In the 2016 blockbuster film Arrival, aliens with inscrutable motives descend on Earth—and it is up to a scientist played by Amy Adams to help communicate with them. Were this to occur in real life, ...

If earthlings ever make contact with intelligent space aliens, will we be able to understand them? We use a language of spoken and written words, of course, but aliens might use numbers, shapes, tones ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Boas’s observation had swelled to mythic proportions. In a 1991 essay, British linguist Geoff Pullum called these claims a “hoax,” ...