After reading the book of Ted Chang, Story of Your Life, how Aliens communicate is really different from how humans, us, communicate. Aliens produce fluttering sounds that can’t be understood by humans. A reason for this is because Aliens are using sound that the human vocal tract can’t reproduce and human ear can’t identify. While humans talk by producing sounds that are composed of consonants and vowels or called phonetic. In learning the sounds of the Aliens, we need a sound spectrograph. Other than that, the most effective way of learning new languages is interacting with a native speaker. The way Aliens write their language is also different from how humans write. Their pictographic appearance was logographic and not alphabetic. This means that heptapods’ language didn’t appear to be writing but it is similar to drawing a picture or graphic designs. “A sentence is written by joining the logograms by rotating and modifying them” (11). Human written language is classified into “glottographic” while aliens pictographic is classified into “semasiographic”. It conveys meaning without reference to speech.
The simplest way of communicating in humans is talking. Talking is the act of exchanging information and expressing feelings. This is performed by our mouth and the sound is produced by the Phonatory System, also known as the larynx or the “voice box”. Other than using our mouth to communicate, we have our hands and feet to perform gestures, drawing and writing. Other human body parts can also be involved in communication. Facial expression is one of them. Aliens communicate by their “Heptapods”, they looked like “a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs.” (5) They use their limbs to make gestures. The fluttering sound produced by a puckered orifice at the of the alien’s body