Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang Notes

  • Aliens vocal tract is different from human vocal tracts, doesn’t sound like they are using a larynx to produce sound
  • Humans most likely cannot reproduce the same sound/ human ear cannot distinguish
  • To learn an unknown language, you have to interact with native speaker 
  • Fluttering sounds, “puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate”, how they talk/ communicate
  • Communicated by pointing/ gestures to understand each other since they couldn’t understand each other’s languages
  • Aliens had a language of their own but it seemed very complex 
  • Repeated Flutter 1 but no response
  • First impression of heptapod’s written language: logographic
  • “Their script isn’t word-divided”(11) humans read left to right, the heptapod’s don’t, “they join the logograms by rotating/ notifying them.” (also may connect to the way they are physically built. the aliens can read the word no matter how its rotated which might be due to their bodies’ racial symmetry.
  • Form of writing was similar to primitive sign systems 
  • Heptapods’ formation of physics is similar to humans but not easily understood 
  • Learning Heptapod B had changed the way the narrator viewed her life/ memories
  • Heptapod’s follow Fermat’s Law “light travels between two points along the path that requires the least time, as compared to the nearby paths”
  • Louise’s memory with her daughter is written in future tense, might be related to how she is studying the language of Heptapods.

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