
A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016) - CarolineW
http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/11/22/a_linguist_on_arrival_s_alien_language.html
======
dudeonthenet
It's also worth making the distinction between the movie and the impressive
short story that the movie is based on, which the article completely fails to
mention: Ted Chiang - Story of Your Life [1]

I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really
is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover.

Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himself did a
wonderful job with the screenplay, while managing to convey the main ideas and
emotion of the book, there are quite a few details about the process of
translating Heptapod A and B that didn't make it into the movie, details which
would have painted a more complete picture of the situation for the
interviewed professor of linguistics that was interviewed in this article.

[1] [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-
your...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your-life-
and-others)

~~~
shas3
[spoiler] Also, the story clearly has a theme of a person being a helpless
observer of their own life (prescience or not (see Gwern's post [0]). The
movie has a time-travel twist that's very, to use an indian term, "masala".

[0]
[https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life](https://www.gwern.net/Story%20Of%20Your%20Life)

~~~
alanbernstein
I'm intrigued by this use of "masala", can you explain? Urban dictionary has a
few options, not sure which of those you mean, if any.

~~~
GenerocUsername
I can try to shine a light on this idiom.

Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US... so popular in fact that it
is expected at any indian restaurant. Because of this, the term can be
synonomous with 'run of the mill', 'standard', or even 'safe'.

~~~
setr
>Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US...

Huh? Masala just means the dish uses a bunch of spices (ie masala chai is just
tea with cardamom, maybe pepper and cinnamon and other things depending on
whose making).

I'm pretty sure regarding film its used to say a "standard movie" or even
"boring", thats been "spiced" to taste better, with spices being a set of
tropes that most people like.

~~~
prebrov
Haha, such an appropriate comment thread in a post about linguistics!

------
skizm
What bothered me the most is that the way they start the "conversation" with
the aliens is by using names and human concepts (walking, eating, etc.). I'm
not a trained linguist or anything, but it seems to me they should start with
concepts that are universal: mainly numbers. Maybe as a CS guy I'm biased
(since my language is symbols and numbers), but literally every conceivable
language has to contain numbers of some kind (at the _very least_ the concept
of singular vs plural).

So start with "one" and "two" or maybe even the concept of nothing vs
something. Work your way to vocab words related to space and time (again, I
would think these universal concepts considering the aliens traveled with the
goal of getting to earth), then get into specific human concepts like me vs
you vs third person.

They essentially worked through language in the same way you would work
through language with a _human_ baby, which I think would get you no where
when talking to an alien race (who are "adults" at this point you would
assume, and have their own fully developed world views).

Just my 2 cents though.

~~~
katamaritaco
For what it is worth, numbers are not necessarily a 'universal concept'.

One of the most talked about examples is Piraha[0], a language which doesn't
really represent numbers. This is interesting because a study done by Everett
and Frank[1] shows that this can actually have effects on cognition, providing
some evidence for the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis[3]

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language)

[1]
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708001042)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

~~~
tlb
The Piraha language is probably inadequate for developing interstellar travel.
As was English hundreds of years ago. You need numbers, and names for concepts
like energy, mass, momentum, and time.

~~~
shuzchen
Numbers and math are required for theoretical space travel, but not
necessarily for practical space travel. Catching a ball requires solving
differential equations, but children and animals are capable of performing
this action with no problem.

Given that there is so much of physics that we have yet to understand
(assuming what we think to be true is actually true), and given the infinite
possibilities of what forms alien life could take, you can't make any
assumptions about what sort of language they'd have. This was a point they
briefly tried to make in the movie.

~~~
Latty
Another way to do 'practical space travel' without 'theoretical space travel'
is with tools. Just because you can't develop it with your language doesn't
mean you can't use a tool someone else developed, or even an animal that
evolved with the capability.

------
YCode
> Once she had these splotches, they jumped pretty quickly from “OK, that’s
> how they communicate a concept” to “I’ve now got a mini-dictionary of a
> bunch of concepts.” ...they don’t really show the process of how she got
> from there to understand what chunks mean what.

I think the film makers made the right choice artistically.

There's a certain potential, a sort of superpositional value in only filling
in the details of a plot device that are absolutely necessary to further the
plot (i.e. the flux capacitor).

So long as you don't fill in the answer it could be anything, but as soon as
you provide a concrete answer all that sense of wonder and curiosity is paved
over with a simple matter of fact answer that may or may not be fully thought
out.

And in practical terms the plot becomes more restricted and the odds of
creating a continuity error are increased.

I suspect, in short that had they filled in that gap in the movie we'd be
reading a rant about how the film maker's answer doesn't hold upon closer
examination.

------
mosqutopi
Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language. Another
suggestion for aliens to understand our language would be first to show then
how evolution in earth has happened. Any high technology creature able to
travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary
path. Perhaps studying the neurons they could infer a lot of information about
how our mind interacts with the environment.

Edited: An interesting novel is The Black Cloud by Hoyle in which the author
tries to establish a language between human and an intelligent
extraterrestrial electromagnetic cloud.

~~~
js2
> Perhaps we should first try to understand dolphin's language

Probably the most famous attempt to do so:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Howe_Lovatt)

------
remarkEon
One thing that I think always confuses me about any science fiction work that
deals with Humans meeting Aliens for the first time is that it seems to assume
it's all on _us_ to figure out a common language. I have to admit, my
assumption if that if some species is sufficiently advanced to figure out
interstellar travel they'd likely be able to decypher our language and find a
way for us to communicate.

~~~
artimaeis
By your comment it seems like you didn't watch Arrival. Maybe I'm
misinterpreting that, if so please ignore.

The whole point of Arrival was that we _had_ to learn the alien language. The
purpose of their arrival was to teach us their language so we could help them
in the future.

Had the purpose of the aliens been to spread the knowledge of their culture
then it may have made sense for them to analyze and learn our language, but
since that wasn't their goal it wouldn't have made much sense.

~~~
stickfigure
I think the OP's point still stands. If aliens are traveling the universe
teaching their language, you'd think they would have developed a _curriculum_
, no?

In pretty much every alien encounter movie it's the humans working out a plan
for communication from scratch. You'd think the aliens would put a little more
effort into it, especially if they've been spacefaring for years. And if they
haven't, wouldn't they be a lot more curious about us?

I would love to see a cinematization of Robert Forward's _Dragon 's Egg_,
which I think gets this right.

~~~
bane
The best part of the story is that the Aliens already know that humans will
learn their language. There's no need to try to optimize when they already
know the outcome and that outcome is the one they desire.

------
gliese1337
I feel like the linguist interviewed may have missed the point of the
semasiograms (explicitly _not_ called logograms in the movie). Which I suppose
is understandable, as the movie by itself may have not done a sufficiently
good job of explaining why they are _not_ like Chinese logograms after all. (I
am unfortunately biased by having also read _The Story of Your Life before
hand).

Logograms, although they do not encode the phonological structure of words in
a language, nevertheless do correspond to words, and written sentences using
logograms mirror the linear syntactic structure of the spoken language. The
distinction between Heptapod A and Heptapod B is not merely a matter of
discarding phonological representation and using logograms; Heptapod B is
intended to have literally no relation whatsoever to the structure of Heptapod
A, being a fully 2-dimensional semasiographic system while Heptapod A is a
(necessarily, because spoken) linear system.

And while the circular semasiograms developed for the movie certainly look
cool, and were probably a good choice for the film-makers to make, they really
do not do justice to what's described in the original story, or to the actual
real-world 2D writing systems that have been developed (e.g., UNLWS:
[http://conlang.org/cms/wp-
content/uploads/grammar.pdf](http://conlang.org/cms/wp-
content/uploads/grammar.pdf)).

------
civilian
> At one point in the movie, the character Ian [Jeremy Renner] says, “The
> Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that if you immerse yourself in another
> language, you can rewire your brain.” And that made me laugh out loud,
> because Whorf never said anything about rewiring your brain. But since this
> wasn’t the linguist speaking, it’s fine that another character is
> misunderstanding the Sapir-Whorf.

As a Biochemist-- this is not a misunderstanding! Everything in our brain is
rewired as we learn things and as we develop heuristics. So of course thinking
differently relies on rewiring your brain. There's no spirit or soul hidden in
our brain, it's all wires.

This linguist needs a neurobiology course. :3

~~~
6stringmerc
I like the wiring analogy, and also ones that describe the functional mind
akin to vast, complex spider webs upon which information zooms around. Making
connections, turns, associations, firing individual bits or entire areas into
vivid use.

If we didn't "rewire" as you put it, I think we'd have a very big problem as a
species learning new things!

------
inputcoffee
Perhaps they should take the time to make a few distinctions in this
interview:

1\. Perceptions 2\. Constructs 3\. Language

For a creature that doesn't have sight at all, they literally can't talk about
certain concepts.

Now, does the creature distinguish between objects and actions? If they do,
they have a basis to distinguish between Nouns and Verbs.

Finally, humans might be hard wired for some aspects of language. It would be
a huge coincidence if aliens had the same hard wiring. (For instance, they
could have evolved to give their children negative evidence, rather than pre-
constrain grammars.)

~~~
mannykannot
It would indeed be a huge coincidence if humans and an extraterrestrial
species had the same hard-wiring for language, but I would think it far less
of a coincidence if they both had hard-wiring that was functionally broadly
similar.

------
cletus
One big issue with communicating with aliens is sensory differences with
humans. Humans perceive a sound range, the so-called visibl spectrum and
certain limited smells (compared to man animals). Even here there are animals
that perceive different spectra and the magnetic field.

What's more human communication relies on a basic common wiring (e.g. Paus s
between words seem to be basically universal regardless of language and
culture).

So if an alien landed here what if they didn't perceive sound at all and saw
only in the ultraviolet range? I find this subject fascinating and it's
certainly rich fodder for sci-fi.

Anyway the article asks how the interviewee would handle this situation
without touching on this far more pressing problem.

~~~
maxxxxx
This makes me wonder: is there a specific advantage in us being able to see
the specific wavelengths we see or is it just a random thing and we would be
fine if we could see only other wavelengths like UV or infrared?

~~~
Robotbeat
Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum:
[http://plantphys.info/plant_physiology/images/solarlight.gif](http://plantphys.info/plant_physiology/images/solarlight.gif)

And there are other constraints, too. UV is blocked by water (and our lens
material) and can induce chemical changes (read: damage) easier than visible
light. Damaging sensitive retina. Not that this is an unsolvable problem (bees
see UV), but it is a biochemical constraint. Infrared, especially far
infrared, doesn't work too well without a cooled sensor. And the energy per
quanta is less, which reduces your options for good, high-sensitivity
biomolecules that can detect them, kind of the opposite problem of UV.

So yeah, there are a few reasons why visible light is visible light and why we
can't see UV or infrared. It's not entirely arbitrary or random. But "seeing"
with sound is also a viable evolutionary approach, but less effective in a
low-density medium like air and more effective (even than light) in a medium
like water.

~~~
yourapostasy
> Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum...

Does this mean that our vision system evolved to pick up the most energetic
part of the Sun's spectrum that ends up at the surface? Did it evolve this way
so our vision systems' cellular agglomerate don't have to expend as much
energy gathering that part of the spectrum as opposed to other parts of the
spectrum?

If so, then is there any linkage via evolutionary theory that imply our vision
system might be among the first vision systems to evolve on the planet,
because it filled the most-favored evolutionary niche associated with the
lowest energy expenditure to gain a evolutionarily competitive advantage over
other pre-human species?

~~~
jcranmer
I would point out that the crystal field splitting energies happen to
correspond to the region around visible light, which means that being able to
finely distinguish gradations of visible light would lead you to be able to
visually distinguish between many different organometallic ions. I suspect
that matters more than the flux of visible light in the solar spectrum.

------
thesz
I haven't seen Arrival myself but I had a discussion with someone who did and,
boy, did he was extremely on the linguistic determinism side!

After some reminescence and analysis of the discussion I came to bold
conclusion that defending strong Sapir-Worf hypothesis is very much akin to
racism. Basically, you prohibit someone not fluent in the language of your
choice the ability to see the world just like you do or even better.

Just to give one food of thought - most of human languages are two-level (like
van Wijngaarden two-level grammar) with the extremely outstanding examples
like Nigerian (and I heard there are fixed-grammar languages here and there,
but they are rare). Two-level grammars are Turing complete and thusly you can
express any concept in most of them. The expression effort will differ at
start but if concept is important enough it will be expressed concisely in
every one of them.

To quote B.Stroustrup "users require LOUD SYNTAX for new features and succinct
syntax for familiar ones". Just like real languages evolve.

~~~
zingermc
Maybe I'm being too literal, but how can a grammar be Turing complete? The
usual definition of Turing completeness is being able to simulate an arbitrary
Turing machine. Typical human languages don't do beta reductions like Lambda
Calculus, so I fail to see how a grammar (or the language produced by the
grammar) can be said to compute anything.

~~~
mcguire
Regular expressions = regular languages.

Stack machines = context free languages = primitive recursive functions. (?)

Turingmachines = context sensitive languages = total recursive functions. (?)

Or something like that.

~~~
thesz
You are wrong.

Primitive recursive functions alone are able to recognize formal languages:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_(complexity)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_\(complexity\))
_PR is the complexity class of all primitive recursive functions—or,
equivalently, the set of all formal languages that can be decided by such a
function._

------
UhUhUhUh
It think this linguistic approach remains very superficial in that it only
targets vocabulary and ways to represent it and to translate it. It does not
tackle the "deep structure" the grammar that underlies and, in my belief,
determines everything that sits above. Yes, I know, I'm a chomskian... I also
understand that this would have propelled the narrative in a wildly weird area
where most spectators would have probably gone to do some other thing than to
watch. And "Arrival" is not a bad movie. I just wonder what would a truly
alien language, with a truly alien underlying structure, would look like. Much
more than vocabulary keys could be needed to even begin to communicate. This
is also where the SW hypothesis would begin to really become hugely
significant.

~~~
readymade
Seeing as though deep structure is by definition unobservable in its direct
form, it would be kind of strange to tackle that before building up a lexicon.
A more interesting question, IMO, is whether they even have a deep structure.

------
seewhatIsee
The Himba tribe in Africa have an interesting perception of color which is
believed to stem from their language[1]. For example, their language uses the
same word for what westerners separately call green and blue. As a result,
they cannot seem to distinguish the colors when presented to them.

[1] [https://vimeo.com/120808489](https://vimeo.com/120808489)

~~~
jessaustin
"Grue" is actually pretty common:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language)

------
xbryanx
It was interesting to read up more on the Hopi Language Controversy and see
how Ekkehart Malotki demonstrated that the Hopi do have a wealth of time
related vocabulary.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy)

------
mcguire
" _What I gathered is that the written form is not encoding the sounds of the
spoken form, right? And certain dialects of Chinese are like that. They have
these characters and the characters stand for a word or a concept, but a
Chinese character isn’t made up of individual symbols that stand for
individuals sounds in the way that English does. In English, the word dog has
a D and that corresponds to the sound duh. In Chinese, it’s not quite that
way. Now I gather there is a phonetic aspect to Chinese, but largely Chinese
uses logograms, where the symbol stands for the word. It doesn’t stand for a
sound._

" _You don’t really pronounce the logogram._

" _Right, it’s not phonetic in the way that English is phonetic. So I took the
alien language to be that kind of writing system. I still took the visual
system to be encoding the same concepts of the oral system so that the aliens
would have for any given concept a written version and a spoken version.
Logographic systems on Earth are essentially similar. The Japanese have three
different writing systems. One of them, Kanji, is shared with Chinese. The
spoken languages are very different. The Japanese speaker and the Chinese
speaker can’t talk to each other, but they share a writing system because the
writing system doesn’t actually match phonetically onto the sounds of the
language._ "

I began to doubt the linguist here. I understand that many people use
'logogram' as a shorthand to describe whatever Chinese is, but she seems to be
taking it seriously.

Chinese isn't written with 1 symbol per word (or idea or whatever); it would
be more true to say that it is syllabic, where most common Chinese words are
one syllable.

Many (most?) Chinese glyphs are made up of a root and a radical, where one
part indicates the "class" or "topic" of the symbol and the other indicates
the pronunciation (at least at one time).

She seems to be dancing around the idea that a Chinese speaker and a Japanese
speaker could communicate by writing, each in their respective languages, and
be understood through the magic of Kanji/logograms. That is not the case, too
my understanding.

I'm given to understand that one feature of all known natural writing systems
is that they are based off of the languages' vocabulary, grammar, etc.,
however hidden by changes between when the writing system was formalized and
now. The idea that a writing system would not record what someone would say is
weird.

------
awinter-py
I've never understood the core question of S-W. Is it that you can't have a
word without having a concept for it? That seems like a no-brainer.

Neanderthals weren't able to build airplanes, and their language probably
didn't have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn't the cause of A.

The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not
able to build airplanes.

Most cultures that _can_ build flying machines have one or more names for
them.

I don't know what it would mean to have the concept for something without
having a word (or a sentence) to describe it.

If the S-W claim is that 'it's more common for a concept to underly a word
than for a word to exist for a concept', I don't agree with that either --
kids who read a lot will often know the part of speech for a word and its
context but not much else.

~~~
pebblexe
Are you kidding me?

Are you claiming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't true on _ycombinator_?

This is a forum famous for talking about blub languages and lisp. And if it's
true for artificial languages, that's a strong indicator that it's true for
human ones.

But sadly there are very few studies comparing programming languages and I've
never seen one comparing human languages qualitatively.

~~~
jcranmer
But the evidence for programming languages is that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
is completely and totally false. To take a topical example, a lot of people
complain that the idea of classes in JavaScript is antithetical to its
underlying design philosophy. Presume that the statement is true (it's
debatable), and you'd find that many of the people who push for this feature
are likely to be those who have known no other language than JS. Their views
are not being shaped by the language itself but by the views of those who
taught the language, who like the paradigms of classes and came up with
multiple, sometimes somewhat incompatible, ways of expressing that paradigm in
JS.

The problem of Blub is less that people are incapable of understanding
concepts, but that the people explaining concepts are incapable of explaining
them. I've yet to find a feature that I couldn't explain to a "Blub"
programmer. If you take, e.g., call/cc, sure, describing that to a mediocre
Java programmer would probably elicit a blank stare. But I could instead
describe the yield operator and get excited responses on to where it would be
useful, despite it being basically the same thing as a call/cc (modulo issues
like saving the call stack).

The evidence for natural languages is equally poor, although it's obfuscated
by the extreme difficulty of separating culture from language in early
childhood instruction.

~~~
pebblexe
Do you have to manipulate text? Perl is probably better than C for that.

Do you have to write a program that operates on lists? Lisp probably is better
than Java.

Do you have to write a formal proof? Coq is probably better than Python.

Do you have to write distributed networking code? Erlang is probably better
than PHP.

How can the strengths of each language _not_ be direct support for linguistic
relativity? All that means is that certain concepts are easier to manipulate
and understand in certain languages.

~~~
jcranmer
> How can the strengths of each language not be direct support for linguistic
> relativity? All that means is that certain concepts are easier to manipulate
> and understand in certain languages.

The principle of linguistic relativity is that language (particularly L1)
influences the thought patterns of those who use it. It does not state that
certain thought patterns are easier to express in various languages.

To demonstrate support for linguistic relativity, it's not sufficient to say
that Perl is better at text manipulation than C. You'd have to say first that
Perl programmers tend to view generic programming problems (say, how to route
email messages) as questions of text manipulation rather than other paradigms.
You would also have to show that this paradigmatic shift is a result of the
_language_ itself, and not other factors including (but not limited to)
language instruction or library availability.

In terms of natural language, sure, I can't translate the sentence "Time flies
like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" effectively into French (since the
different senses of "to fly" are «voler» and «mouche»). But that doesn't
matter for linguistic relativity. The linguistic relativity argument is over
whether or not the difference between English tending to use "do" for its
modals precipitates a different worldview than the French «faire» ("make").

~~~
kbenson
> You'd have to say first that Perl programmers tend to view generic
> programming problems (say, how to route email messages) as questions of text
> manipulation rather than other paradigms.

Which I think you could actually make a strong case for. It's very natural in
Perl to reach for a regular expression instead of other tools, and to join
data into and split data out of strings, since the core data types don't
distinguish between numerical and string data, the operators do.

------
xtiansimon
Neophyte impression--Enjoyed the notion of time-less language and the
similarities to other series/state issues in langauge theory such as Synchrony
and Diachrony[1]. As a neophyte programmer I find networks and version control
are also similarly intresting structural contrasts.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_and_diachrony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrony_and_diachrony)

------
mirimir
I was expecting some discussion of S-W hypothesis and coding. Does learning
particular programming languages alter thinking more generally? I've read that
it's better to know several distinct sorts of languages. Are some languages
dangerous to learn?

------
sirishn
Anal retentive interviewee speaks English

