One of my favorite mistakes found in bad science fiction movies, television and books is the ability of computers, or sometimes simply "genius" characters, to take a small sample of some otherwise unknown alien language, and, with sufficient time, come up with an entire alien lexicon. Or even just translate the given sample.

Some may be asking what is wrong with this concept, given enough technology, why shouldn't it be possible. But that question ignores one very simple fact, one that has plagues us throughout history, and that is the fact that linguistic symbols, be they sounds making up words, or written symbols (excluding very basic pictograms) are entirely arbitrary. Even many pictograms, which seem to those who know them as simple illustrations of an idea, are themselves not translatable until we know the meaning. For example, a picture of a man in a chariot. Does it mean "chariot"? "Warrior"? "Ride"? "Yoke"? "Noble"? "King"? "War"? "Fast"? In fact different chariot pictures could possible mean each of these. Or, in some languages, the same picture with various additional symbols. So even pictograms, which seem to bear at least some relationship to what they describe, are themselves arbitrary^1,2.

Worst of all are alphabets. Once we move beyond the most simple pictograms,  we develop symbols for sounds, which, while they may have begun life as pictograms, now bear no relationship to the sounds, and thus are purely arbitrary symbols. And that is why I laugh at these translators in science fiction. Taking a few hundred arbitrary symbols, they somehow manage, without any other data, to translate them. Working with hieroglyphs, prior to the Rosetta stone, and even since, translators had a very hard time connecting them to definite sounds, much less meanings, and that was with the help of languages descended from them, such as Coptic, and with millions of characters of writing to use, in many cases including illustrations which provided some context³. Yet somehow in the future a few scraps of a language without any additional data will be enough to understand it?

The reason I bring this up, besides being able to air a gripe I have harbored for some time, is that it illustrates very well an aspect of "arbitrary" that often escapes the attention of people. I suppose, if we want to be strict about the meaning, letters are not "arbitrary", as the original usage tended to tie a letter's sound to a pictogram which represented a word with a similar sound. However, among all the possible choices, the selection of that particular symbol was still an arbitrary choice. And that is what seems to stump people, "arbitrary" need not mean "totally unrelated" or "without any foundation", it can mean "selected randomly from among a host of possibilities".

I mention this because we seems often to be trapped by arbitrary definitions, arbitrary terminology,   and think that those terms actually contain some inherent meaning, the same way bad writers assume languages somehow contain enough information to provide their own translation.  For example, when "recession" is defined as four quarters of negative growth, we begin to hear people rejoicing that we only had three quarters of negative growth as "it shows we aren't in a recession". What is lost here is the fact that "recession" is simply an arbitrary term adopted by government, and three quarters of negative growth is still a troubling phenomenon.

And that is the problem here, sometimes, just as the fiction writers above imagine a language magically contains clues to its own translation, it seems journalists and politicians imagine the arbitrary terms of academic and government economics contain a significance they do not. Whether or not our circumstances meet the technical definition of a "recession" is less relevant than the specific details of those circumstances. The meeting of arbitrary guidelines is irrelevant.

No, I am not saying that the definition of recession or other economic terminology is entirely meaningless. The definitions are adopted for a reason, and have some significance, but they are still picked arbitrarily and meeting or failing to meet them does not make that much difference.

For example, I recall when the media was watching for two quarters of positive growth to determine whether or not a recession had ended. The funny thing is, that could be entirely meaningless. For example, is it better to have four quarters of 0.1% growth, or one quarter of 20% growth followed by a quarter of -0.1% growth, followed by a repeat of the same? But, by definition, the second is still recession, while the first is not. Which shows how such terms can mislead, by establishing technical definitions without looking at the whole situation.

But, sadly, humans tend to relish precise, technical definitions, and so we often are guided more by these silly arbitrary goalposts more than by a rational assessment of the situation. And so, for better or worse, we will continue to be plagued by newscasters counting quarters of growth and other absurdities.

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1. And there is the other problem, found in Egyptian hieroglyphs and elsewhere, that a symbol beginning as a pictogram may later come to represent a sound as well, or even exclusively, and so what started meaning "hawk" may mean "em" or "no" or some other phonetic or syllabic unit. Or, in the worst case, may do double duty as both a sound and a pictogram for an object, adding to the confusion.

2. Onomatopoeia is also a problem for the same reasons. We assume our languages sounds, such as "ding" and "bark" and "croak" are self-evident, but in truth they are arbitrary constructs, and other languages use completely different sounds, which, while they find them just as self-evident, are entirely alien to us. And thus, even the "obvious" sounds in a language, such as "bang" turn out to be much less obvious than we assume.

3. Even now, after all our discoveries, there is a lot of debate over the pronunciation of Egyptian words. Mostly because our best guides are less than satisfactory, being Greek transliterations and analogies from related languages, as well as a smattering of words from other languages imported into ancient Egyptian. And that makes one aspect of these science fiction films even more amusing. Often, they not only translate the alien tongue, but somehow learn to speak it, figuring out from arbitrary symbols how to make the correct sounds. And that is truly absurd.