Originally published in The Skeptical Intelligencer 20:1 (2017), pp 11-15

'Story of Your Life', short story by Ted Chiang, originally published in 1998 and collected (pp 55) with seven other stories by Chiang in Stories Of Your Life And Others, Vintage Books (New York), 2016; with Arrival, 2016 Lava Bear/Paramount movie based on the story



Ted Chiang (Chiang Feng Nan, born 1967) is an American science-fiction author with a computer science degree who works as a technical writer in the software industry.  He has won many prestigious awards for his works, including a Nebula Award and a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the work under review here. (He also won a Nebula Award for 'Tower of Babylon' (1990), another of the stories in this collection, which brilliantly re-envisages the biblical Tower of Babel myth as a quasi-factual personal story set in the universe of ancient Middle-Eastern mythology.)  

'Story of Your Life' and Arrival deal impressively with the now familiar but still intriguing matter of imagined first contact with intelligent extraterrestrials, and in particular with the linguistic aspects of such scenarios. Chiang focuses adroitly and for the most part accurately on these matters of language, and the specific criticisms offered below should not be seen as disparaging his achievement.

By way of background: 12 identical alien craft have appeared at locations scattered across the surface of Earth, and appear to be inviting mutual communication, using initially incomprehensible groaning noises.  The main protagonist is a linguist (Louise Banks) who is called upon by the U.S. Army to analyse and interpret the profoundly different non-human communication system employed by the visitors and to interact fruitfully with its users, notably on the question of why they have come to Earth.  Banks, together with physicist Ian Donnelly, is brought to a military camp near one of the spacecraft; and in an interface chamber on the craft, divided by a glass barrier, they make visual and oral/auditory contact with two of the large (elephant/dinosaur-sized but upright-standing) seven-limbed aliens (named 'heptapods' by the humans) moving in their own (somewhat hazy) atmosphere beyond the glass.

The movie follows the original story rather more closely than is usual in such cases, and my comments can in general be read as applying to both.

Linguistic scenarios of this general type ('xenolinguistics') have been widely represented in earlier works of science-fiction; for discussion, see for instance Chapter 11 of my 2013 book Strange Linguistics and references given in that text. One well-known movie with a broadly similar theme is Contact (1997), based on Carl Sagan's 1985 novel; various reviewers of Arrival have drawn comparisons between the two films. Karen Stollznow (see below) refers usefully to other movies dealing with contact scenarios of this kind, such as Iceman (1984), Stargate (1994) and Thor (2011). Such notions have also been discussed, albeit often rather peripherally, in the literature on 'SETI' ('Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence'). On this aspect of the matter and on associated quasi-factual claims made by 'contactees' and such, see Chapter 5 of my book.  The former Soviet Union actually arranged for linguists to train on the most 'exotic' human languages available in case such events should ever actually occur. However, much of the material across this entire range of work evinces limited expertise in linguistics per se. The main exceptions are works by some science-fiction writers proficient in linguistics whose work prominently features accurately presented linguistic themes, such as the professional linguist Suzette Haden Elgin.  Chiang himself has no professional background in linguistics, but he displays an unusually high level of competence for an amateur.

The story and the movie feature the distortion of linear time under the influence of the heptapods, who have a very different perception of such matters, and there are frequent anomalous-appearing 'flashbacks' arising from this effect – saliently involving a full-blown relationship between Banks and Donnelly, including a child who (in a major sub-plot) dies young. These ideas are well handled, though for me at least the suspension of disbelief in 'time-travel' scenarios (not to say acceptance of the notion that such things might actually happen or, if they did, might be amenable to human understanding) remains difficult. However, the linguistic aspects of this particular element in the story are not articulated explicitly enough to allow a linguist qua linguist to comment seriously (especially in the movie; the original story is somewhat more explicit on this front, as it is about the heptapod vocal system, though still furnishing little detail on such matters). Neither, as a linguist, can I say much about the 'hard-scientific' or mathematical aspects of the story, which again are not elaborated in any detail. (It has been noted in commentary upon science-fiction that it is very difficult to present imaginary scientific details, as opposed to generalities, with any real conviction; for the ideas involved to be intelligible to us today and possibly valid, we would already have to have gone a considerable part of the way towards actually grasping them ourselves.) 

It emerges that each of the heptapod ships is attempting to communicate only a small portion of their overall message, thus requiring humans to collaborate if they are to learn significantly from the visitors; but we do not get to learn about the upshots.

Reviews of the movie (and of the hitherto less-than-well-known short story) have focused upon the key linguistic aspects of the case; see for example http://wpo.st/mlTE2. Almost inevitably, the non-linguist reviewers make some errors.  For example, the review just cited accepts the in fact highly contentious notion that the communication systems of some non-human animals (here, monkeys) display to a degree some of the key features of human language, notably what might reasonably be called syntax (sentence-grammar); some very prominent linguists, notably Noam Chomsky, would disagree.

Some reviewers (again including the one cited) show awareness of the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis' (explicitly referred to by Chiang): the idea (developed by the two eponymous American linguists) that the thought-patterns of human beings (as of other [putative] language-using species?) are very heavily influenced by the structures of their first languages, which (parenthetically but crucially) may be very different indeed even across one species (important 'language universals', pace Chomsky et al., are few). As some German thinkers have said, mit jeder neu erlernten Sprache erwirbt man eine neue Seele ('with each newly learned language one gets a new soul').  See above on the Soviet Union's 'xenolinguistic' programme, which was inspired by SWH. 

The character Banks is shown as endorsing SWH without serious hedging.  But any strong version of SWH implies that really learning even a new human language which is essentially unrelated to one's own would be almost impossibly difficult, for adults at least. This is one reason why some linguists reject strong versions of SWH. And indeed one must note the serious differences on this front even among non-Chomskyan linguists.  Compare Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages (2010) and John McWhorter's The Language Hoax: Why The World Looks The Same In Any Language (2014).  (For more on this, see my review of Vyvyan Evans' 2014 book The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not An Instinct, in The Skeptical Intelligencer 18:2 (2015).) 

Naturally, genuine non-human (especially extraterrestrial?) languages might really be almost impossibly different from human languages, at all levels of analysis, even if all human languages really are very uniform in a Chomskyan sense and if SWH is thus largely false.  And the heptapod language is indeed represented here (not always very clearly) as infringing some of the widely accepted (rather general) universals of human language.

It is fair to say that neither the movie nor the story explain convincingly or with any specificity how the specific meanings of specific heptapod expressions are learned by Banks (discussion ends up being carried on largely in 'Heptapod' rather than English). This applies in particular to items referring to entities not actually present in the interface and most of all (as is admitted) to abstract notions; but major issues can arise with 'ostensive definition' even with reference to object-types which are to hand, as in Willard Quine's 'Gavagai!' example. (On this example, readers should 'google' 'indeterminacy of translation'.)

Vis-a-vis the portrayal of linguists in Arrival: the (skeptical)-linguist Karen Stollznow, in her 'Linguists in “Arrival” and other pop culture' (http://karenstollznow.com/linguists-in-arrival-and-other-pop-culture/), points out that the movie, to some degree, reinforces the popular misconception that the expertise of linguists lies mainly in personally speaking many languages rather than in matters of theory.  I would observe in addition that by portraying the two main human protagonists as initially conflicting with each other over methodology both Arrival and the original story (perhaps inevitably, in context) oversimplify the issue of science/mathematics vs language as means towards the 'cracking' of the code of an alien communication system.  For the former aspect of potential communication, better understood by most science-fiction authors with their science backgrounds, see for instance the focus on 'Rosetta Stones' involving a) prime numbers (introduced in Contact and echoed in a reference in Arrival to British work on the heptapod numeral systems) and b) the periodic table of elements (in the famous short story 'Omnilingual' by H. Beam Piper, where a linguist also features but – before elucidation by a scientist – is embarrassingly ignorant of the universality of the periodic table). (In this present work there is also, interestingly, reference to the possible use of highly-structured games such as mah-jong or chess in this context.)

Realistically, Banks is represented as confronting her non-linguist colleagues, in various settings, with some observations familiar among linguists, such as the story that the word kangaroo means 'I don't understand' in an Aboriginal language (which she persuasively recounts as if true and then admits is false) and the point that a basic Sanskrit word for 'war' originally meant 'a desire for more cows' (compare the Ulster legendary cycle involving cattle-raids). And indeed most of what she is portrayed as saying about the phenomenon of language corresponds with what a real linguist would say and think.

Perhaps the 'worst' error in the linguistics here is the statement that the only way to learn an unknown language is through actual interaction with a native speaker. Banks issues this statement when the military naïvely ask her if she can interpret a brief uncontextualised burst of heptapod phonation without any prior exposure.  In ensuing discussion, she goes on to say that the heptapods could not have learned human language simply by monitoring broadcasts. The military are clearly disappointed, not wishing to have to allow Banks or other outsiders direct access to the heptapods with the resulting loss of control of information on their part. It is from this point that the scenario involving actual contact between Banks and the heptapods develops.

Now it is obvious that actual interaction with a native speaker furnishes much better opportunities for learning a hitherto unknown language, and that in such a situation a linguist should demand such opportunities.  But a skilled linguist can make some progress on the basis of oral or written texts without access to the speakers/writers – as long as these texts are long enough and are 'glossed' with at least approximate meanings or provided with supporting information as to context.  If this were not so, hitherto unreadable ancient written languages, particularly those like Sumerian which have no known 'genetic' relatives, could not have been deciphered, as they have been. Banks' (not especially clear) example involving Farsi (Modern Persian), a language where far more surrounding information is available, is too pessimistic in tone.  And in fact some earlier science-fiction writers have developed more optimistic scenarios along these lines. Isaac Asimov was naïve at times about matters of language, for instance in The Gods Themselves where he portrays aliens in a parallel universe as somehow arriving at imitated spellings of English words; but in the same book he presents a historical linguist as willing to take on the task of deciphering written symbols independently produced by said aliens, initially deterred not by Banks' point but only by the inevitable absence both of 'genetic' or other links with human languages and of shared specific mental attributes. Compare Piper's 'Omnilingual', referred to above, where a start is made on the basis of one small but unusually highly-structured body of vocabulary (though admittedly the story is not developed further).

One very striking feature of the heptapod communication system involves the major dissociation between spoken and written forms. The writing system, which appears to relate more closely to the distinctive heptapod notions regarding time, is not, it seems, based upon the specific structures – still less on the 'morphophonology' (words and sounds) – of the (pre-existing/earlier-learned?) spoken language as is normal in human language (with marginal exceptions such as the dissociation between the signed languages used by the deaf and the written forms of structurally unconnected spoken languages in which most deaf people must necessarily become literate). As becomes clear from analysis, it is a separate, also highly articulated linguistic system, presumably devised later in historical terms – at one point Banks wonders if it was adopted/adapted by these heptapods from another cultural group or species – and perhaps acquired much later in developmental terms.  Understanding one of the two systems is of little help in grasping the other (perhaps only in respect of very general background characteristics or concepts?). 

At one point, Banks rather misleadingly describes heptapod writing as 'semasiographic', a term which she uses to emphasise its dissociation from spoken heptapod but which more usually refers to quasi-scripts which in fact do not represent any strictly linguistic system but rather language-neutral meanings (as with traffic lights).  (See below on Chinese script.)

Heptapod writing is presented to the humans in the form of series of complex, generally near-circular dashes of fluid on the heptapod side of the glass barrier, applied by the sucker-like star-shaped ends of their limbs.  Some of these characters are found to be internally complex after the manner of the symbols in the Ethiopic 'abugida' or some Chinese logograms with their 'phonetic' elements (see again below on Chinese).  The characters making up a sentence are linked together (as in handwriting as opposed to printing) and are modified as part of this process (as in 'sandhi' in spoken and written Sanskrit, Finnish, etc.). 

Overall, the heptapod writing is described as 'non-linear' (something of a 'buzz' word in fringe linguistics), and this term is presented as relating to the 'non-linear' heptapod conceptualisation of time. Indeed, it is indicated (but not adequately explicated) that the heptapods, with a temporally holistic grasp of what humans perceive as a string of passing events, already know the future, and that therefore the main function of their written and spoken language is not communicative (of meaning) but 'performative' (as in Speech Act Theory, which, interestingly, arose originally in the context of mid-C20 Oxford analytical philosophy and only later came to be of interest to linguists): their utterances in both modes serve chiefly to 'actualise'.

The script appears genuinely non-linear most obviously in respect of the design of individual characters, which is itself hardly significant; many characters used to write human languages, such as the Greek/Roman letter O and the zero sign, possess this feature. More importantly, however, the heptapod characters are not arranged in one-dimensional linear rows like the symbols of written human language; but they are organised two-dimensionally into 'webs', and they are at least sometimes communicated in sequences rather than 'all at once'.  It does not appear to be suggested that these sequences or in particular the positions of characters in webs have no significance, i.e. that a given series of associated characters might appear in any order or web-structure with the same overall meaning. At the level of word-structure, this feature has been claimed (for their own convenience!) by some proponents of non-standard theories of human language origins – notably by John. J. White III, the 'discoverer' of 'Earth Mother Sacred Language', in which the ordering of the short morphemes making up the longer words which allegedly lie at the origins of known words in known languages is said not to be significant; a given sequence of morphemes will normally have
the same overall meaning regardless of their linear order as spoken. But (predictably) no such case is actually known; and at the level of sentence-/clause-structure such a system arguably appears even more implausible.  In manifestations of human language where word-order is very free (as for instance in Latin poetry), the sequences are intelligible and unambiguous only because of extensive 'morphological concord' (case and gender endings, etc.) indicating which words should be understood together. In any event, the contrast drawn here between human and heptapod systems is genuine but appears somewhat overstated.

And the comparisons made in the movie, in this context, between written Heptapod and written Chinese are unconvincing, given that Chinese writing (like all human writing) is itself inevitably linear in the sense that the characters representing words appear one after another in sequence (and indeed Chinese word-order is not especially free). The ductus of Chinese script (left to right, top to bottom, etc.) is variable; but once the ductus of a given block of text is established it is adhered to.  It is true that (as is remarked) earlier times are often conceptualised as 'up' and later times as 'down' in the Chinese world, and that this is not at all typical of 'western' thought on this front; but this does not prevent the Chinese language itself from being written horizontally at need. (A more genuine example of linguistic 'non-linearity' arises in the reports of the 'contactee' Jim Sparks, who claimed to have been taught an alien alphabet in which, in writing, the alien users of the system would place one symbol over another, until only a black spot was visible – although Sparks believed that the aliens themselves could still resolve this into characters when reading.)

It is also observed here that Chinese characters represent 'meanings' rather than the sounds of Chinese (any 'dialect'), which furnishes a link with the point about heptapod speech and writing being essentially dissociated.  However, this is an oversimplification. Firstly, many Chinese characters do contain a 'phonetic' element (which has varying interpretations revealed when the characters are read out in different 'dialects') in addition to the main, purely semantic element.  Secondly and more importantly, the meanings represented by the characters are those of spoken Chinese words, not language-neutral meanings as was once believed by European scholars; despite continuing looseness of terminology in some quarters, the characters are logograms, not semasiographic ideograms. A concept or a non-Chinese word which has no Chinese-language equivalent cannot be expressed (in the normal way) as an existing Chinese character. None of this is itself especially damaging to the story, but it implies an incomplete grasp of the relevant linguistics, which may suggest that the ethnically-Chinese original author was not closely consulted at this point.  (On the other hand, three linguists from McGill University in Montreal – Jessica Coon, Morgan Sonderegger and Lisa Travis – were consulted when the movie was being made, and clearly gave excellent advice, but they apparently did not focus upon points of this nature.)

The reference to Pakistan in this context is to say the least obscure, given that those languages of Pakistan which are written use an Arabic-derived 'abjadic' script notable – to westerners – only for its representation of vowels by means of diacritics rather than letters and for its right-to-left ductus.

Some of the precise methods used by Banks in initial communication with the heptapods appear less than optimal. For instance, when she displays the written forms of her own first name and that of Donnelly on cards by way of self-introduction, she is concerned that the heptapods understand these words as referring to them as individuals (an aspect of the 'Gavagai!' problem). One obvious way of ensuring this, or at least of avoiding confusion between the names of species and of sub-groups/individuals, would be to present two cards at once each time, one reading HUMAN (a word already known to the heptapods) and the other bearing the relevant personal name. Furthermore, Banks appears concerned that the heptapods interpret the phonetics of these names/words accurately.  It has not yet been established at this point that most of the interaction is to be in Heptapod, nor that the heptapod script, dissociated as it is from spoken Heptapod, is non-phonological in character.  And in fact Banks adopts invented names for the two heptapods themselves (Abbott and Costello!). But in the first instance Banks would surely have done better to present the humans' names in the International Phonetic Association Alphabet or a phonemic system for (American) English based on same – thereby avoiding confusion arising from the complexity, not to say irregularity, of English spelling, the presence in her own first name of 'silent E', etc.  It is also unclear at this stage (and is left unclear) whether the heptapods (with their own strictly non-phonological writing system) are genuinely reading the names for sound (as well as for meaning/reference) at all; this is often a major issue in contact situations involving dissimilar systems, illustrated by the contrast between 'on' and 'kun' readings of Chinese characters as used to write the unrelated Japanese language.

A minor infelicity: in the story, Chiang uses […], the convention for phonetic representations, to frame some spellings in normal Roman script as used for English.

There is much more that could be said about this significant double work, most of it positive.  I strongly encourage readers with an interest in science-fiction, SETI, language or any combination of these to watch the movie and read the story.