Story Of Your Life
This story that I read is very interesting and I have come to realize that it is the inspiration of the movie “Arrival”. I ended up watching the movie after the reading and it really challenged my thought process.
- How do aliens in the story using language and communication style different from the human language (oral, pictographic, phonetic, etc.)?
In this reading the aliens, known as “heptapods” communicate by using their larynx to make sounds that are not familiar to the human ear. ” I just mean that the human auditory system isn’t an absolute acoustic instrument; It’s optimized to recognize the sounds that a human larynx makes. With an alien vocal system, all bets are off.”[Chiang 3] This quote from the reading explains that the sounds they make to communicate are just random sounds and inconceivable to the human. They speak in an ultrasonic tone and use flutters to get their points across to one another. The difference between human language is drastic because in addition to us humans using our larynx to produce sounds. We use our mouths to create phonetic sounds and our mind is optimized to recognize those sounds that come out. We also communicate orally with our facial expressions and actions whereas the aliens did not have faces, they did not need expressions to communicate. When it came to communicating between the humans and the aliens, the aliens showed examples of word and they demonstrated or acted them out. This was how they were teaching then. The aliens equivalent for text was the “logogram”. This was more like pictorial symbols being displayed and one logogram did not resemble one one word but full sentences, It was a very complicated text.
How does the physical structure of our body inform the way we communicate? How about the aliens?
The human body is designed in a way that we use our appendages like our hands legs and arms to get our points across. An example of this is in the reading when she said human and used her arm to point at Gary. The use of our body is essential in our communication because we do not only use our senses to receive information but our sight as well. We communicate through actions and movement and the body structure such way that we can use our arms, hands and kegs to get our point across. “It 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. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them “heptapods.””[Chiang 5] For the aliens communication was very different and it is apparent in this quote that they did not need their bodies to be optimized to their communication because it does not require actions to communicate. It is different for humans who have to use body parts or facial expressions to get their point across. The aliens use fluttering to receive and give information and they occasionally use their appendage to point at things.