Shelia and I chose to introduce the magnifying glass to heptapods. Considering the huge difference in body structure and linguistic feature, we drew two images in comparison in order to demonstrate the principle of magnifying glass to aliens more intuitively.
To start off, since heptapods have little knowledge of any objects used by us in the human society, it will be useless to introduce more novel concepts in order to illustrate this certain concept, which merely adds on to the explanation workload. Thus, we decided to replicate the figure of themselves according to the description provided by Chiang. In accordance with the reading, heptapods looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs with no distinct joints. It was radially symmetric, which means that any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. On top of that, seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body, and gray skin with corduroy ridges arranged in whorls and loops covered its body.
Armed with these information, we portrayed a heptapod of normal size in the top left corner. After that, we placed a human eye below to illustrate that the above is what we naturally see. On the right side of our image, there is the same eye looking through the magnifying glass, and above is a segment of the significantly enlarged heptapod. Compared with what was demonstrated in the left, the body, eyes and limbs are obviously larger, we can also clearly see the details on its limbs, such as the suction cups aligned when observing from the magnifying glass. By these means, heptapods can comprehend the function of the magnifying glass, which is to amplify details for better examination.
In Chiang’s novel, heptapods communicate with humans through a type of written language, which Louise called logograms. It consists of intricate circular symbols that are arranged in a non-linear way that conveys certain meanings. This implies that their language is non-alphabetical. Each symbol represents an idea or concept, rather than individual words or letters. Hence, a sentence is written by rotating and modifying the logograms for the constituent wors. In this case, the human eye, the pair of arrows, the magnifying glass as well as heptapods in different size all counts as logograms.
On top of that, heptapods can read a word with equal ease no matter how it’s rotated due to their bodies’ radial symmetry. Thus, when explaining how the magnifying glass works to the aliens, I intend to assign the logograms in our image in different directions and surround the heptapods with them, in accordance with their symmetric body structure. To put it briefly, enable heptapods to perceive this new piece of knowledge through their own language system, which I believe will have a more striking effect compared with explaining this human technology verbally.