Comparing Human and Alien Communication

Story of Your Life Ted Chang
Some key notes and takeaways from the reading:

• The aliens, called heptapods, have a very different biological structure from humans. They have 7 radial limbs and eyes placed all around their body (p. 5). This would inform their communication in some key ways:
  Vocal communication: Heptapods lack a human-like larynx and vocal tract. Their sounds are described as a “wet dog shaking” which humans have trouble replicating or distinguishing individual phonemes within. This poses challenges for spoken language learning.
  • When the linguist listens to a recording of their sounds, she notes “It didn’t sound like they were using a larynx to make those sounds” (p. 3). This suggests their vocal anatomy is different than humans.
• Writing system: Due to their logographic writing system, the heptapods’ scripts represent whole words or concepts rather than combining letters into phonetic words. Their written “sentences” manipulate the orientation and connections of individual word logograms. This is unlike the human alphabetic system.
• Multidirectional perception: With eyes all around their body, heptapods likely experience their surroundings with omnidirectional sight rather than a front-facing human perspective. This may influence how they structure information and meaning within their language.
  • “It’s possible our ears simply can’t recognize the distinctions they consider meaningful” (p. 4). Their sounds may involve infrasonic or ultrasonic frequencies humans can’t perceive.

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For humans, our specific vocal anatomy allows for distinct speech sounds to form our oral, alphabetic languages. Our bipedal, forward-facing structure also influences our sequential processing of visual and linguistic information compared to the aliens.

The story explores the difficulties but also fascinating challenges of understanding alien communication approaches so radically different from our own human-centered preconceptions of language. More observations are needed to fully comprehend differences in linguistic thinking between the two species.