My pioneer plaque is about the written languages of human beings. They include Albanian, Amharic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Dhivehi, Georgian, Gujarati, Hindi, Hungarian, Khmer, Kurdish, Lao, Myanmar, Sinhala, Urdu, and Yiddish. According to Google Translate, they each mean “welcome”. I would like to deliver a message that is at least not hostile based on human understanding. I would also like to convey the information that human beings consist of different groups of people that have different languages and different stories.
I chose these languages because most of them resemble symbols, especially compared to the Latin alphabet. I also tried to avoid languages that are “common” in an attempt to bring attention to less used languages, while all of them, with numerous variations, have together formed the language system of human beings. Honestly, I think some of them have to be written horizontally or from right to left, but I make them in vertical shapes for my design purpose. I apologize for being random. It was really interesting to jot down these words in languages that are very different from the languages I usually use, while sometimes, I didn’t even know if the strokes were supposed to be one or separate.
I chose the system of language because I think language is a unique cultural phenomenon of human beings, not saying that other species do not possess languages at all. After all, human beings as a species mainly use language to communicate, especially written languages to pass on information from one generation to the next.
In Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang describes the heptapods speaking as “sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur”. Moreover, there have been people imagining their written language Heptapod B as a circle with several branches. Inspired by these, I made my pioneer plaque with ink to simulate the sense of moisture. It may be difficult to tell from my scanned image, but I drew on Xuan paper (宣纸) because it is a traditional combination with ink. I also think its rough surface would add more details and be more meaningful for heptapods to learn about human beings than an entirely white background with no texture.
I made the design into a circle, with each word string centripetal around the circle, according to the habits of the heptapods, so that it could “be read with equal ease however rotated”. I did not focus on making each stroke recognizable because I thought Heptapod B also has a sense of fuzziness since there should be many affixes, and sentences are written by “sticking together as many logograms as needed”. According to heptapod syntax, my message could be roughly translated as “Humans welcome” or “Humans said welcome”.
I’m aware that these are only 19 languages out of thousands of human languages, both oral and written. Ideally, the pioneer plaque would contain as many languages as possible, but I think it also makes sense for a pioneer plaque to contain only several languages.
Originally, I created a pioneer plaque with similar logic themed on make-up, but then I went with monochromatic in case the aliens do not have a sense of colors.
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