allthingslinguistic:toboldlyblahblahblah:troi-in-monochrome:Actually, the fact that any alien race c
allthingslinguistic:toboldlyblahblahblah:troi-in-monochrome:Actually, the fact that any alien race communicates with another is quite remarkable.tHIS WAS THE ONE TIME STAR TREK GOT PSYCHOLOGY RIGHT, actually!!!Humans are biologically programmed that during the acquisition of language if something is pointed at and a word is said, we assume that word is a NOUN. Every human in every culture and every language does this. But there’s nothing to say in an alien language their biology would be the same. That word could just as easily be an adjective or a verb or the objects location in space or a million other things. Good job Star Trek. Just this once, you managed to not piss off every psych student to watch your shows. In linguistics, this is known as the gavagai problem: Quine uses the example of the word “gavagai” uttered by a native speaker of the unknown language Arunta upon seeing a rabbit. A speaker of English could do what seems natural and translate this as “Lo, a rabbit.” But other translations would be compatible with all the evidence he has: “Lo, food”; “Let’s go hunting”; “There will be a storm tonight” (these natives may be superstitious “Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage”; “Lo, an undetached rabbit-part.“ -- source link