Aliens & Language

How the hell could aliens understand a word we are saying



To begin English is widely known as the most difficult language in the world to learn. Even people who speak French and German, which are the two languages which make up most of English, still take years to learn it.

Bare in mind that an alien language might be Latin based where each symbol represents a sound or Arabic based where each symbol represents a word.

Also bare in mind that not all aliens are going to speak the same language as each other either. As we have multiple languages here on Earth so will there be multiple alien languages out there on their planet.

Not only this but we communicate through vocal sounds and written texts. What is to say that aliens would have developed to communicate the same way.

Maybe they communicate in colors, frequencies of light, by radio signals or maybe just sign language.

If they are all deaf and communicate through gesticulation then it wont be until they abduct someone who communicates in sign language until they can understand us.

But if they do communicate through the same means as us, without frequent interaction with the same people, they would only get limited knowledge from each.

If aliens were to tap into our communication network would it make any kind of sense. Bare in mind that most of our communication is sent in compressed image files (JPEGs) and binary encrypted text files (HTMLs).

The compression process of JPEGs makes it damn near impossible to decipher without using a very complex algorithm and that means that aliens probably couldn't see them without using an Earth PC.

As for the HTMLs and pretty any other ascii encoded text file there are many things that could upset their attempts to read them.

1. do they even use binary in the first place and would they be able to figure out that it is indeed a sequence of on and off signal and not some advanced Morse code.

2. now knowing it's a binary signal how would they know that the data goes in packets of eight digits. Even if they got this slightly wrong it would just be garbled and how would they even know if they actually got it right?

3. now getting the groups of digits correctly how do they know that they equate to certain written characters. Would they realize that the first letter begins at number 65 to begin with?

4. having got all the characters printed out how do they know what the message says without being taught English step by step like we are taught as children.

5. now understanding English will their knowledge of our language be similar to a foreigner trying to speak it. If they find certain common phrases hard then there's no way they are gonna be able to explain themselves to us.

6. now understanding us completely do they even care if we know about them when they would rather know about us.