But first, we have to talk about the Story of Your Life, Ted Chiang's novella on which the movie Arrival was based.
(As usual, both of those are Amazon Affiliate links.)
For those who don't know yet, Arrival and Story of Your Life are about the arrival of seven-legged aliens (known simply as Heptapods... because they have seven legs) on Earth,, and Louise Banks's work to decipher their language so humans can talk with them. Or... well, that's what happens. What they are about is a little more complicated.
(Incidentally, I previously reviewed some of Ted Chiang's other stories.)
The novella doesn't show us any of the alien language, but it says a lot about the structure of the language and about linguistics. For example, we know about Heptapod A (the aliens' audio language) that
"The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur."
In other words, it doesn't use human speech sounds at all. Which is exactly what we should expect from an alien language, really, even though such depictions are conspicuously missing from most movie and TV depiction of aliens--a fact I complained about already in my review of the Halo TV series. This also highlights an issue with xenolinguistics that rarely if ever comes up when doing fieldwork among humans: We might not be able to distinguish alien phonemes! We might not even physically be capable of hearing the frequency bands that contain distinguishing information for alien phonemes! Even if aliens use sound to communicate, deciphering alien languages is going to require a lot more technological assistance than deciphering unknown languages of our species does.
After hearing this recording, Louise, the protagonist and linguist of the story, tells the General trying to recruit her that
"the only way to learn an unknown language is to interact with a native speaker, and by that I mean asking questions, holding a conversation, that sort of thing."
That is... not strictly true. Lost ancient languages (e.g., ancient Egyptian, via the Rosetta stone) have been deciphered with no interaction with existing speakers. But, it's close to true--in every case where we have deciphered a lost language, there was some other source of information available that allowed us to connect form with meaning; parallel translations, or identifying relations to other known languages, etc. So, in Louise's situation, dealing with an extraterrestrial language for which no such auxiliary sources could possibly exist, I might well respond to the General in the same way.
(If you want to see what this kind of deciphering-a-language-by-conversation stuff looks like in real life, Dan Everett--the Pirahã guy--has a demonstration on YouTube.)
But, the audio language of the Heptapods, known as Heptapod A, is not the most interesting bit of the story. The narratively-important language is Heptapod B, a non-linear two-dimensional written language with no regular correspondence to their spoken language. Heptapod B is not a developed conlang, although it has inspired conlangs like Alex Fink & Sai's UNLWS, and we do get a lot of aesthetic descriptions of it which one could use to try to create a realization of it:
Logograms are stuck together in a giant conglomeration -- sounds kinda like the 3D language of the Demons in Rosemary Kirstein's The Lost Steersman.
Argument roles are indicated by relative orientation compared to the verb -- this feature shows up in the 2D conlang Pinuyo.
Adverbs (or at least the adverb "clearly") can be expressed by regularly morphing the curve of strokes in a verb glyph, and various other semantic features can be indicated by varying a stroke's curvature, thickness, or manner of undulation; or the relative size, distance, or orientation of radicals -- this makes Heptapod B sound like a "fusional" 2D language, as described by Sai.
The overall impression of large Heptapod B utterances is of "fanciful praying mantids drawn in a cursive style" -- which kinda reminds me of Ouwi.
But lest the complexity and integration described for Heptapod B begin to seem impossible to realize for anything usable by a human... "I had seen a similarly high degree of integration before in calligraphic designs,"
So, theoretically, something which fits the design description of Heptapod B should actually be instantiable, even though nobody has actually managed it yet. (Or at least, not made it public that they have done so.) Just... actually using it would be a major undertaking, just like designing a highly-integrated bit of Arabic calligraphy.
Of course, the science fiction bit is not actually realizable--that being that learning Heptapod B, a language that does confine the expression of information to a linear format isomorphic to the flow of time, allows one to break out of the perception of time itself as linear, and see one's entire timeline as a whole.
In the novella, this does not grant anyone any special powers. It's just a vehicle for philosophical ponderings on the nature of free will, and the multiple possible formulations of physics from different points of view--linear cause-and-effect, or wholistic principle of least action. Louise's theoretical knowledge of the future does not allow her to make any different choices; i.e., "Those who read the Book of Ages never admit to it." Once you know the future, you must act it out exactly as it was always going to be.
Now, first let it be known that I actually like the film. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. And I might be slightly biased by the fact that my oldest child took his first steps in the theatre where we were watching Arrival just after it was released... That was the end of going to movies with a baby!
The film, however, is quite different from the book. Their portrayal of the language is... silly. It's quite understandable that they did not in fact fully instantiate a Heptapod B conlang, but "non-linear" writing is realized just as "writing bent into circles-per-sentence", which display absolutely none of the whole-message graphical integration which is central to the idea of the language in the novella.
Do these look like "fanciful praying mantids" to you?
The Heptapods themselves are also not entirely text-accurate. In the novella, Heptapod legs are described tentacles, perhaps with supportive vertebrae inside. In the film they are distinctly jointed, with tentacle-like fingers at the ends. In the film, the Heptapods produce ink directly from their own bodies to write, whereas in the novella Heptapods have screens for displaying writing--or at least, they use a machine in which a tentacle is inserted for control. However:
"I started playing the tape, and watched the web of semagrams being spun out of inky spider's silk."
So, that at least was portrayed pretty well. I have to admit, the swirling ink is a pretty cool visual.
But the more significant changes are to the core theme of the story, and the psychological effect of the Heptapod B language.
In the novella, humans never enter the alien ship--all communication is by remote viewscreen. There is no attempt to damage the ship, and no humans are ever in danger. There is no politics involved, past Louise convincing the General to give her access in the first place. And the language has no externally observable effects. It let's Louise remember the future, but not tell anyone else about it. It alters psychology in a way that only the experiencer can know. And thus, the duality of points of view remains intact: everything observable, everything that actually happens, can be explained either as a linear sequence of cause and effect, or as a teleological process of optimizing for a known end goal, and neither system will ever disagree with the other. Yes, novella-Heptapod-B exploits a sci-fi Sapir-Whorf effect, but in a subtle way, that doesn't unleash magical powers on the world.
The film throws out all of the interesting philosophy, and just goes with "this language straight-up lets you see the future". And to make that relevant, they have to introduce personal danger, and worldwide political and military turmoil, and explicitly position the language as a tool. In the novella, the Heptapods never explain why they came. They just did. And then they left. Whereas in the film, they have to explain to Louise why they came, so that Louise will realize the power of their tool--they came because they saw the future, and knew that they would need humanity as allies. Thus, they gave humanity their language, and Louise realized that she, too, could use her resultant knowledge of the future to make decisions about the present, just like the movie-Heptapods did. And so Louise's magical abilities brought about by learning an alien language allow her to use information from the future to stop a war. Woohoo.
It's still a good movie, and it's a movie that uses linguistics as the science for its science fiction of which there are not many, and it actually does a halfway decent job of portraying a realistic linguist doing actual fieldwork--admittedly in a very weird environment. But not only does it reach for the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of what you can do with sci-fi linguistics, exploiting the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to give someone magic powers, it does so despite being derived from an original story which is probably the best usage of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that's ever been written, and just throwing that away.
So. Go watch Arrival, it's a good movie. But then, go read Story of Your Life. It's so much better.
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