Reading Responses: Story of Your Life
Questions:
- How do aliens in the story’s language and communication style different from the human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?
- How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?
Before discussing this first question, it’s important to first consider the difference in body structure between the aliens and humans when talking about the language style and communication style. So I would like to first discuss the second question.
For the aliens, as their name “hetapods” suggests, they looked like “a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs.”(5) Since their bodies are radially symmetric, any one of their limbs can be their legs or arms. As a result, they can use any number of limbs to communicate with others. While humans only have two arms and two legs, and we communicate with each other mostly by these four limbs.
Secondly, on our human faces, we have two eyes, so we can only observe things that happen in front of us. But for hetapods, they have seven “lidless eyes” ringing on the yop of their body, so they can view the whole surroundings even if they don’t turn their head. Because hetapods can see the things happening even behind them, and they have many limbs that they can use, they are more likely to communicate with several objects at the same time, in other words, horizontally.
Furthermore, there is one aspect that the hetapods are quite similar to humans, which is that both the two species have their mouths, so both the aliens and us can communicate with our mouths through speaking. This leads to the fact that in some certain ways humans are able to communicate with the hetapods, and the two species also share knowledge in the science department–math and physics.
For the first question, how the hetapods communicate with language is quite different from the human way of communication. In the story, when hetapods are speaking they are producing a fluttering sound. Different flattering sounds can be recorded as different words in a human’s communication system. In hetapods’ language system, they have analogs of nouns and verbs–which is similar to humans. However, there exists a difference between human language and communication systems and hetapods’. From the story, it can be found that there is a difference between the language hetapods use orally and the language they use in pictographic: “In their writing, however, things weren’t as clear-cut.” Instead of a word relating to a specific image or symbol, their writing “script isn’t word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join logograms by rotating and modifying them.”(11) And this fact makes it difficult for the narrator to recognize each word and analyze it. More specifically, hetapods’ pictographic language didn’t appear to be writing at all, “it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, a spiral, or any linear fashion. Indeed, [the two hetapods] would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration.”(12)