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Why alien languages could be far stranger than we imagine Essays
Imagining how aliens might communicate prepares us for first contact and illuminates the nature of our own languages
If you were feeling particularly imaginative, this language could include signs from a completely new modality of articulation, like movements of the body (think bee dances) or electrical impulses, which was presumably used by the robots in the Hollywood movie AI Artificial Intelligence(2001) who communicated by touching each other. In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus(1921), Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed a ‘logically perfect’ language whose elementary sentences contain only simple signs, analogous to names like Xi Jinping, Colosseum or Bogota that refer to individuals, objects and places. English speakers would struggle to find a direct translation for the German Fernweh – a melancholic ache to be in faraway places – just as I feel at a loss in my native language of Hindi when seeking a word for serendipity.
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