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Comment by speedylight | Hacker News Reader

“How much wood would a woodchuck chuck” -> “Number of numbers”

I’ll concede it’s not an easy sentence to make sense of in another language, let alone 10 and back…It does still make me question how much damage has been caused (in the most general sense) due to meaning being lost in translation between people.

In the movie “Arrival”—which is mainly about establishing communication with an extraterrestrial species that visited earth goes fairly in depth into what I consider very realistic challenges and possible methodologies of teaching the aliens our (English) language, and us learning theirs. They even built a rudimentary translator once they had a solid enough understanding. Would highly recommend watching it if you like this kind of content.

Thank you for sharing OP.

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That was a great short story.

In contrast, I just read Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, author of the Martian, and boy is translation between alien languages nice and trivial in that.

Isn't a big part of Arrival that the aliens don't experience time the same way we do? Or something along those lines. When something that fundamental is different, that has to become a major hurdle in communication.

Whereas the aliens in Project Hail Mary are still fundamentally similar organisms. And you just have to come up with a common baseline to understand each other. Humans have been able to learn to translate between different languages for a long time now. It seemed no different than that to me. Especially when you add in machine assistance.

I would actually be quite curious though. If you put two people in a room, and each one only speaks one distinct language, and their only goal is to communicate with each other. How long before they can effectively communicate? Now it wouldn't be a perfect comparison because there is likely shared body language. It would still be interesting.

Im contractually obligated to mention the novel The Dragons Egg, which followed the interactions between humans and life that evolved on a neutron star. Major time issues in that one. Fun read!

Author?

Robert L. Forward

“Hard” sci-fi, but the neutron star gravity pummels anything hard to goo anyway.

> Isn't a big part of Arrival that the aliens don't experience time the same way we do? Or something along those lines.

Yes, but an important detail in the plot (possibly a spoiler) is that they experience time differently _because_ of the structure of their language, sort of an extreme outcome of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A human learning their language will eventually experience time in the same way. Notably this is the pattern used by most of the stories in the collection that Arrival was derived from (Stories of your life and others). The author takes a phrase, hypothesis, etc and creates a story out of an extreme and concretized outcome from it. All of the stories in the collection are well worth reading IMO.

> If you put two people in a room, and each one only speaks one distinct language, and their only goal is to communicate with each other. How long before they can effectively communicate?

They can (somewhat) effectively communicate right from the start, and third party observers who speak neither language can mostly follow along too. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3qqYyQC9ww

> If you put two people in a room, and each one only speaks one distinct language, and their only goal is to communicate with each other. How long before they can effectively communicate?

I would sign up for that even, maybe. I think the main problem with that idea is that willingness to spend time in such an endeavour is highly positively correlated with knowledge of certain well-spread Indo-European languages. ;)

That would be what's known as "monolingual fieldwork" in linguistic circles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYpWp7g7XWU

as far as I can recall, in the Arrival story ("the story of your life") the aliens eyes are a continous ring that has a 360 degree view.

I also recall that the aliens were impressed by humans standing in 'only' two legs. as their entire biology was radially symmetric.

this is why their perception is so unlike ours.

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