“Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang

NOTES 

• The narrator is the mother (Louise Banks) of whom the book is directed towards
• UFOs with aliens appeared landed on Earth a few years ago before the narration, which marked the start of the “story”
• Colonel Webber calls a meeting to show Louise a recording of the alien sounds to try to interpret their linguistic capabilities 
• Louise’s daughter dies aged 25
  • Louise and her husband visit her at the morgue
• Looking glasses – devices for two way communication with the aliens in orbit – only 9 in the US 
• Louise conducts her first session with the aliens (Heptapods) and attempts to recreate their language but is unsuccessful 
• Louise requests for a large video screen in order to communicate with them through simultaneously using a different medium other than speech: text 
• The alien’s speech seems to be logographic instead of alphabetical, like humans’
• The alien’s writing mushed the subject and verb into one connected piece instead of using two separate pieces of writing 

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

The speech of the Heptapods are unintelligible to humans and the aliens wasn’t able to understand Louise’s recreation of their speech. This is because human ears are trained to voices made from the larynx. Aliens use a logographic writing system, like Chinese, instead of most human languages, which are alphabetical. Additionally, the aliens tend to mush together the verbs and subjects while building sentences, making it difficult to distinguish the individual characteristics of the writing. 

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

Humans use a lot of their body language for communication, like the direction we face while talking, our hand gestures, whether we are maintaining eye contact, etc. However, determining how the Heptapods use their body to communicate is close to impossible because of their anatomy. The aliens have eyes around their body and their limbs are separated into hands or legs.  So the linguists couldn’t even determine the direction that they were facing, left alone characterize type of non-verbal communication.