On language & reality

Just saw Arrival and yes, it's one of the great films, along with 2001 and Interstellar, that examines how humanity deals with the great unknown which, in this case, involves communication with aliens whose connect to existence is utterly different from our own save that both species use language to define how they view reality, something BRT examined in some depth back in 2014.

The part that fascinates your truly are the beautiful logograms, the circular alphabet the heptapods use to communicate their view of time and existence to humanity along with the reason why they showed up, a process no doubt rife with complexity, nuance and the potential for dangerous misunderstanding.

From the beginning, Vermette knew the alien language would appear in circles—screenwriter Eric Heisserer specified as much in the script. The aliens regard time as non-linear, and the language needed to reflect that. But consultations with linguists and graphic designers kept leading to fictional alphabets that Vermette says hewed too closely to familiar systems like hieroglyphics, or code. It felt too human. Then one night, Vermette’s wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to sketch some ideas. The next morning, Vermette came downstairs to find 15 inky logograms on the kitchen table. “I said, ‘eureka.'”

The shapes in Bertrand’s paintings made it into the movie. Vermette and his team assigned meaning to the inky tendrils that project from each ring, developing a dictionary of 100 symbols. A single logogram can express a simple thought (“Hi”) or a complex one (“Hi Louise, I’m an alien but I come in peace”). The difference lies in the complexity of the shape. A logogram’s weight carries meaning, too: A thicker swirl of ink can indicate a sense of urgency; a thinner one suggests a quiet tone. A small hook attached to one symbol makes it a question. The system allows each logogram to express a bundle of ideas without adhering to any traditional rules of syntax or sequence.

The basis for the language set.

The way Louise think and perceives our world is directly shaped by the structure and other properties of the heptapods’ language. This is a linguistics concept-paradigm called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, and is the idea at the heart of Arrival.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is based on the early 20th-century work of American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir theorized in 1929: “Human beings… are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society... The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group.”

Last but not least the the trailer for Arrival.