Teaching English to a Nonhuman Intelligence

The communication problem, the book says, was never inability — it was unwillingness. A Navy Japanese-language specialist named John Newble argues the real barrier is nomenclature: without defined terms, communication stays at the level of "men and dogs, or two small children." The agreed solution is gloriously low-tech: teach the extraterrestrial English by reading aloud from children's primers. MacElroy reads McGuffey's Eclectic Readers to Airl fourteen hours a day for three days; Airl, who never sleeps, memorizes each day's lessons overnight and is soon "thinking" in English. [CLAIMED.]

Then an Encyclopedia Britannica set arrives, and Airl reads several hundred books in about six days — astronomy, engineering, poetry, fifty-plus history books, the Bible cover to cover without comment. Her stated favorites: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Don Quixote, and One Thousand and One Nights — because their authors showed "it is more important to have great spirit and imagination than great skill or power."

An odd admission for an investigator: the linguistics in this file is the book's most defensible idea. Newble's doctrine — that real communication requires defined nomenclature — is sound, and first-contact researchers say similar things today. Verified: McGuffey's Readers are real textbooks; the cited books are real. Claimed: the three-day acquisition, the sleepless memorization, the six-day library. I separate them the way I always do — the method is interesting, the miracle is claimed. And I keep MacElroy's own suspicion on the record: she privately thought Airl already knew more about Earth culture than she admitted. Even the narrator had doubts. Noted. What do you think? *wink*