This is a guest post submitted by Nathan Sanders and colleagues. It's the text of an open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson, who made a comment about linguists on Twitter not long ago. Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, As fellow scientists, we linguists appreciate the work you do as a spokesperson for sc
A recent guest post on Language Log is an open letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson about the role of linguists versus cryptographers in Arrival:
As fellow scientists, we linguists appreciate the work you do as a spokesperson for science. However, your recent tweet about the film Arrival perpetuates a common misunderstanding about what linguistics is and what linguists do:
In the @ArrivalMovie I'd chose a Cryptographer & Astrobiologist to talk to the aliens, not a Linguist & Theoretical Physicist
Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson), 1:40 PM – 26 Feb 2017
Though the term linguist is often used by the public to refer generally to anyone whose occupation is related to language (especially translators and interpreters), the type depicted in Arrival is a special kind of linguist who engages in the scientific study of human language: its structures, its uses, its underlying similarities, and its surprising diversity. A cryptographer simply cannot replicate the specialized training that a linguist like Louise Banks has, which takes years to learn and decades to master.
Most importantly, a cryptanalyst would likely be much less suited to the task of communicating with aliens than a linguist would (a cryptographer even less so, since they work on encryption, not decryption). Cryptanalysis relies on decrypting coded messages from a known language. If the source language and the encryption method are both unknown, ordinary cryptanalytic methods will fail. This is why the Native American code talkers of the 20th century were so invaluable to the US in both world wars: their languages were not understood by enemy cryptanalysts, so their encrypted versions could not be cracked, unlike with well-known languages like English.
Read the full open letter or see also many previous posts about the linguistics of Arrival.