#Blog 1: A Story of Your Life
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How do aliens in the story language and communication style different from the human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?
First of all, aliens (Heptapods) have 2 very different language systems for oral and written use, which is different from human language.
Oral Language — “Language: Heptapod A”:
The sound of the aliens is described as “a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur”, which is hard to distinguish for humans and indicated that these aliens must look different to humans in order to make the noise. And they cannot understand our mimics of the sound, so that may mean that to them they don’t “hear” as humans do. It may be a wat just like the whales or other animals that recognize vibration use. But their oral language is similar to human’s in a way that it’s composed by fractions of “words”.
Written Language — “Language: Heptapod B”
Their writing is called as semagram. 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. The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, they would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration. Depending on a semagram’s declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke’s curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means. While our language relies heavily on the pronunciation/phonetics that human years can hear.
It is defined by the author as semasiographic’ writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds. In their spoken language, a noun has a case marker indicating whether it’s a subject or object. In their written language, however, a noun is identified as subject or object based on the orientation of its logogram relative to that of the verb. Their writing constitutes a completely separate language from their speech.
Whereas in human language, our written language is in line with our oral language, that is a linear way of presenting a sentence. Our language has a tendency of going forward, however, the aliens’ is still, presenting the whole meaning all at one instant. And they have the ability because they can foresee the future, or they see the past, present and future as the same thing.
The aliens’ semagram reminded me of the process I go through when doing the sound visualization project. When I’m listening to the music, I took notes like these. It’s clearly linear. However, when I try to express it in the form of visual art, the linear documentary is compressed into a flat “semagram” that gives the viewer the whole meaning I want to convey.
Music Related: Take the ‘A’ Train
Other ways of communication:
Humans have facial expressions and body gestures to help us convey our message, for example, as the author described in the book, we shook hands, frown, roll eyes or use “carefully casual tone reserved for requesting a favor”. however, in the story, the author didn’t introduce a lot about aliens’ communication style outside of oral and written language.
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How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?
Humans have 4 limbs, in which 2 can mostly support our motion, and the other two can additionally support our communication with gestures. We have a clear “front” and “back” with our eyes pointing “forward” which helps people recognize which way we are moving. Our facial muscle is also of great use as mentioned above to help us convey emotions. And our vocal folds support our oral language to convey message in a linear, phonetics-oriented way.
The aliens, as described in the book, “looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg.” They walk around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at their sides. Its limbs had no distinct joints. Whatever their underlying structure, the heptapod’s limbs conspired to move it in a disconcertingly fluid manner. Its “torso” rode atop the rippling limbs as smoothly as a hovercraft. Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod’s body. And because their bodies don’t have a clear “front” and “back”, we don’t know the direction fo its motion. And the author didn’t introduce if they can express emotion through facial expression or anything.
However, they are similar to humans in a way that they indicate which subject they are talking about by pointing to the subject with their limbs, with the four terminal digits pressed together.
They make the brief fluttering sound with puckered orifice at the top of its body. And their limbs can be inserted into the large socket in the pedestal and show doodles of script.
Sep 29, Pusan, Younian Liu