Dennis E. Taylor
Destroying Worlds Since 2015
It could be a cook book.
How to serve man?
It could be a cook book.
That is not necessarily the case. Given enough source material it is possible to translate a completely unknown script. The prime example is the decipherment of Linear B.Which, I think nicely, underlines @Extollager's opening point; without a key (like the Rosetta Stone) we can't even translate a human language so think how much harder it will be to translate an alien one (assuming a nice convenient alien isn't available to help us along). If all you have is a load of words and nothing to help you associate them with things then translation is almost impossible.
My request is: Can anyone recommend stories that deal plausibly with the real obstacles to understanding an alien language?
Last read any in 1972!
Here's a manuscript some hundreds of years old that has been studied by code-breakers etc. and which seems likely to be meaningful but which no one has been able to translate.
The World’s Most Mysterious Book
It's datable and someone or some people of this planet devised it, but nobody can figure it out.
My point is that science fiction seems to me inclined preposterously to underestimate the difficulty of translating the language of an alien civilization. My request is: Can anyone recommend stories that deal plausibly with the real obstacles to understanding an alien language?
Ho hum!
The solution at last?
Two stories in Analog in recent years dealt with 'decoding ' lost alien languages where the civilisation had died out but parts of their civilisation remained.
Each one dealt with a different but universal concept to help decode the language. The first: maths, the second: the periodic table.
How to serve man?
AI appears to have cracked it. It's in Hebrew. They now need to figure out if it's actually encrypted in some fashion.