Hard SF : Aliens : Aliens: Eats Shoots and Leaves
To appreciate the difficulties of communicating with any extraterrestrials when we’ve first met them or received signals from them, consider the following.
There’s a story that goes something like this:
A panda enters a restaurant. The waiter takes him to a table and gives him a menu. The panda places his order and after a while the food arrives. After the panda has finished his meal, the waiter comes over to his table again. The panda takes out a gun, points it at the waiter and pulls the trigger. Bang! The waiter falls to the floor. The panda stands up and starts walking towards the exit.
The manager runs over, yelling “Stop! You can’t do that!”
The panda looks at him and says, “Of course, I can. That’s what pandas do.”
“What do you mean ‘That’s what pandas do’?” asks the manager.
“Look it up in the encyclopedia!” the panda snaps as he walks out the door.
The manager gets an encyclopedia and finds the entry for pandas. It says: “Asian mammal that eats shoots and leaves.”
The point of the story is two very different interpretations of “eats shoots and leaves”. But actually, the two versions should be spelled differently (one should include a comma).
“… eats shoots and leaves” would most reasonably be interpreted as meaning there are two things a panda eats: [bamboo] shoots and leaves.
“… eats, shoots and leaves” would most reasonably be interpreted as meaning there are three activities a panda does: (1) eats, (2) shoots, and (3) leaves.
The presence or absence of a punctuation mark may be subtle in writing and may not be apparent at all when spoken. Furthermore, this confusion is possible because in English the word “shoots” can be a noun (a plant’s new growth) or a verb (fire a gun), and “leaves” can be a noun (a plant’s light-gathering parts) or a verb (the act of exiting).
These are issues within the context of both speaker and listener being fluent in English. If one has the other information in the story and understands it, and is familiar enough with the things being discussed, we will understand the story and the play on words. However, if one is not very familiar with plants and doesn’t recognize the term “shoots” as having to do with plants, one might wonder whether the encyclopedia is talking about guns.
If the listener only knows English as a second language, he will have even more difficulty in correctly interpreting the words. The less familiar one is with English, the more sentences he will encounter that are as confusing as “eats shoots and leaves”.
Languages can be full of potential snares like this for somebody just learning the language. In learning another human language, we have a number of common foundations to help us. The languages will refer to the same world. Different parts of Earth may not have exactly the same species of plants and animals, but they will be plants and animals with basic similarities. The language will refer to aspects of our human body that we all share. The language will reflect how humans think of and interact with the environment; at least some of this will be shared either because of our common neurology or our history of passing these down to our children and sharing it with our neighbors. Human languages will tend to share sounds because of our common larynx, tongues and ears. We can’t count on these factors to help us with alien languages.
… And then there was the old TV episode [The Twilight Zone?] in which humans only knew the friendly-acting aliens’ book was titled “How To Serve Man”. It was only later discovered it was a cookbook….