Teaching Aliens English (Or any other Human language)

[Spaceception]

It's late spring, the year is 2063, and Humans finally develop a Alcubierre warp ship named the USS Millennium, they decide its first mission is to go to Epsilon Indi 11.9 lys away which has a Near-Earth twin orbiting it. The journey takes 6 weeks to traverse the 11.9 light years, and they fall into orbit around the planet. Shortly after, scanners find it has a breathable atmosphere, and comfortable temperature, and 5 crew go take a look down at its surface. However, they drop down less than 1/2 of a km from a tribe, a large Alien tribe that seems to have 11th century technology. Disregarding some sort of "Prime directive" How would humans explain their technology and language to a young Alien race?

Edited December 6, 2015 by Spaceception

[cubinator]

Language would be awfully complicated to explain without any kind of reference, it's not like they have similar grammar or even talk in the same sound range, or even talk at all. Hell, they might communicate by warming up different parts of their bodies. As for technology, I would leave it at what they can understand, which, with 11th century technology, probably amounts to telescopes and Rubik's Cube. But the one thing that I would give them is math. It would be as simple as writing a list of numbers from 1 to 100. Then we could ask them to tell us the same. They most likely have a writing system, so it wouldn't be too hard. After we've exchanged numbering systems, we could tell them about pi and zero. The Pythagorean Theorem. Graphing. We could show them how their planet goes around the sun and it's moons go around it, but knowing how well that turned out on this planet, even when it was our own species, I would leave that bit out for the moment. We could probably tell them that we come from a star in the sky without too much trouble. That's all I would give until they ask for more, because too much information about how the universe works could shatter their ideologies and create turmoil, like the heliocentric model did for us. Imagine if we showed them that not only were they not the center of the universe, and that they shared it with others, but that we had devices that could communicate across a planet and even across solar systems, or worse, that we had devices that can destroy them at the push of a button.

[Kerbart]

How would humans explain their technology and language to a young alien race?

If history is to serve as a guideline, probably with nuclear bombs and a wide range of nasty diseases.

[Spaceception]

9 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

How would humans explain their technology and language to a young alien race?

If history is to serve as a guideline, probably with nuclear bombs and a wide range of nasty diseases.

Assume the crew of the Starship (And the space agency/s that launched it) is peaceful without (Much) weaponry (For defense).

[HoloYolo]

3 hours ago, Kerbart said:

How would humans explain their technology and language to a young alien race?

If history is to serve as a guideline, probably with nuclear bombs and a wide range of nasty diseases.

Jesus Christ why does everyone think we'll answer with violence?! Unless a certain few people take the controls of major powers I don't see a violent interaction with aliens unless those aliens strike first.

[AngelLestat]

if they are advance.. they might have neural networks to decode all our languages.. if they had neural networks.. then not sure what are they still doing here.. (in this universe)  

[LordFerret]

Like any other creature we know, their first word to learn is "No".

[Kerbart]

4 hours ago, HoloYolo said:

Jesus Christ why does everyone think we'll answer with violence?! Unless a certain few people take the controls of major powers I don't see a violent interaction with aliens unless those aliens strike first.

I'm sorry, my bad. I should have looked better at history. Yes, practically every interaction in the history of mankind where explorers ran into local tribes has worked out exceptionally well for those local tribes. Why should I think that meeting a true alien civilization would work out any different? Silly me.

[AeroGav]

Audio communication is the method of choice amongst earth's higher mammals and i suspect that unless we're touched down somewhere truly exotic it will be the case on another world too.     Also if you think about how many languages have evolved on earth, virtually every possible grammar system must have appeared in one of them.    I think the good old method of pointing at objects and saying their name would be a good way to start, bear in mind that astronauts are (highly) selected for intelligence and they are going to have an audience with brightest minds that alien planet has to offer - university boffins, code breakers etc.    Explorers of the New World managed to learn completely unrelated native american languages after all.

 

One obstacle however, is that all of this involved speech between humans.      The human ear is, i believe, very good at discriminating between slightly different frequencies in the part of the audio spectrum in which human speech occurs.   Alien speech could well fall outside this range however.  Audio analysis equipment may be necessary to identify what may to us sound like identical syllables,  which will greatly slow the process down, and may mean that aliens and humans may never be able to speak each other's language well enough to be understood.  Of course, we could just send them an email...

 

 

[RainDreamer]

Assuming they are capable of speaking and listening the same way we do, we would need to have a whole new constructed language that doesn't require arbitrary grammar and spelling rules due to historical development. Something more logical with clear patterns.

[sgt_flyer]

One problem with 'pointing at objects' is if they don't have the corresponding biological / conceptual use for that object than we do. Even with american natives, there were still some common points to serve as a base

 

so, i guess the first thing to do would be to find common denominators and build upon that  

(try explaining the concept of a fork to a being which absorbs nutriments through his skin for example)

 

guess if we don't know if their biology / concepts are close enough to our own, we would need to get down to use something we are almost sure they worked with - like common atoms / molecules.

[micr0wave]

That will be a difficult task, considering we are unable to understand some old writings made by humans.

Heck, even the SETI message couldn't be decyphered by a lot of scientists. That is with a common ground ... planet, species and all that.

So even when the way of communication (sound) is the same with the aliens, i wouldn't have a good idea where to start.

[KerbMav]

14 minutes ago, micr0wave said:

That will be a difficult task, considering we are unable to understand some old writings made by humans.

Heck, even the SETI message couldn't be decyphered by a lot of scientists. That is with a common ground ... planet, species and all that.

So even when the way of communication (sound) is the same with the aliens, i wouldn't have a good idea where to start.

Old writings or a received message are totally different from actually meeting and communicating with another being or person for that matter.

Even without words you are communicating by pointing, showing objects/pictures, demonstrating actions etc. - combined with audible sounds helps a lot in understanding an unknown language. Conveying the meaning of written words comes later is not that complicated once spoken words are understood.

[Melon kerbal]

It would be hard,not just because may not have the same biology as us,but have 11^th century technology so we couldn't explain the lander and such.

[Nikolai]

Anybody here read H. Beam Piper?  I'm reminded of "Omnilingual".  (If you haven't read him, you might want to; he seems to have been extremely influential on a lot of pop science fiction.  And you can get a lot of stuff of his for free from gutenberg.org.)

EDIT: In that story, humans discover the ruins of a long-lost civilization on Mars.  They have access to libraries of information, and have even codified a lot of the written language, but they can't determine what anything means.  They finally stumble on a classroom with a periodic table -- chemistry is chemistry, no matter where it's being done -- and they quickly get words for lots of substances and a healthy pile of numbers, which gets the ball rolling.  Of course, I've seen some intriguing alternatives to Mendeleev's version of the periodic table which seem to make this less than guaranteed -- but it's an intriguing jumping-off point.

Edited December 31, 2015 by Nikolai

[kerbiloid]

How could you explain 2063 technoligies to a earth tribe of 11 century?..

Back to theme: you take chief's sons as host... guests and promise him a help against a neighbour tribe. And that's his problem how to learn you language.

[fredinno]

On 12/7/2015 at 5:33 PM, HoloYolo said:

Jesus Christ why does everyone think we'll answer with violence?! Unless a certain few people take the controls of major powers I don't see a violent interaction with aliens unless those aliens strike first.

Not to mention the first colonists/explorers of the Americas did not use violence unless they needed too- they knew they couldn't survive if they did anyways.

[Beowolf]

8 minutes ago, fredinno said:

Not to mention the first colonists/explorers of the Americas did not use violence unless they needed too- they knew they couldn't survive if they did anyways.

Yes, Columbus and Cortés were great men of peace.

So our early colonists didn't resort to violence unless they thought they could get away with it...which isn't exactly a ringing endorsement, by my standards. There wasn't much opposition left along the US east coast anyway, due to the worst plague in recorded history wiping out 90% to 99% of the population. Definitely a different story from the one Leif Erikson's crew told centuries earlier, when they couldn't even land because of "hails of arrows that darkened the sky" as soon as their ships came into range.