Why alien languages could be far stranger than we imagine Essays

In the movie Arrival (2016), a seven-limbed alien species lands on Earth with a language that no human can understand. The aliens – dubbed Heptapods – are obliging enough to provide room in their spaceship for linguistic exchanges, but the team charged with translation is baffled. The creatures write in sentences that look like circular smoky inkblots, unlike anything on our planet. The movie’s drama – based on a story by Ted Chiang – rests on the sheer strangeness of the Heptapod language, but it’s actually not as alien as it could be. Apart from the sci-fi twist that learning it imparts special abilities, the Heptapod language is not very different from ordinary human languages. The symbols are strange and circular, sure, but they still stand for words belonging to familiar grammatical categories like nouns and verbs, and can be translated into English. In fact, a major plot element in the movie is the mistranslation of a Heptapod noun meaning ‘tool’ as ‘weapon’. The situation is s ... Read full article.