First Contact Protocol Updated After Aliens Rate Humanity's Grammar a 2 Out of 10

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs has overhauled its first contact communication protocols after an alien civilization's unsolicited linguistic assessment rated humanity's collective grammar at 2 out of 10, with French receiving the highest individual score at 4. The assessment arrived via modulated gamma-ray burst from the direction of the Bootes Void — a region of space previously thought to be empty — and consisted of a detailed critique of every human language the aliens had apparently been monitoring. 'English received the lowest score,' said Dr. Marie Leclerc, the UN's chief xenolinguistic advisor. 'The assessment described it as a language that mugged three other languages in an alley and rifled through their pockets for vocabulary. They gave it a 1.' Mandarin received a 3, praised for its tonal structure but criticized for what the aliens called 'an over-reliance on contextual disambiguation that would cause navigational errors in any serious interstellar communication.' Arabic scored a 3.5, commended for its root-pattern morphology. Japanese received a 2.5, with the aliens noting that 'maintaining four separate writing systems suggests a civilization that cannot commit to decisions.' French alone received a 4, with the assessment describing it as 'the least offensive of your attempts at structured communication,' a verdict that has prompted the French government to issue a statement of 'dignified satisfaction.' The aliens' own language, samples of which were included in the transmission, operates on 47 simultaneous frequency bands and encodes meaning through temporal phase relationships between phonemes. Human linguists who attempted to analyze it have described the experience as 'like trying to read a symphony.' The UN's revised protocol now requires all first-contact messages to be reviewed by a panel of grammarians. France has volunteered to lead the committee.