that alien visitors would find it hard to spot differences between our various tongues.
At a workshop entitled ‘Language in the Cosmos’ at the International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles last week, Chomsky argued that if there is a universal grammar on Earth, the same theory can be applied to languages from outer space – maybe one day we could even find ourselves shooting the breeze with an ET-like creature stranded on our pale blue dot. "To put it whimsically, the Martian language might not be so different from human language after all," said Chomsky.

less than 30 min ago:

www.abovetopsecret.com...

sank u!

thought provoking, no?

a reply to: vnski

It may have to do with the fact that the m sound is one of the first and most basic sounds a human can make. I read something like that years ago.

I think humans are more likely to invent a 'telepathy' machine before we evolve the skill. The only missing piece is the technology that digitally captures our thoughts from our brains. It's not hard to imagine us with the technology possibly within our lifetime. Once a person's thoughts are digitized they can be communicated anywhere like a file transfer over the internet. Presumably if we can capture our thoughts, we could 'inject' them just as easily.

Manmade telepathy could be awesome. The baud rate of human communication would increase by orders of magnitude. Imagine your brain being manipulated so you acquired all the knowledge to be a doctor in 15 minutes. Slow textbooks and lectures will be a relic of the past. We could really push the limits of our brains.

If pure bio-telepathy is the universal language then there's a real chance humans will be left in the dark. Artificial telepathy would kill the inventive for humans evolving it naturally.

I have always thought they would use light. it has the faster modem speed. I have always thought they would make it obvious they were using unnatural light with an unnatural frequency/pattern/ so on...

This is incorrect. Remember Arthur C. Clarke's corollary.

Any aliens we encounter will be stranger than you CAN imagine. That's the big sticking point. Any ET we might meet (and we won't) can't be too strange or we will not only be unable to interact with them, we will also be unwilling.

Imagine human-sized viruses, or stone-like creatures who exist on a time-sync similar to geological time. They have a single thought every 10,000 years.

originally posted by: vnski
how come so many earth languages have some variations of M_ for mother?

is it just to coincidence?

More than just a coincidence, as many languages share a common root, that's why all Latin languages have similar words for "mother" ("mãe", "madre", "mère", etc.) and Germanic languages follow the same path, with "Mutter", "moeder", "mor", etc. Unrelated languages have different words, like Japanese with "haha".

Besides the different words, the way of constructing the sentences is different, a sentence like "Chomsky’s Universal language theory could help us chat" in Portuguese would be written as "A teoria da linguagem universal de Chomsky pode ajudar-nos a conversar". As you can see with similar words like "theory", "universal" and "Chomsky", the order is completely different (something that automatic translators are not good at recreating).

I think we would need some kind of translation, even for telepathy.

And for some reason the word for "three" is very similar across multiple languages of far-flung cultures. There are linguists who study this kind of thing looking for a universal common proto-language. Some of them to prove the Biblical Tower of Babel story.

But it's a little presumptuous to think that just because humans have language commonalities those would be useful for communicating with aliens. Particularly if they communicate through smells or chemical exchanges, like ants, or with light patterns like octopi.

If aliens ever show up, it'll probably be very difficult to exchange ideas with them. If they even have them.

originally posted by: LookingAtMars
a reply to: vnski

It may have to do with the fact that the m sound is one of the first and most basic sounds a human can make. I read something like that years ago.

The Dementia alphabet is pretty simple , Aaaa ,Mmm

a reply to: vnski

Article author ends with:
"So maybe we won’t be repetitively clicking and rhyming to communicate with aliens, and will instead just be wiped out by their superior weaponry in the good old-fashioned way.

Grrreeaat...
How optimistic...

Maybe we're an experiment(s) and experiments have beginnings and ends.
I'd guard my experiment from being tampered with if I had one this big...
Keep em' clueless to the abundance of others out there, teach them to mock each other for considering the concept.
Wouldn't be prudent have your control or study be contaminated with external influence.
That's not the scientific method.

creator dividing babel to deter breaching firmament;
likewise keeping much matter out (apparent not meteor, asteroid, apollo, etc)?

i like the universal tongue being telepathy better, maybe it has to do with quantum physics? spooky action at distance?

et home phone..

a reply to: vnski

My problem with telepathy is that when we think we think in one specific language (or more), but we do think in the language we usually use to talk.

It would be interesting to know in what language a deaf person thinks before learning out to read and write.

originally posted by: ArMaP
It would be interesting to know in what language a deaf person thinks before learning out to read and write.

Or what gorillas name things before they learn sign language.