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Mystical theories of languages

The search for the origin of language has a long history rooted in mythology. Most mythologies do not credit humans with the invention of language but speak of a divine language predating human language. Mystical languages used to communicate with animals or spirits, such as the language of the birds, are also common, and were of particular interest during the Renaissance.

History contains a number of anecdotes about people who attempted to discover the origin of language by experiment. The first such tale was told by Herodotus. He relates that Pharaoh Psammetichus had two children raised by deaf-mutes in order to see what language they would speak. When the children were brought before him, one of them said something that sounded to the Pharaoh like bekos, the Phrygian word for bread. From this Psammetichus concluded that the first language was Phrygian.

Late 18th to early 19th century European scholarship assumed that the languages of the world reflected various stages in the development from primitive to advanced speech, culminating in the Persian language, seen as the most advanced. Modern linguistics does not begin until the late 18th century, and the Romantic or animist theses of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Christoph Adelung remained influential well into the 19th century. The question of language origins seemed inaccessible to methodical approaches, and in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris famously banned all discussion of the origin of language, deeming it to be an unanswerable problem. An increasingly systematic approach to historical linguistics developed in the course of the 19th century, reaching its culmination in the Neogrammarian school of Karl Brugmann and others. However, scholarly interest in the question of the origin of language has only gradually been rekindled (разжечь вновь) from the 1950s on (and then controversially) with ideas such as Universal grammar, mass comparison and glottochronology.

Primitive Hinduism

The Vedic period is characterized by Indo-Aryan culture associated with the texts of Vedas, sacred to Hindus, which were orally composed in Vedic Sanskrit. The Vedas are some of the oldest texts, next to those of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Vedic period lasted from about 1500 to 500 BCE, laying the foundations of Hinduism and other cultural aspects of early Indian society. The Aryas established Vedic civilization all over north India, particularly in the Gang River Plain. This time succeeded the prehistoric period, during which immigrations of Indo-Aryan-speaking tribes overlaid the existing civilizations of local people whom they called Dasyus. The Dasa are a tribe identified as the enemies of the Aryans in the Rig-Veda. The word Dasa, later acquired derogatory connotations, meaning 'servant', implying that they were subordinated by the Aryans who entered India from outside, displacing its earlier inhabitants. Western scholars identified the Dasa with dark-skinned Dravidian-speaking people.

Aryan society became increasingly agricultural and was socially organized around the four social classes. In addition to the Vedas, the principal texts of Hinduism, the core themes of the Sanskrit epics Ramayana and Mahabharata are said to have the true origins during this period.

The race belonged to the splendid Aryan or Indo-Germanic stock, from which the Bráhman, the Rájput descended. Its earliest home seems to have been in Central Asia. From this common campaign-ground certain branches of the race-started for the east, other for the west. One of the western offshoots founded in the Persian kingdom; another in Athens and became the Greek nation; a third went on to Italy, and reared the city on the seven hills which grew into imperial Rome. A distant colony of the same race excavated the silver-ores of prehistoric Spain; and, when we first catch a sight of ancient England, we see an Aryan settlement fishing in willow canoes, and living in the vicinity of Cornwell. Meanwhile other branches of the Aryan tribes have gone forth from the primitive home in Central Asia to the East. Powerful brands found their way through the passes of the Himálayans into the Punjab, and spread themselves, chiefly as Bráhmans and Rájputs, over India.

The history of ancient Europe is the story of the Aryan settlements around the shores of the Mediterranean; and that wide term, modern civilization, merely means the civilization of the western branches of the same race. The history and development of India consist of the history and development of the eastern offshoots of the Aryan stock who settled in that land. In the west, the Aryan speech has supplied the modern languages of Europe, America, and England’s island empires in the southern Pacific. In the east, Hinduism and Buddhism, the religions of the Indian branch of the Aryans, have become the faiths of more than one-half of the whole human race, and spread Aryan though and culture throughout Asia to the utmost limits of China and Japan.

We know little regarding these noble Aryan tribes in their early camping-ground in central Asia. The forefathers of the Greek, Roman, Englishman and the Hindu, dwelt together in Asia, spoke the same tongue, worshipped the same gods. The languages of Europe an India, although at first sight they seem wide apart, are merely different forms of the original Aryan speech. This is especially true of the common words of family life. The names for father, mother, brother, sister, and widow are the same in most of the Aryan languages, whether spoken on the banks of the Ganges, of the Tiber, or of the Thames. The ancient religions of Europe and India had a similar origin. They were to some extent made up of the sacred stories or myths which our common ancestors had learned while dwelling together in Central Asia. Some of the Vedic gods were also the gods of Greece and Rome; and to this day the Deity is adored by names derived from the same old Aryan root by Bráhmans in Calcutta, by Protestant clergymen at Westminster, and by catholic priests in Peru.

The Rig-Veda forms a great literary memorial of the early Aryan settlements in the Punjab. The age of this venerable hymnal is unknown. The Hindus believe, without evidence, that it existed "from before all time," or at least 3000 years B.C,—nearly 5000 years ago. We only know that the Vedic religion had been at work long before the rise of Buddhism in the 6th century B.C.

Vedic Sanskrit is an Old Indic language. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language. Vedic Sanskrit is the oldest attested language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family.

Vedic Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, texts compiled over the period of early-to-mid 2nd to mid 1st millennium BCE. Vedic Sanskrit has been orally preserved as a part of the Śrauta tradition of Vedic chanting, predating the advent of alphabetic writing in India by several centuries. For lack of both epigraphic evidence and an unboken manuscript tradition, Vedic Sanskrit can be considered a reconstructed language. Especially the oldest stage of the language, Rigvedic Sanskrit, the language of the hymns of the Rigveda, is preserved only in a redacted

Sanskrit (संस्कृतम् saṃskṛtam [sə̃skrt̪əm], originally संस्कृता वाक् saṃskṛtā vāk, (refined speech), is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism and Buddhism.[note 1] Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India[2] and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand.[3]

Classical Sanskrit is the standard register as laid out in the grammar of Pāṇini, around the 4th century BCE. Its position in the cultures of Greater India is akin to that of Latin and Greek in Europe and it has significantly influenced most modern languages of the Indian subcontinent, particularly in India, Pakistan and Nepal.[4]

The pre-Classical form of Sanskrit is known as Vedic Sanskrit, with the language of the Rigveda being the oldest and most archaic stage preserved, its oldest core dating back to as early as 1500 BCE.[5] This qualifies Rigvedic Sanskrit as one of the oldest attestations of any Indo-Iranian language, and one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family, the family which includes English and most European languages.[6]

The corpus of Sanskrit literature encompasses a rich tradition of poetry and drama as well as scientific, technical, philosophical and Hindu religious texts. Sanskrit continues to be widely used as a ceremonial language in Hindu religious rituals in the forms of hymns and mantras. Spoken Sanskrit is still in use in a few traditional institutions in India and there are many attempts at revival.

Message in a radio wave

All of this information will be exciting, yes, but what would really knock our hosiery off is to know what the aliens are saying. That requires additional work beyond detection. To make them more sensitive, the SETI receivers add up the incoming radio waves over fixed period – the time constant – which is typically a second or so. As a result, any variations in the signal that are faster than once per second are smoothed out and lost. A terrestrial TV signal, for example, varies about five million times per second, so if your home set were to have a one-second time constant, you’d find the telly a bore (or perhaps I should say, more of a bore). The screen would be a slowly changing, gray wash of light.

Simply shortening the receivers’ time constant isn’t the trick, however. That just weakens the signal and makes it noisier. What we need is to boost the signal first, so we can still detect it even with a shorter time constant. In practice, that means SETI researchers will have to build far larger telescopes than they have today - perhaps ten thousand times larger. That’s currently a financial impossibility, but if an alien signal is detected I fully expect that the money will be found to construct this super-instrument.

Suppose it happens. Suppose that we have not only tuned in to ET’s broadcast, but we are happily downloading the bits that constitute the message. These bits will be recorded and distributed for analysis. After years of work, either we will succeed in figuring them out, or we won’t. It’s probably realistic to assume that we will comprehend the aliens only if they are broadcasting deliberately, trying to communicate with other worlds. They could be engaged in altruistic efforts either to enlighten their neighbors or simply get in touch with young, technological societies such as our own. In that case they’ll devise a message that can be decoded fairly straightforwardly.

Since it’s overwhelmingly likely that any civilization we detect will be technologically far older than our own, the message would be of great interest. The aliens could allow us to short-circuit thousands of years of research into physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and tunnel our way into a far more sophisticated future. This could be compared to the rediscovery of classical science during the Renaissance, but would be of much greater magnitude. (Mind you, this windfall of knowledge will impose certain burdens. Scientists, for example, will suddenly be confronted with answers to research problems that have consumed their entire careers. These earthly scientists may not be entirely gratified to yield their chance for a Nobel Prize to the aliens!)

Such a sudden discovery of knowledge is possible, and it’s an exciting thought. But it’s also conceivable – and I personally think more probable – that the message will be difficult and perhaps impossible to decode. Imagine if the classical Greeks were given the bits belched out by a modern telecommunications satellite. The Greeks were not dumb, but they wouldn’t get very far in understanding this torrent of information.

The same could well happen to us. Imagine everyone from professional cryptographers to amateurs with a flair for puzzles taking a crack at understanding the hieroglyphics from space. The aliens’ message would become the equivalent of a Mayan Codex or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Centuries of human effort might be expended in an attempt to understand this cosmic riddle beamed our way from a society we can never meet. When the headlines of the initial discovery are only a distant memory, humankind might still be busying itself with the message.

The signal is the message

Such thoughts are quite speculative – and they are also, in some sense, irrelevant. The detection of an alien civilization will certainly be the biggest news story of all time. And it will be a lasting story, both because researchers will continue searching for the message contained within the signal and because it will heighten the hunt for other signals. But to paraphrase Marshall McCluhan, the signal is the message. For a million years, humans have lived on this planet surrounded by a bubble of isolation. We have seen the Universe, like a vast and intricate construction, stretching billions of light-years in all directions. We have not, as yet, found any inhabitants.

But if SETI someday becomes a discovery, rather than an experiment, the bubble will burst, and we will suddenly share the cosmic stage with myriad others. It is hard to imagine a greater metamorphosis.

References

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