“Story of Your Life” Reading Response

To summarize the story, Dr. Louise, a linguist, tried to understand alien’s language and found that the basic mindset of aliens was quite different from human beings. She thus fit herself into the language model of aliens, which featured objectivitism, and got to know the story of her daughter’s life in the future. 

To answer the question that how the aliens’ language and communication style in the story are different from human language, the first thing is that the aliens’ written language is composed of intricate symbols with no apparent linear order or direction, and it must be seen as a whole. This is vastly different from human written language, which typically consists of linear sequences of letters or characters. That makes a person have to first have a knowledge about what the sentence would be like before writing the sentence. 

Additionally, the aliens’ spoken language is not constituted of seperate units such as words and phrases, but rather is a continuous flow of sound that has to be regarded as a whole to be understood, just like aliens’ written language. At the other end of the spectrum, human language is based on discrete units of sound that can be combined to create words and sentences.

Shortly speaking, aliens’ language is non-linear and lacks the concept of time as humans understand it, instead, it reflects that aliens experience all events simultaneously. 

When it comes to the second question that how the physical body of aliens affect their language, the aliens, known as heptapods, have seven limbs and a complex system of fluid-filled sacs on their bodies that they can use to produce circular symbols, having no linear direction. On the other hand, human beings have only two hands. Furthermore, we have a main hand (for most of us is the right hand). Thus, human beings have a linear way of writing. This is one aspect of the impact of physical structure on communication. 

The other aspect is that the aliens only use continuous sounds to communicate, and there wasn’t other things like facial expression possessed by human, so their communication is highly homogenous. This makes communication easier for their objective mindset without free will. This is in contrast to human beings’ communication, which involves people’s free will.