Before reading this blog, please click on this link to Marble Springs and explore the site for a while.
What do you feel about it? Maybe confused and lost?
The reading of Story of Your Life reminds me of the structure of “hypertext”, which the ideas connected to each other like a web instead of in a linear sense. Marble Springs is a story about a town that doesn’t follow a classic storyline that we usually read(chapters followed by chapters, pargraphs followed by paragraphs, pages followed by pages). Readers of such story may feel confused because we are used to process that goes from the top to the end. When we jump to a context with no orientation or direction, it feels like a new world.
A New Friend
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In the story Story of Your Life, an alien is introduced to the human being on earth. The main character, a mother and also a linguistician, embark on a journey to explore a completely different language system as well as the worldview of human’s.
A Totally Different Language System
The linguistician faced difficulties when tried to decode and learn the aliens’ language. The reason of it was that their spoken and written language followed totally different rules and pattern. While their spoken languge was still constructed in a linear sense, though may differ from human language, their written language were more like a drawing which a character included many elements that represents a whole sentence. And more interestingly, the alteration of curves, orientation and direction of the elements create different meanings for the character.
A Non-Linear Culture
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The feature of their language corresponds to the physical structures of their bodies. Unlike human who has faces(with eyes, mouth, noses) facing towards front, the body structure of the aliens has no so-called “direction”. That is why we tend to think and convey things in a linear process, whereas the culture of the aliens don’t take directions or orientation into account. This may be a kind of experience we as a human can’t never have and relate to, provided that we are used to worldview that there is a consequence before any results, as well as the time squence of what is past, now, and future.