What If: Language Edition

Hey all, we all love a good "what if" questions in this sub, so I thought of a few of them that I'd like to get opinions on. These aren't really related to a specific world I'm working on, but they seem like they might be interesting to consider in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. If you see a (G) or (H) next to a question, I got the idea from a conversation I had with another redditor, either /u/finchambambil (G) or /u/hex Russell (H).<br><br>- **What if humans are innately so bad at languages, that when we make contact with alien species, we end up being by far the best polyglots in the galaxy?** <br><br>- **What if the reason we haven't found any signs of alien languages via radio waves or other signals is that we're so bad at language that we can't even recognize a message as a language?**<br><br>- **What if there exists a language that can be both spoken and signed, with no translation possible, and the spoken and signed versions are mutually unintelligible?**<br><br>- **What if we learned a fixed-size set of concepts (say 100) by the age of 5, and at that age we lost the ability to learn new concepts, with language being a way of combining those concepts?** (G)<br><br>- **What if the reason the name of God is so hard to pronounce for mortals is that humans, in their folly, decided to make up new letters and parts of language when we hadn't actually created them?**<br><br>- **What if there's a set of words that can be used to by speakers of any language to communicate complex ideas, but only in very specific contexts (e.g. "gifted" can describe a student when a teacher is talking to a parent, but "gifted" can't describe a birthday present in that context)?**<br><br>- **What if we humans are actually very good at languages, it's just we are bad at recognizing the full set of sounds available to any given species? So a species with a lot of clicks is easier to pronounce for us if we can actually hear those sounds, as we can learn to pronounce it, but we can't hear the sound?** (H)<br><br>- **What if one of our languages is actually telepathy masquerading as our ability to form a shared understanding of sounds?**<br><br>- **What if every possible language exists, and when we try to create a constructed language we're actually tapping into the collective consciousness of that language, built up by speakers of other languages when they mispronounce words and construct sentences in ways that aren't "allowed" by their native tongue?**<br><br>- **What if every human on the planet actually speaks the same language, and the differences between people are not related to the words and grammar, but actually how each person represents those sounds in their mind - and if we could figure out how to represent those sounds in a way that everyone can understand, world peace would immediately be achieved?** (H)<br><br>- **What if the average person actually can learn and be fluent in a second language, but they just need to do it in 5-minute blocks as a child, spread over 20 years, with their native language in between, and this is the only way for humans to be able to function with a second language?**<br><br>- **What if the reason children are better at learning languages than adults is that adults actually have a fixed-size set of "language slots" in their brain - once a slot is used, it can't change its language, and a child has more slots open, but also can't really function with more than one or maybe two languages?** (G)<br><br>- **What if there exists a language where once a word is used, it is never used again, and new words are added as needed? But it's still somehow a language with rules like all other languages?** (G)<br><br>- **What if there exists a language that is 100% context-dependent, and given a word and its position in a sentence, it could have any possible meaning? But somehow it's still a language with rules and speakers can understand each other?**<br><br>- **What if all the ancient dead languages that we think are 100% dead (like Sumeria, Latin, ancient Egyptian, etc.) are actually still spoken today, just only in very specific places and contexts, and so we haven't found speakers of them in the modern day?**<br><br>- **What if we created a machine that translates one language to another perfectly, and then we didn't actually use it because the potential for abuse was too high?**<br><br>- **What if there exists a language that has both speakers and listeners, and when someone listens to the language they actually hear a different language from what the speaker is saying? But both the speaker and listener somehow manage to get their point across?** (H)<br><br>- **What if the entire world actually speaks the same language, but just with minor dialects, and we can't see this because our brains are wired to recognize differences and ignore similarities? So we actually should be able to speak to anyone in the world and they'll understand us, but we just can't see it?**