If you've seen the movie Arrival, you may know that it is based on a novella by Ted Chiang: The Story of Your Life, available in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others. And if you are a conlanger, you may know that the alien language Heptapod B had been discussed in conlanging circles for quite some time before the movie was made.
But, I don't really want to talk about that story; it's been done to death, with it's premise that's kind of frustrating because its just another rehash of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but is nevertheless a fresh and intriguing take on that extremely broad category of linguistic sci-fi premises... and there I go talking about it on accident anyway! Let's move on!
I acquired the above-mentioned anthology of Ted Chiang stories for Christmas; I had read all but one of the stories before, in other venues, but coming back to them again one after another in this format allowed me to recognize the repetition of linguistic themes, which go beyond the boundaries of Whorfianism. So, let's talk about some other Ted Chiang stories!
Understand
Understand is not about language, per se; it is about imagining what it might be like to have intelligence so much quantitatively greater than the smartest normal humans to experience a qualitative difference in the experience of cognition. But in so doing, linguistic concepts are brought up; in fact,
conlanging is brought up! (Although not by name.) The protagonist effectively identifies language as a
cognitive technology (
1,
2)--and, having determined that the natural language he speaks is sub-optimal for continuing to expand his cognitive abilities, sets out to create a new language that would be more suited to thought. He even plans to discard the basics of natural language and consult logic for the fundamental units on which to build his new language--rather like my approach to
building WSL (although the intent is quite different)! The new language is described as being "gestalt-oriented", incapable of being spoken or written linearly; a description which puts me in mind of non-linear conlangs like
UNLWS, and of course is parallel to the description of the ideograms used to write Heptapod B! Seeing as this story is older than
The Story of Your Life, it seems likely to me that this is where the idea of gestalt ideograms originated for Ted Chiang, then to be re-used in the more famous story. However, the theoretical language of
Understand is further described as being sub-optimal even for a static page, best represented as a hologram or a video of a time-evolving image. I have no idea if these are the terms Ted Chiang was thinking in when he wrote that description, but that is in fact exactly what I would expect from a perfect non-linear
loglang, which encodes a semantic graph. The planarity of a page puts limits on the types of semantic graphs that can be encoded, necessitating workarounds for notating crossing edges, or else allowance for ambiguity, but a 3-dimensional "surface" would in fact allow embedding any arbitrary graph!
Seventy-Two Letters
Seventy-Two Letters is a unique take on the idea of a
magical language--one which is inherent to the universe, rather than arbitrary, and command of which allows for the production of magical effects. The "magic" of the seventy-two-letters universe is realized in the form of twelve-by-six grids of letters constituting "true names" used to animate golems of various shapes of functions, thus constituting a kind of natural programming language whose semantics the characters must discover through a scientific process of investigation. The greatest breakthrough comes when the ability to produce self-referential statements is discovered (e.g., the famously paradoxical "this sentence is false"), which then leads to the creation of
quines--and the ability of golems to contain the information necessary to build more of
themselves. The idea of a magical language in and of itself is certainly not new, but this is a very original fictional take on how such a thing might be used!
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