The Ling Space's video: What Could Alien Languages Look Like

What basic properties do all human languages have in common? How might languages from other worlds differ? In this week's episode, we take a look at potential alien languages: how we can categorize them differently from how our languages work, how they could potentially make sounds and compose meanings, and how imaginative we may have to be to understand what other species might have to say to us. This is Topic ! This week's tag language: Na'Vi! Last episode: Nosing Around Phonetics: The Acoustics of Sonorant Consonants - https://youtu.be/g8BgfHEDbFY Our previous Halloween videos: Braaaaaaains: The Basics of Neurolinguistics - https://youtu.be/Yq7ozVixqDs Future Tense: Predictions for the Future of Language - https://youtu.be/5hibYoYwGko Our website also has extra content about this week's topic, discussing how complex alien languages might be, at: http://www.thelingspace.com/episode-81/ Find us on all the social media worlds: Tumblr: http://thelingspace.tumblr.com/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheLingSpace Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thelingspace/ And at our website, http://www.thelingspace.com/ ! You can also find our store at the website, https://thelingspace.storenvy.com/ We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally. Sources: On semiochemicals: http://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/the-science-of-music-why-do-songs-in-a-minor-key-sound-sad-760215 http://www.psycho.hes.kyushu-u.ac.jp/~lab_miura/Kansei/Workshop/proceedings/O-205.pdf On the number of languages in the world: http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world. On bee dances: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/B/BeeDances.html On vervet monkey calls: https://midnightmediamusings.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/which-species-has-a-language-most-like-human-language https://books.google.ca/books?id=PQFuCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA5&lpg=PA5&dq=vervet+monkey+calls+productivity On one-word grammars and context: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/jackendoff/papers/simplersyntaxwritten.pdf On posture and alien language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9pFA2XfVEc On metaphor and alien language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3N0dlL2NU8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-wzr74d7TI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANvlLcOTy6M Charles Hockett and language design features: These initially come from Hockett's books, The Origin of Speech (1960) and A Note on Design Features (1968). But for online sources, try: http://pages.uoregon.edu/redford/Courses/LING162/Handout_1.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockett%27s_design_features https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_F._Hockett Chomsky's digital infinity quote: http://philpapers.org/rec/CHOLAC Mark Liberman and his speculation on the limits of alien language: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=28159 A discussion of novel quantifiers & the problems with schmevery: http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hunter/conservativity/journal.pdf https://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~zimmermann/teaching/ALS2009/Session%20III.pdf Looking forward to next week!