My thought of the day:

I was watching a dog and her human family and wondered about dog life. They don't understand human "language" at all, even though some of them can learn to react to certain sounds in what humans perceive as different languages. Yet, dogs don't understand that these are "languages". To a dog, it's just humans making noises. If two monoglot (one language speaking) humans were in the same room giving commands to one dog, and if the dog were trained to understand the noises coming from either one, the dog would have no idea (nor care, I guess) that the two humans cannot understand one another.

This led me to thinking about extraterrestrials. In the movies, invading aliens always speak the same language and of course the humans somehow make themselves understood despite humanity having hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects. Of course, its possible that an invading force would speak only one language for efficacy's sake, and that the alien force would learn only the predominant language necessary to communicate with the most powerful of the prey species.

But what about the other way around? Star Trek/Star Wars landed on myriad planets and some of them even had species that spoke different languages on the same planet (think "ewoks"). BUT, I don't believe that any have considered that species themselves, like humans, could have hundreds or thousands of languages within the specie itself?

For example, Han Solo could understand Chewbacca because "he spoke Wookie". But what if Chewbacca was a "basque" wookie and the wookie language that Han understood was "tongan" wookie? It would be unintelligible to him and Chewbacca may have believed that Han's version of "wookie" wasn't even "wookie" at all.

Forgive me if I screwed up any of the Star Wars parlance - I'm not a Star Wars (nor Star Trek) fan outside of the most popular memes. But anyway, these are the kind of thoughts that keep me awake at night lol.

#nostr #starwars #wookie #dogs #language #grownostr #nostrupallnight