“Story of Your Life” is a sci-fi novella published in 1998 by author Ted Chiang. Exploring our understanding of language and communication, and how they shape our lives, it follows the story of linguist Louise Banks in her effort to communicate with newly-arrived aliens. 

 

How do the aliens’ language and communication styles in the story differ from human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?

Humans

• Oral: humans produce speech with our larynx, however we have a  great variety of languages and dialects, which themselves bear different sentence structures, sounds, grammar, etc. 
• Written/visual: again, we have varying languages that can be alphabetic or non-alphabetic (ex. Chinese, which is logographic).
• Visual: we have ASL, which is neither spoken or written

Heptapods:

• Oral: aka “Heptapod A.” Features nouns with case markers that indicate whether they’re a subject or object.
• Written: aka “Heptapod B.” Appeared at first to be logographic, later better described as semasiographic. Very intriguing as what they produce looks more like mandalas/graphic designs than sentences. Chiang writes, “their script isn’t word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them” (11).  A noun identifies as a subject or object based on the orientation of its logogram relative to the verb. Has no written punctuation.
• A powerful quote to me was “for the heptagons, writing and speech may play such different cultural or cognitive roles that using separate languages makes much more sense than using different forms of the same one” (Chiang, 14), when Louise was asked why they bother to use 2 different languages.

Both:When Louise noticed the reuse of specific sounds, she thought it could mean “the heptapod was confirming my utterances as correct, which implied comptaibility between heptapod and human patterns of discourse” (Chiang, 6). 

Heptapod B was stated as reminiscent of “primitive sign systems” (Chiang, 12), and similar to math equations, notations for music and dance

 

 

How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?

Humans are able to speak by way of our larynx–colloquially called our voice box–which contains our vocal cords. When we speak, we allow air in past our vocal cords, which vibrate and create sound waves. We are further assisted in enunciating by our mouth anatomy, particularly our teeth and tongue. 

It was apparent to Louise, upon first listening to a recording of the aliens , that the aliens feature a vocal tract “substantially different from a human vocal tract” (Chiang, 2). She surmised that they do not possess a larynx. Interestingly though, this did not do much to inform her of what the aliens might look like. Upon getting to see them, she notes that they have an orifice seemingly used for both respiration and speech, which would “vibrate” and produce a “fluttering sound” (Chiang, 6). 

Communication isn’t communication without the ability to receive, interpret, and respond to information we are given, whether it be auditory, visual, or written. The challenge Louise pointed out is that not only does the anatomy that involves speaking vary between us and the aliens, so does our hearing. She comments that establishing communication would be difficult because the sounds the aliens make might be “sounds that the human ear can’t distinguish…it’s possible our ears simply can’t recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful” (Chiang, 3). 

What I also pulled from the story is the following quote, which is Louise’s interpretation of why their written script looks the way it does, and how it can in fact be influenced by the alien’s physical structure: “I wonder if it’s a consequence of their bodies’ radial symmetry…their bodies have no ‘forward’ direction, so maybe their writing doesn’t either” (Chiang, 11). This is interesting as she’s able to envision how this characteristic of their appearance might affect how their written language develops as well.

 

 

Works Cited

Chiang, Ted. Story of Your Life.  Tor Books, 1998.