According to Noam Chomsky, "the Martian language might not be so different from human language after all.” And, "if a Martian visited Earth, it would think we all speak dialects of the same language, because all terrestrial languages share a common underlying structure” — he must mean "universal grammar." Others also believe that since the laws of the universe are supposedly the same everywhere, the language alien civilizations use might be fundamentally similar. Stephen Krashen, on the other hand, wrote "It is possible that alien language will be completely different from human languages." Do you think alien language would be similar to or different from human language?
An alien language may be so different that it is impossible to translate.
The reason human languages can be translated is that the words and sounds have underlying meaning, rooted in culture, that can be equated. But usually one must "think in the target language" in order to have any hopes of using the language with any level of effectiveness.
Even machine translation (such as Google Translate) Chinese to English often produces gibberish, because the words do not have the same idiomatic meaning.
Imagine aliens, coming from a fundamentally different culture with fundamentally different meanings in which there are not equivalent meanings to words in human languages.
Fascinating! Thank you, Joachim and Michael. The information and opinions you have provided are profound and insightful. There will be more answers coming from different disciplines and perspectives, which I so look forward to!
Quite an appealing discussion! Any postulates on the topic can be only speculative until we finally meet an alien race. However, literature, and more specifically, SF, has contributed some invaluable ideas. The Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages by Tim Conley and Stephen Cain gather loads of such examples.
For instance, Ted Chiang's Heptapod A, and Heptapod B. The former, as described in the novella, sounds like "a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur" (119), that is, an unpronounceable sound for human physiology. The latter, in turn, was so different that enabled its speakers to realise time in a non-linear way.
There are also cases like the Kesh language, describe in Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home that is more phonetically similar to human languages but quite distinct when it comes to grammar, which also happens because of physiological differences between humans and the aliens.
Most of the cases to point into one direction: if the alien species are physiologically similar to humans, so are their languages; whereas if the aliens' physical buildup is different, so is their language. As Michael W. Marek has mentioned, the unimaginably different culture the alien races might have developed over millennia of existence may cause quasi-untranslatable languages - we can already see similar cases in human languages. That makes total sense, in my opinion.
A very astute observation. Notably, the speculations about the existence of aliens and the existence of life on other planets lack empirical evidence. Accepting the likelihood of other kinds of life on other planets, the language spoken by them would certainly differ from humans just like the language adopted and used by various groups of people is exclusively unique in terms of linguistic structures.
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