Story of Your Life Notes

  • Weird sounds that humans usually don’t make + doesn’t sound like they’re using a larynx
  • Interacted with the aliens with “looking glasses” since the aliens didn’t want to directly interact with humans; acted as a two way communication device
  • Communicated with it’s limbs (by pointing and making gestures) since they couldn’t understand each other’s language
    • Aliens seem to speak in an unknown language marked by a [flutter] sound; at least we know they speak a form of language but they seem to vary quite a bit and when the main character repeated [flutter 1] none of the aliens showed a reaction
    • But they respond to the recordings on a computer of their language
  • We learn to communicate as a child from hearing other people speak (Sharon was honored pg. 7) or by pointing to things for someone else to tell us what it is
  • These aliens could have some form of handwriting like the english alphabet (graphemes instead of phonemes)
    • Aliens understood what the humans wanted by observing their monitors, body language, and a little bit of their alphabet
    • Alien writing kinda logographic; their alphabet is made by combining and joining logograms with the base word “hetapod” and modifying them (rotating them) since their body has no ‘forward’ aspect to them
    • Form of writing was similar to primitive sign systems; a graphical language 
  • Main form of communication was body language observing and then writing them down in both languages (jumping, walking, speaking, writing, etc… pg. 10)
  • Fermat’s Principle of Least Time; heptapods definition of simple doesn’t match humans which is possibly why it was so hard to decode and learn their language 
  • All of heptapod language is performative; they use language to actualize

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