14 DAY TRIAL // Let us cast aside initial skepticism for a little while, and imagine that there really are aliens somewhere. In fact, not just anywhere, but right here on Earth, on the Moon or on Mars – places to which we currently have some sort of direct access.
Well, given this situation, what would we do, how would we be able to deduce whether their intentions are peaceful or otherwise, whether they want us to follow them to their ship or get them a cup of water? More precisely, how could we communicate with an alien species intelligent enough to make it this far into space?
Dr. John Elliott from the Leeds Metropolitan University believes that the answer lies in his newly-developed software that combines 60 of the world's languages. It looks for similarities and oddities, from phrase topic to recurrence of functional terms (like the words “and,” “or,” “but,” or “if”), which break sentences into ideas. The author of the program believes any language, including alien ones, must be based on a specific structure. Understanding that will allow us, he says, to form an idea on whether the alien is smarter than we are or not.
Even if the tongue is extremely remote from anything spoken on Earth, it should still have identifiable patterns, comparable to the ones in the software. “Language has to be structured in a certain way otherwise it will be inefficient and unwieldy,” claims Dr. Elliott. Normally, the functional terms are separated in fluent speech by as many as 9 interposed words, while, most of the times, adjectives are found next to a noun. The program allows breaking languages into specific parts like verbs, nouns or adjectives, although their meaning remains hidden.
Any alien message would be compared with the syntactic library and checked for any resemblance to a human language or a mix of more of them. This idea is rather a starting point than an end product in itself. “You have to start somewhere,” admits a US linguist, Dr. Sheri Wells-Jensen from Ohio's Bowling Green State University.