- How do the aliens’ language and communication styles in the story differ from human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?
The alien language is akin more so to our symobols. Just like how we have caution signs that tell a word without corresponding to actual words or spoken language, thats how the aliens spoke. They called it glottographic because it represents speech. Every human written language is in this category. However, the symbols we use is semasiographic’ writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds. The aliens way of writing was not picture writing, it was something far more complex. It had its own system of rules for constructing sentences, like a visual syntax that’s unrelated to the syntax for the aliens spoken language. It was almost like a visual syntax. This written language also was not connected to how they spoke, it was almost like two different languages for whatever purpose they had.
- How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?
The way our body is laid out determines how we read and see words to an extend. Our body’s physical structure profoundly shapes the way we communicate. It affects our ability to speak and produce sounds, convey emotions through facial expressions, use gestures and body language, establish eye contact, hear and interpret words, maintain personal space, and convey emotions through touch. From the way we talk to the expressions on our face, the posture we adopt, and even the distances we maintain during interactions, our bodies serve as a fundamental channel for human communication, influencing how we understand and connect with others. For aliens it seemed to defer. Their script wasn’t word-divided like ours; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. They would read a word easily no matter how it was rotated. Almost like if we could read a sentence with all the words scrambled and upside down. This was a consequence of their bodies’ radial symmetry: their bodies have no ‘forward’ direction, so their writing doesn’t either