Language that cannot be divided into words?
For the purposes of this post, "word" is defined as a unit of language such that
- Has some meaning on its own, often relating to the real world.
- Complex utterances can be formed simply by transmitting multiple words.
- There are few enough words for a speaker of the language to know most of them (i.e. less than about a million for humans).
All reasonably bandwidth-efficient, general-purpose forms of communication, real or imagined, seem to have words in this general sense.
- Human spoken and written languages, including unique ones like Pirahã.
- Human sign languages usually have distinct signs that are basically words.
- As far as I know, all constructed languages like Esperanto, Lojban, Ithkuil, Toki Pona, etc.
- Fictional languages like Klingon, Quenya, Dothraki.
- Even the circular language from Arrival has words in the general sense (sentences can be split up into symbols with individual meanings).
- In Max Harms' Crystal Society, there are AI and alien characters that think differently from humans. However, the AIs communicate through concept-representations that are basically words, and the aliens' language uses ~1000 symbols that can be translated into words.
- Programming languages have variables, keywords, commands, etc., the last two of which have intrinsic meanings. When we create a language made entirely of syntax and variables, it is always by assigning meaning to certain concepts e.g.
λfx.xfor the number 0.
However, if we relax the requirement that the form of communication is efficient and general-purpose, I can think of several examples of wordless "languages" whose sentences cannot be easily split up into symbols of any kind.
- Photos and videos are a general-purpose form of communication, but even compressed photos and videos have huge bandwidth requirements, and are thus inefficient.
- Bees have dance communication where the direction, distance and quality of food are communicated simultaneously, not serially. But this is not general-purpose communication.
- Human body language for indicating emotions. But as far as I know, human body language used for general-purpose communication basically becomes sign language.
Question
The idea is to create a version of the "starfish" alien language trope in an advanced alien civilization where the language is actually plausible. Most existing examples just have an exotic medium (body language, music, telepathy), or just handwave the unintelligibility. A strange inherent structure for a well-developed language would be far more interesting, and open up narrative possibilities like a Universal Translator being unable to translate anything an alien says until they are finished talking. So, how would a language whose thoughts cannot be broken down into words work, and how would it feel to be an alien communicating in this manner? If you think it's impossible, why?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/173300. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Yes... and no.
Since no one else has done so yet, I'll point out the elephant in the room... You are writing for a human audience. Humans think in words. Therefore, no matter what ideas anyone comes up with, at some point you are going to have to translate your alien's language into words anyway. The alternative is for them to be utterly incomprehensible even to the reader, in which case the reason doesn't matter, just whether you can sell that to the reader.
That said... combining some of the other ideas here, I think it's plausible, and one of the keys is that your aliens don't know how to translate their communication into neat little pieces (even if you, as the Author, can). For that, I'll point you again at treecats, which were exactly like this before they met humans, so there is solid precedent for a species that can't 'wrap their heads around' word-based language.
There are already several ideas here for how they would communicate that you, as the Author, can use to explain to your readers what's going on. The easiest and probably best is that they are telepaths, and rather than exchanging "language", they exchange something more like a gestalt that incorporates whatever feelings, knowledge or desires they want to include in it. For example, while I might say to you "may I have a glass of water", such an alien might send a gestalt that expresses that they are thirsty, when they last had anything to drink, their memory of how water tastes, their imagined image of another alien handing them a glass of water, their imagination of how grateful this will make them feel, and so on. You could even extend this to such gestalt including, or taking the form of, some event from cultural tradition, Darmok-style. All of this could happen in a fraction of a second. (BTW, AI's might communicate this way...)
I'm also less confident that such a species couldn't develop technology. If one such alien can figure out some technological concept (say, how to smelt iron), they can certainly convey that knowledge to another alien. In fact, I could imagine a huge teaching advantage here, since you are directly sharing knowledge rather than having to encode it into words and hope that the listener can decode it correctly. (On the other hand, this might lessen the likelihood of accidental discoveries, so...)
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