Xenolinguistics

The research will include the exploration of possibilities & boundaries of human and extraterrestrial communication in 21st century.

Pioneer 10 & 11 Plaque / The Ways to the New Plaque / Current ET Contacts will be the main linguistics topics covered.

We will base our research on the possibilities & limits of Universal Grammar by Noam Chomsky, discoveries of the traditional science then to pass to unconventional / heretical / non-ortodox research areas as xenolinguistics, higher spirituality, parapsychology, mysticsm & current spirituality.

Are language and consciousness co-evolving? Can psychedelic experience cast light on this topic? In the Western world, we stand at the dawn of the psychedelic age with advances in neuroscience; a proliferation of new psychoactive substances, both legal and illegal; the anthropology of ayahuasca use; and new discoveries in ethnobotany. From scientific papers to the individual trip reports on the Vaults of Erowid and the life work of Terence McKenna, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, and Stanislav Grof, we are converging on new knowledge of the mind and how to shift its functioning for therapeutic, spiritual, problem-solving, artistic and/or recreational purposes. In our culture, pychonautics, the practices of individuals and small groups using techniques such as meditation, shamanic ritual, ecstatic dance and substances such as LSD and psilocybin for personal exploration, is a field of action and thought in its infancy. The use of psychonautic practice as a site of research and a method of knowledge production is central to this work, the first in-depth book focusing on psychedelics, consciousness, and language.

Xenolinguistics documents the author's eleven-year adventure of psychonautic exploration and scholarly research; her original intent was to understand a symbolic language system, Glide, she acquired in an altered state of consciousness. What began as a deeply personal search, led to the discovery of others, dubbed xenolinguists, with their own unique linguistic objects and ideas about language from the psychedelic sphere. The search expanded, sifting through fields of knowledge such as anthropology and neurophenomenology to build maps and models to contextualize these experiences. The book presents a collection of these linguistic artifacts, from glossolalia to alien scripts, washed ashore like messages in bottles, signals from Psyche and the alien Others who populate her hyperdimensional landscapes.

With an entire chapter dedicated to Terence and Dennis McKenna and sections dedicated to numerous other xenolinguists, this book will appeal to those interested in language/linguistics and the benefits of psychedelic self-exploration, and to readers of science fiction.

"‘Asemic writing’ is defined by Tim Gaze as a collection of forms ‘which appears to be writing’, while ‘having no worded meaning’. Asemic forms may bear the hallmarks of writing, either through their shape or organization, but have no specific verbal signification. These signs are typically abstract, geometric glyphs, arranged in linear sequence so as to invite the act of reading, but that do not allow verbal interpretation. The relationship between literacy and asemic signs has been established historically, and many past examples of asemic writing (sometimes described as ‘pseudo-writing’) can be found in historical artefacts which convey a sense of status, power and exclusivity through asemic decoration.

Asemic language appears within images in Shaun Tan’s wordless picturebook, The Arrival (2006).  Tan uses this pseudo-writing to represent a generic foreign language, with the aim of showing a sense of alienation. These images demonstrate that language, when it is not understood, can be isolating. In other examples, asemic writing is used to convey a sense of otherness. Dylan Horricks (2014) uses shading within speech balloons to describe ‘words [that] were not understood by us’. Here, the use of a speech balloon signifies verbal communication, though no verbal meaning is present.

Numerous texts contain decipherable alien languages, painstakingly developed by linguists (such as Christine Schreyer’s Kryptonian). Such sign systems can be directly transliterated, offering the readers the challenge of deciphering messages. However, other comics, ranging from Peanuts to the X-Men, embrace asemisis. These present alien or animal languages that are never intended to contain decipherable messages, and instead convey a sense of otherness through the impossibility of understanding.

This paper will explore the motivations for featuring asemic signs in comics and graphic novels, focusing in particular on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, and The X-Men, seeking to consider how meaning is achieved through meaninglessness in indecipherable symbols.
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The article explores the depictions of communication with extraterrestrial life-forms from the point of view of cognitive linguistics and the philosophy of embodied realism. Optimism in visions of Contact, i.e. the degree to which communication is presented as possible and relatively easy, often results from ignoring the embodied nature of the human mind and language. Two novels analyzed in this article, Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (2003 [1961]) and Peter Watts’s Blindsight (2006), paint a more pessimistic picture of interstellar communication. To a large extent, this pessimism results from greater awareness of the problems related to embodiment of the mind and language.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) typically presupposes contact with extraterrestrial civilizations much longer lived than humanity. Many have argued that given humanity’s ‘‘youth,’’ the burden of transmitting should be placed on the extraterrestrial civilizations, which presumably possess more advanced technologies. These assumptions have contributed to the current emphasis on Passive SETI. Complementing this existing stress on Passive SETI with an additional commitment to Active SETI, in which humankind transmits messages to other civilizations, would have several advantages, including (1) addressing the reality that regardless of whether older civilizations should be transmitting, they may not be transmitting; (2) placing the burden of decoding and interpreting messages on advanced extraterrestrials, which may facilitate mutual comprehension; and (3) signaling a move toward an intergenerational model of science with a long-term vision for benefiting other civilizations as well as future generations of humans. Technological requirements for Active SETI are considered, and a case is made for Active SETI as a means for experimentally testing variants of the Zoo Hypothesis. Recommendations are provided for sustaining Passive and Active SETI and the communities that conduct these searches.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok," a humanoid alien race provides a challenge to the Universal Translator - they only communicate in metaphors. A cognitive semantic approach is used to discuss the question of whether that language is as strange as it seems, comparing the metaphoricity of Darmok with eponimization and lexicalization. The real oddity of the language is proposed to lie in an innate Theory of Mind impairment in the alien race.

Most of humans live their lives without investigating on the unobserved side of nature. From the conservative point of view, this could be a safe way to sail in the curved path of time without observing the gates between the two sides. One of the simple lessons, without crossing any gate, is on the methods that were used by the ancient Egyptian scholars “the friends of the Scarab of La#-Major  ” to communicate with their guards. This short article is only the prelude to the philosophy and mathematics of creating the so-called the “Chapters of Talks” with the immortal ethereal beings. Using the language of the day, I put the key ideas here in a new form without mentioning the old references because in this ancient science, they said it is the task of the target reader, who might know how to find the door of the magic square.

As scholars involved with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) have contemplated how we might portray humankind in any messages sent to civilizations beyond Earth, one of the challenges they face is adequately representing the diversity of human cultures. For example, in a 2003 workshop in Paris sponsored by the SETI Institute, the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) SETI Permanent Study Group, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology (ISAST), and the John Templeton Foundation, a varied group of artists, scientists, and scholars from the humanities considered how to encode notions of altruism in interstellar messages http://publish.seti.org/art_science/2003. Though the group represented 10 countries, most were from Europe and North America, leading to the group's recommendation that subsequent discussions on the topic should include more globally representative perspectives. As a result, the IAA Study Group on Interstellar Message Construction and the SETI Institute sponsored a follow-up workshop in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA in February 2005. The Santa Fe workshop brought together scholars from a range of disciplines including anthropology, archaeology, chemistry, communication science, philosophy, and psychology. Participants included scholars familiar with interstellar message design as well as specialists in cross-cultural research who had participated in the Symposium on Altruism in Cross-cultural Perspective, held just prior to the workshop during the annual conference of the Society for Cross-cultural Research www.seti.org/altruism. The workshop included discussion of how cultural understandings of altruism can complement and critique the more biologically based models of altruism proposed for interstellar messages at the 2003 Paris workshop. This paper, written by the chair of both the Paris and Santa Fe workshops, will explore the challenges of communicating concepts of altruism that draw on both biological and cultural models.

The newest results in the chromatographic analysis of xenobiotics present in biological and environmental matrices are compiled and the results are critically evaluated. Examples for the employment of preconcentration and pre purification technologies, gas chromatography using electron capture detection (ECD), nitrogen phosphor detector (NPD), various mass spectrometric detection methods (MS, MS/MS, etc), liquid chromatographic methodologies such as thin-layer chromatography (TLC), high performance liquid chromatographic methods (HPLC), as well as electrically driven systems, are presented. The advantages and disadvantages of the various chromatographic technologies are shortly discussed and the efficacies of the methodologies are compared. Xenobiotics included in the review are volatile organic compounds (VOC), hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon-based pollutants, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), polychlorinated bisphenols (PCB), other polyhalogenated compounds, pesticides, etc. The application of various chromatographic methods for the determination of xenobiotics in a wide variety of biological and environmental matrices is discussed in detail.

Some characteristics of terrestrial music may be meaningful to extraterrestrial civilizations by virtue of the connection between acoustics and mathematics—both of which might be known by technologically advanced extraterrestrial intelligence. For example, a fundamental characteristic of terrestrial polyphonic music is found the number of tones used various scales, insofar as the number of tones represents a compromise between competing musical demands; the number of tones in a scale, however, also reflects some of the perceptual characteristics of the species developing that music. Thus, in the process of communicating something about the structure of terrestrial music through interstellar messages, additional information about human perceptual and cognitive processes can also be conveyed. This paper also discusses methods for sending signals that bear information through the form of the very frequencies in which the signals are transmitted. If the challenges of creating intelligible messages are greater than often thought, the advantage of reduced conventionality of encoding the message by using an iconic format of this sort may be of significant value. Such an approach would allow the incremental introduction of musical concepts, somewhat akin to the step-by-step tutorials in mathematics and logic that form the basis of Freudenthal’s Lincos.

Empiezo este ensayo con las debidas precauciones que se deban tomar, no por la cuestión de herir sensibilidades sino de abordar con las debidas aproximaciones un tema que es bastante complejo, pues la sociedad mexicana representa bien la tragicomedia de reírse de su propia historia. Decía un autor, México es un país con prácticas discriminatorias que no lo sabe. La discriminación en el país parte desde su estructura más profunda, puede venir en diferentes expresiones, medidas, acciones, pero siempre con el mismo modo. Tanto que estas prácticas parecen comunes en el desarrollo de la vida cotidiana con el fin de preservar el status quo de forma consiente como inconscientemente. ¿Cómo se vive la discriminación en México?, una pregunta que para su respuesta necesita indagar el pasado histórico, los prejuicios sociales, las dinámicas convencionales, el predominio de los estándares occidentales en la cultura, entre otros más, para darnos una idea de lo que podría ser el ¿por qué de este fenómeno? Me es imperante recalcar un hecho, ¿es necesario cambiar la dinámica de la discriminación? Si parece un problema que podría ser vano o no tener implicaciones, sin embargo, los resultados son peores. Tal caso lo supuso el hiper-positivismo con las teorías del Darwinismo Social y lo que representa, el peligro de la discriminación fundamentada desde el ámbito científico para legitimar un prejuicio.
Ramírez Polo Elías Salvador
Elías Salvador Ramírez Polo

The subject of this paper is an analysis of ethnic xenodiscourse in the current Slovak linguistic-cultural environment. The paper focuses on xenodiscourse about the Hungarians, Roma and Hungarian-Roma in Slovakia. On the basis of this analysis of Slovaks’ xenodiscourse, the paper describes and interpretes the standardized discoursive strategies in the general discourse about selected minorities.