Arrival is a 2016 movie based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life.” Dr. Louise Banks is a linguistics professor, and she is contacted by the army to help translate an alien language when twelve spaceships mysteriously appear above various places on Earth. Interspersed throughout the film are snippets of her life with her daughter.
Linguists around the internet were very excited when this movie came out—finally, a movie about us that gets things (mostly) right! The internet’s favorite linguist, Gretchen McCulloch, collected links to a variety of articles here and did an episode of her podcast, Lingthusiasm, about the movie (transcript here). When Neil deGrasse Tyson made a disparaging remark to the effect that they should have chosen a cryptographer and astrobiologist, rather than a linguist, to talk to the aliens, Language Log posted an open letter from linguists explaining why he’s wrong.
A lot of things in the movie rang very true to me. One common misperception of linguists is that we know a lot of languages. That’s not (necessarily) true! Linguistics is about how language works, so some people may know a whole lot about one particular language and that’s it. Others may know how to read a dozen (or more) dead or reconstructed languages, like my friends who are studying Proto-Indo-European, who’ve learned Sanskrit, Greek, Hittite, Latin, classical Armenian, and that sort of thing. I know a lot about one language (German) and some about English (by default, and also because English is the most widely studied language), and I can read five dead languages to varying degrees (Gothic, Old Norse, Old English, Old Saxon, and Middle High German—and this is because of my interest in German.) I can speak very small amounts of Russian and Japanese. I’m one of the “gotta learn ‘em all”-type of linguist. I have some colleagues who have difficulty learning other languages, so they focus on English.
In Arrival, when Colonel Weber drops by Banks’ office to get her to translate the alien language, he plays a recording for her and asks her what it means: “Did you hear any words? Any phrases?” She replies that it’s impossible to translate it from an audio file. Weber is confused because she translated Farsi from recordings before, so why can’t she just translate this? Her answer is that she already knows Farsi, and she doesn’t know the alien language. This seems like a completely obvious answer, but the popular perception that linguists “just know” a lot of languages is at work here. This was a very true part of the movie for those who study linguistics; Banks is frustrated with Weber’s misconception of how her job works, and I can sympathize.
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When she finally makes it out to the alien landing site, she gets a chance to do field work. I haven’t personally done extensive field work, but I’ve learned the principles in class (and field work for sociolinguistics is slightly different than field work for documenting a language), and this also rings very true. After a session or two without any progress (because the heptapods’ language is kind of like whale sounds and humans can’t make it out), Banks sees a whiteboard in the prep area—and she grabs it. She uses it to write “human” because maybe the aliens have a writing system and they can understand each other that way. And the heptapods respond with a logogram. This is a great breakthrough, and they soon get more vocabulary in this way. A team of analysts gets to work on decoding it (using geometry, as best I can tell) and making a translation interface. This part is perhaps dubious, but it’s science fiction, and there’s alien language involved, so it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t break my suspension of disbelief, because writing systems aren’t my area of expertise but also because it’s realistic enough.
After a few sessions, Weber tells Banks to move on to the real questions, asking why they’re still on “grade-school words” like “eat” or “walk.” Banks explains to him why you have to start from the basics and work your way up to questions like “What is your purpose on Earth?” You need to know what the pronouns mean, whether the aliens understand the concept of questions and exchanging information, and a lot of other things before you can create higher-level sentences. (This is something that’s vital in CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series—which I’ll return to in a future column.) Weber is grudgingly satisfied and tells her to continue with her work. This scene also rang extremely true to me. I had a conversation about Arrival with a colleague at a conference after we both mentioned liking SF, and he specifically mentioned this scene as being a fist-pumping “hell yes!” moment, because it was so real and relatable.
A linguist’s job is to think about language and how it works. Linguists enjoy that and often have conversations about which dialect features they personally have, or sometimes they develop entire research articles around something they overheard on the bus. This is what we do. Not everyone thinks about how language works or is even interested in the subject. So it’s not surprising that Weber is frustrated because he doesn’t think there’s any progress happening, when Dr. Banks knows she’s made considerable progress.
So far, so verisimilar! In my first column, I wrote about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This is the entire basis for the story that drives Arrival. As Louise Banks begins understanding the heptapods’ language, she becomes unmoored in time. She sees the future and present at the same time (and introduces time travel paradoxes, but that’s a job for someone else to unravel), because the heptapods’ written language is circular and every sentence is conceived of all at once, thus facilitating the ability to perceive time in a non-linear manner. This is nonsense, of course. Learning a language where native speakers conceive of the entire sentence in one thought doesn’t mean that you will rewire your brain to see time all at once.
However, it didn’t break my suspension of disbelief (even though I repeatedly got annoyed at it, from a linguistic standpoint). Chiang’s writing, and the screen adaptation of his novella, was internally consistent, and within the realm of the story, it remained plausible. After all, it’s fiction—and dang good fiction, at that.
CD Covington has masters degrees in German and Linguistics, likes science fiction and roller derby, and misses having a cat. She is a graduate of Viable Paradise 17 and has published short stories in anthologies, most recently the story “Debridement” in Survivor, edited by Mary Anne Mohanraj and J.J. Pionke.
I thought learning the alien’s language meant seeing through time (or whatever) because it was like making a connection to Dr Who’s Time Vortex. Not just rewiring the brain, but granting access to some kind of external power.
I respect what the film tried to do, and that it mostly portrayed linguistics well. And I did like the structure and the way it set us up to expect certain things and then reveal that they were the opposite of what we thought. But the implausibility of the core premise undermined it for me. Also, I gather there was a lot of scientific and linguistic research they did for the film that didn’t actually end up in the final cut, which for me is a disappointment.
(Mainly, though, it underwhelmed me because it starred Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner, two actors I’m pretty consistently “meh” about.)
Anyway, as implausible as I find the idea of gaining an altered perception of time just through language, there is a physical basis for the idea. Einstein said that the difference between past, present, and future is an illusion, though a persistent one. Some physicists think that time doesn’t really flow, that all moments essentially coexist at once, and that our perception of time as moving is an artifact of the way we change from one “frame” of time to the next, like the images in a strip of film. The premise of the story and the movie is essentially that this is true and the aliens are able to perceive time as it really is, while we’re still stuck in a misguided perception of time as linear because of the way our language frames our thoughts.
There was a point in the movie where they talked about being so immersed in a different language that you start to think and/or dream in that language, that your brain does rewire itself to operate the way the language you’re immersed in operates. This is, I believe, how they setup her starting to think and ‘remember’ in a non-linear time mAmber as she becomes so immersed in their language, one of non-linear time, that her brain rewires itself to adapt.
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The original short story handles the whole time issue better. In the short story there is emphasis that in physics there are essentially two ways of understanding anything. For humans the default way is in a a linear fashion, for the heptapods it is in terms of maximization/minimization. The latter method is time independent, and presumably the basis of their physics. The key is that both of these views are correct, and any phenomenon can be understood both ways. The movie adds the whole issue of her getting the general’s cell phone number after she calls him which doesn’t make sense.
@5/neaden: The phone number thing makes perfect sense within the film’s premise, because she “remembers” seeing the number in the future. The whole point of the story is that mastering the aliens’ language lets her mind become unstuck in time, able to experience past, present, and future in nonlinear order.
I think it’s perfectly consistent to say that 1. the popularized version of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bogus, because every human language is a generalized tool for and from human minds, and 2. learning a communication mode that no human has ever used could affect your brain in ways that a human language cannot. Whether it’s at all plausible for that effect to be a permanent change in cognition, let alone the specific one in this story, is a different question– but there we’re just in the realm of “but what if an unimaginable thing…” that is common in SF. I think Chiang is writing in that tradition rather than saying anything about how actual languages work.
If the aliens can remember the future they should already know how to communicate with humans.
Setting aside the science fictional aspects, I appreciated the movie’s emotional beats. (i would say “loved,” but this is about a tragedy…)
Louise doesn’t time travel, but she has knowledge not stuck to concrete points in time. The implications of this are astounding. Think about what a society built on this would look like. (We’d know the outcome of a presidency before an election, for instance.) The movie shows that this time continuum can be altered, despite that it’s already happened . Or perhaps the alterations are required to maintain the continuum, like stitches in time. It’s paradoxical.
But in the very personal terms as defined by her story, what would we do in the same situation? Would you have a child knowing she’ll get ill and die in twelve years? Would you marry someone knowing she’ll be dead of cancer in ten years?
Her character chooses to have the child and not tell her husband. Renner’s character can’t accept it after the fact and distances himself. That’s something I wish had been explored a bit more. Why can’t he embrace the time given?
I love this film so much. It may be my favourite science fiction film. The linguistics is part of the reason, but it isn’t the only reason. I also love the whole first contact scenario – how strange and frightening it all is, how scared Louise is at first, even though she wanted to be part of it, how alien the aliens are. And how fast it all becomes routine. That’s quite realistic. And then it becomes even more normal in the flash-forward scenes, with Louise’s book and Hannah’s drawing. I also love that the protagonist is both a scientist and a mother, and how the world-changing event and the personal is intertwined.
@8/birgit: They still have to learn it at some point, or there wouldn’t be anything they could remember.
@8: The heptapods don’t remember the future, so much as they have simultaneous perception of extended phenomena. Their perception of their interaction with humans presumably includes the process of learning to communicate, and its result.
Or, to put it a different way, perhaps they have this knowledge throughout, but can only apply it when the humans also have it.
@2/CLB I can respect that :) When I rewatched it for this post, I reminded myself of the plot points and the time aspects and all that at the beginning, preparing myself to be critical, then I got caught up in the emotional beats of the story, which is probably why the big premise being whack didn’t bother me.
@3 – Being able to think in a foreign language is a crucial part of becoming fluent (I am also a college language teacher), but it doesn’t make me German to be able to do so. I’m guessing the “rewiring” they talk about in the movie relates to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar/X-bar/minimalist syntax, which has to choose different parameter settings for different languages. (I am not a syntactician, and I am not a fan of generative syntax to begin with, but that’s a completely different blog post. And a huge controversy in linguistics, tbh.)
@5 – I read the short story to compare it to the movie, and the detail on the field work was even better. I didn’t want to be repetitive, though, so I didn’t include it here. The story was different in some pretty significant ways, and I think they both worked for their medium. The ending in the story would have been confusing and unsatisfying in a movie, and the movie was perhaps too pat for prose.
@7 – I don’t disagree! The point of this was to give my opinion on whether the execution of the what-if part could overcome my natural skepticism toward the premise, and it did. That, and to point out all the things it did right re field work and what popular conceptions of linguists.
@9 – I think that’s why I was able to set aside my skepticism. The emotional beats landed right.
@@@@@ 8 & 11: I’d go a step further and say that, even if the heptapods could remember the future in its entirety –which is not how it works for Louise–, they still cannot transmit this knowledge to humans until humans can understand them, as they cannot make themselves understood in any other fashion.
Neither species seems to learn a lot about the other, and we never know why the aliens depart as suddenly as they came, or even why they came in the first place.
@13. Ashgrove: We’re told that a huge threat is coming and the aliens will need humans as allies in the future. Don’t remember exactly, but it’s in thousands of years. Given the new mode of thinking, humans should evolve significantly by then, or at least avoid some major pitfalls.
@@@@@ 14: That could easily be a pretext. In the end, we don’t know, and won’t.
I really enjoyed this movie for its cerebral sci-fi and the contained, quiet feel to the movie. Considering how many alien contact shows there are, it’s shocking that the language barrier is almost never explored. (Although, Star Trek TNG did have that intriguing, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” episode). Digging a bit deeper into the theoretical science of this premise, I wondered how feasible it would be that this language altered the wiring of an adult brain. Generally adults are not as proficient at learning new languages and usually not as flawlessly as younger children. I wondered if Louise’s abilities are but a small skill relative to what would happen to a young child learning this language.
@8/birgit: “If the aliens can remember the future they should already know how to communicate with humans.”
I think the idea is that communication between two such alien consciousnesses requires the active involvement of both parties. The Heptapods can’t just show up talking colloquial Earthican because their minds and vocal anatomy don’t work that way. What they can communicate has to be interpreted into human terms by the human participants in the conversation. And that couldn’t happen until we learned how to interpret what they were giving us.
Knowing the outcome of a future event doesn’t mean you can skip the work of getting there. I once wrote a Deep Space Nine episode pitch in which someone asked the wormhole aliens/Prophets, who experience time nonlinearly like the aliens in Arrival, why they didn’t understand the human concept of time until Ben Sisko explained it to them. If they already knew the outcome of that explanation, why did they still need him to give it? The response I had them give was, “If you know you will breathe out, why do you still breathe in?”
@9: Her character chooses to have the child and not tell her husband. Renner’s character can’t accept it after the fact and distances himself. That’s something I wish had been explored a bit more. Why can’t he embrace the time given?
…Because a child suffered and died – in agony – for reasons that were eminently avoidable? If you know, objectively, that your child is going to die of cancer in less than two decades, it’s amoral to have the child anyway. I thought that’s one of the major reasons for abortion!
@18/iridium248: That’s a tricky question. On the one hand, the child will die of cancer in less than two decades. On the other hand, she will have a good life until then, and we all die eventually. I don’t think it’s amoral to have the child under these circumstances (nor do I think that it would be amoral to have an abortion).
@18. iridium248: Taking the question of abortion off the table (it’s far too thorny and complex to consider here for simple story purposes), a dozen years is still a long time. Life is an absolute good. 12 versus none is good.
So I’m saying I agree with Louise’s decision. The film is replete with a sense of melancholy because of the impending loss. But we don’t know that at first. At least, I thought I was watching something that happened already, not that will happen. The scenes with her daughter are happy ones, until we understand that it’s a tragedy.
In any case, if you use such foreknowledge as a society, you end up with one like that in Gattaca, where genetic testing weeds out any imperfections (such children are never born) and parents select their children’s traits off a menu.
Apparently the conversation between Weber and Banks was taken from a real one during the writing of the movie. The producer wanted to know why the characters were still stuck in basic vocabulary, and the screenwriter explained it the same way Banks did.
One detail I didn’t notice for a while is that Renner’s character calls the aliens “Abbott” and “Costello”. I knew they were comedians, but I didn’t remember that their most famous routine is “Who’s On First”, where they talk back and forth but never understand each other. Don’t jinx it, man.
@18/iridium248: The problem is that we’re too used to fiction that presents the fantasy that if you know the future, it’s possible to “change” it. So we tend to assume that fantasy is how time travel would “actually” work, and when presented with a story that actually approaches it in a scientifically plausible and logically consistent manner, we assume it’s “wrong” because it doesn’t conform to the fantasy.
In realistic temporal physics, even if you got information about the future, you wouldn’t be able to “change” it. Indeed, one model of quantum time travel says that getting information from one possible future would entangle you with that future and require you to experience it, the exact opposite of the usual fictional model where it lets you avoid that future.
What happens in Arrival isn’t even time travel. It’s just nonlinear perception. It’s like reading the pages of a book in random order instead of front to back. If you peek ahead and read how the book ends, that doesn’t let you rewrite the book. There’s still only one version of the story, and your only option is to follow it through to the end, even if you’ve been spoiled on the outcome.
Also, I’m with Jana and Sunspear about the abortion issue here. We never know how long our lives will last, and many people’s lives end in pain. That doesn’t mean the entire life leading up to that point is worthless. If the baby were born with a crippling defect that would cause them nothing but suffering and prevent any kind of functional life (note I did NOT say a “normal” life, because many people lead worthwhile lives with disabilities), then you might have an argument. But you’re talking about someone who was able to have a fulfilling life for a certain amount of time, which is really all any of us can expect.
Tyson has made many wrong claims. He seems comfortable talking with confidence on subjects he knows nothing about.
I’ve compiled a list of Tyson’s alternate facts. I’d like to include his comments on linguists vs cryptographers. But I don’t really understand the argument why he’s wrong in this case.
If you know, objectively, that your child is going to die of cancer in less than two decades, it’s amoral to have the child anyway.
Immoral? Immoral = against a moral code; amoral = of a person, lacking a moral code, or of an object or issue, something to which morality is irrelevant. So cheating on your husband is immoral, but designing a tin opener is amoral.
On the actual question: maybe the problem, from the husband’s point of view, is not that she took the decision she did, but that she took it alone and kept him in the dark. Most humans have strong opinions about whether they would want to have a child knowing that it would die young; he was deprived of that choice.
@23 – The argument is explained well in the Language Log post and its comments, but here’s a summary: A cryptographer or cryptanalyst works with known languages that are encoded in a way to hide what they’re saying. The language and the cryptographic system must be known to both parties (encoder and decoder). This is why code talkers were so effective in WW2: Navajo was completely unknown to the Germans.
A linguist works with a language they don’t know in order to describe it. German isn’t an encryption of English; neither is Xhosa or Russian or Tagalog. They’re languages with their own sets of vocabulary and rules. Linguists who do field work have techniques to elicit basic vocabulary and sentences (My name is Sarah, this is a dog, I like to eat apples), then build up to more and more complex vocabulary and sentences.
@21 – I didn’t know that. That’s cool!
@@@@@ 23: Cryptographers work on encrypting/decrypting known languages, but they don’t necessarily know much about language itself. Plus you cannot decrypt something that is not encrypted.
Egyptian, for instance, was a lost language until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, where the same language has been inscribed in several languages and alphabets. By knowing what was said, linguists were able to work backwards and learn Egyptian. A cryptographer would have been equally useless there.
And we are still talking about human languages. An alien language, from a species that different from us, requires somewhat who knows how languages work to be able to identify its structure, which in turn is both based on how those people think and shapes their way of thinking.
IMHO as a linguist and translator, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not that far off the mark as people seem to think. For instance, languages such as Russian and Spanish have two different verbs for the English verb “to be,” verbs that embody different concepts that “to be” sort of includes but not really. It follows that to be able to learn those languages you need to learn those concepts.
The heptapods’ experience of time is radically different from ours (which could be a product of them not having a front side and a back side like ours, for instance. Or not) and of course that experience is ingrained in their language as ours is in human languages. We don’t think about it because it is a common experience to all human beings.
ETA: As for Tyson, his ego makes him feel entitled to pontificate on stuff he knows zilch about. But he’s hardly alone in that…
@@@@@ 25: Great post! I was posting at the same time, so couldn’t see it before.
People’s idea of translation seems to be the universal translator thingie from Star Trek –probably the silliest doohickey ever conceived…
@26 Playing Devil’s advocate for Tyson before I include this in my list — While cryptographers decode known languages, it seems to me they’d be skilled at recognizing patterns in what seems to be chaos. More recent cryptography is heavy with math and I’d guess initial communication with E.T.’s would use number patterns. I thinking someone like Babbage or Turing would be a strong team member in such an endeavor.
Given the experience of Navajo code talkers in WWII I’d expect present day cryptographers have developed tools for dealing with unfamiliar syntax, grammar, etc.
Are there linguists with heavy math and computer skills? I’ll admit I know next to nothing about this discipline.
@28: IRL, no one would rely on a single expert or two like in Arrival. There would be a whole interdisciplinary team with linguists, math experts, and so forth. Mathematical linguistics is an actual branch of linguistics.
Again, I see no benefit from using cryptography experts there, for reasons that CD Covington explained better than me. Well, unless there is evidence of encrypted messages there, but you still need references known to both sides to be able to decode a cypher.
@27 It’s a wickedly useful plot contrivance, though.
@@@@@ 30: Agreed. And better than the other, more widely used, that posits that the whole universe speaks English, like in the original Flash Gordon series.
@31 *cough*Stargate*cough*
Look, just put the fish in your ear canal, and mind your towel.
26 et seq: linguistics isn’t cryptography, but there is a fair amount of crossover between the skills required for linguistics and for pre-machine cryptography; the most famous example would be Dilly Knox, classicist and cryptanalyst in Room 40 and BP. You can see the crossovers in looking for cribs – we know that this signal must include the word WETTERUBERSICHT; we know that this engraving must include the word PTOLEMY. Also in very basic techniques like frequency analysis. Many cryptanalysts have turned to linguistics on puzzles like Linear B script.
And, of course, if you’re decrypting a message in German, it helps to speak fluent German.
@32 *cough*Of course!*cough*
Given the experience of Navajo code talkers in WWII I’d expect present day cryptographers have developed tools for dealing with unfamiliar syntax, grammar, etc.
The thing is that modern encryption is so easy to execute that code talkers are sort of obsolete. You can do very hard encryption of voice or data traffic with a gadget the size of a matchbox. That wasn’t the case in WW2; encrypting a short data message took something that weighed at least 20kg, and encrypting voice took something the size of a room. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIGSALY
Not really practical for tactical radio traffic. Whereas your Navajo is relatively small and self-propelled.
There’s also the problem that anthropology has moved on: the reason they picked Navajo was that it was the biggest NA language that they knew had never been studied by a German or Japanese anthropologist. (If I remember they considered other languages, including Cheyenne, but they’d been studied already). Good luck finding a language with enough speakers which you can be sure has no handy grammar somewhere online (or in a university library) nowadays.
@@@@@ 34: Well, sure, but you still need to know the language(s) beforehand. I’m no cryptographer, but I’m pretty decent at basic decrypting, provided the language is one of the smattering I have some knowledge of.
Because that’s the other thing: no use, for example, Brazil deciding to use the language of the Omobono Indians as an encryption system if there are only 37 Omobono speakers left. That gets you enough code talkers to encrypt the traffic of one battalion once you exclude the old, the young, and the unfit for service…
@@@@@ 38: Yeah, you’d be running out of Omobonos pretty fast…
@2 It may not be a plausible premise; but I’m not sure it is less plausible than many of SF’s finest hyperdrives.
Although the Heptapods do remind me a little of the Tralfamadorians.
@29. Ashgrove “…but you still need references known to both sides to be able to decode a cypher.”
Isn’t the same true for linguists? For example the Rosetta Stone referred to three languages and was made by people familiar with all the languages.
Can you give an example of linguists deciphering a completely unknown language? Without use of references like the Rosetta Stone?
And neither you nor Covington have addressed my complaint: A cryptographer’s pattern finding skills could be helpful to deciphering an unknown language as well as a known, encrypted language.
@@@@@ 41. hopdavid: At the time of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, NO ONE was familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphs. That’s what made it such a milestone.
Linguists doing field work have been able to decipher unknown languages, but of course we are talking about human languages here. I’ll quote Covington’s post: “Linguists who do field work have techniques to elicit basic vocabulary and sentences (My name is Sarah, this is a dog, I like to eat apples), then build up to more and more complex vocabulary and sentences.”
For the sake of argument, I guess cryptographers could be included in a team trying to decipher alien languages, as maybe their skills in finding patterns could help. I have nothing against cryptographers, I just think it’s the wrong discipline for this particular goal.
Ashgrove @@@@@ 26:
Egyptian, for instance, was a lost language until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, where the same language has been inscribed in several languages and alphabets.
Well, not entirely lost — its descendant Coptic was still spoken (in Egyptian Christian liturgical contexts, at least), and I gather that Champolion’s knowledge of Coptic helped in the decipherment.
@@@@@ 43: Because human languages are rarely entirely lost… ;-)
Besides, I was talking about the hieroglyphs.
CD Covington @@@@@ 25:
This is why code talkers were so effective in WW2: Navajo was completely unknown to the Germans.
Navajo code talkers were actually used in the Pacific, in the fighting against the Japanese; I think this was mainly because they were recruited by the Marines, who fought almost exclusively in the Pacific.
I’ve seen arguments that the US military decided against large-scale use of code-talkers in the European theater in WW2 at least partly because the Germans were aware of their use in the First World War (Choctaw and Cherokee speakers in US Army units), and supposedly even sent anthropologists to the US in the 1930s to try to learn Indian languages. (And supposedly didn’t make much progress, because there were too many languages and dialects.) Nonetheless, there were Army code talkers in the North African and European theaters using other languages, such as Assiniboine, Comanche, Meskwaki, Mohawk, and Tlingit.
@34/ajay: My uncle Emmett Bennett Jr. was a codebreaker during WWII and one of the key figures in the decipherment of Linear B. He compiled the symbol frequency tables that Michael Ventris used to crack the script and determine what language it was. So yeah, there is some overlap. Although arguably cracking Linear B was more cryptography than linguistics, because it was just a matter of determining that its patterns matched a known language.
After seeing the film, I began to doubt my understanding of the book. Please correct me, but does the book give us any order of sequence on the events of her daughter‘s death and her work with the aliens?
If so, I missed it, and, hence, came to this interpretation of the story: by learning the alien language, the protagonist learned to perceive time in a nonlinear manner. Which in turn enabled her, to balance her grief about her loss with all the good moments she had with her daughter. This implies of course, that in a linear perspective her daughter has died already.
So it’s not a magic ‚time travel by language’ or even ‘remembering the future’ at all, for me, but of how we deal with loss, with weighting good against bad memories. And the point of the story would be, that all memories in a way are equally present – or at least can be perceived to be so – if we were able to think nonlinearilly.
This would also make it a truly linguistic story – as opposed to one about the physics of time: how language alters our worldview as a psychological process, not how it changes our capabilities to perceive physical phenomena. (Having a language that enables us to experience time literally as nonlinear seems like having a language that makes us see ininfrared)
People seem to confuse writing systems and language. Cryptographers use methods from quantitative linguistics to figure out which symbols correspond to which sounds in an alphabetic script/code or common words in a known language. If you don’t know the language at all being able to read it when it is transcribed into an alphabet you know doesn’t mean you understand what you are reading.
@@@@@ 47: If I remember correctly (fat chance!) both the movie and the short story are told in flashback, after the daughter’s death. But I could be wrong. Though in the movie Louise actually taps into her flashes of the future to solve a current crisis. Can’t remember if it’s the same in the story, I read it a looong time ago.
Funny that you mention vision. There are many scholarly debates about color perception in, say, Homer’s Greece, regarding metaphors such as “the wine-colored sea.”
@47/Blueshift: We were led to think that what we were seeing about her daughter’s death was in flashback, but that was the twist — it was actually a flashforward, about the child she would have in the future with the male lead that she hadn’t gotten together with yet.
@45 – whoops, my bad. I’m not a big history buff, so I should probably have googled it.
Other people have commented on Hop’s question as well as I can; I’m not sure where the disconnect is, except maybe birgit @48 hits on it: Cryptography is about the symbols, linguistics is about the language.
Besides, if it were just that easy to decipher unknown languages using cryptographic techniques, Linear A and the Voynich manuscript would be solved by now. Plus, two of the people who broke the PURPLE code in WW2 were unable to use their cryptanalytic techniques to decipher Mayan writing.
@code talkers: I’ve heard a quote from a Japanese cryptanalyst interviewed after the war that was roughly “decrypt it? We couldn’t even transcribe it!”
@42. Ashgrove “Linguists doing field work have been able to decipher unknown languages,”
So give me an example. What unknown language has been cracked without a cipher like the Rosetta Stone?
Linear B. https://www.omniglot.com/writing/linearb.htm (Though technically it’s just a form of ancient Greek.)
@51. CD Covington — True that cryptographers haven’t cracked Linear A or the Voynich manuscript. But neither have linguists.
@54/CD Covington: I’m unhappy that that linked article fails to mention Uncle Emmett.
https://camws.org/emmett-l-bennett-jr
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/a-minoan-linear-b-index-by-emmett-l-bennettjr-yale-uiversity-press-1953-london-geoffrey-cumberlege-oxford-university-press-pp-xxiv-119/6769E88536C4A937ECB0BD7CBDE7997A
@24. ajay: I think you’ve got it. If anyone would be able to understand her choice, it’d be her future husband and father of her daughter, who went thru the same experience she did. Bit odd that she excluded him.
@47. Blueshift: haven’t read the original story, but if so (daughter already dead), it’s a big change in the movie. Her daughter will exist in the near future, after the encounter with the aliens, as her relationship with Renner has only just begun. As CLB said, we think we’re seeing flashbacks not flashforwards. Her choice to have a child knowing it will alienate her husband isn’t in the past. That’s what reveals the consequences of her non-linear perception.
@54. CD Covington No, Linear B wasn’t a language we knew nothing about. Ancient Greek is a language we already knew something about.
You still haven’t established that Linguistics would be the better tool for deciphering a completely alien language.
Or at least not conclusively enough to include in my list of Tyson gaffes. What’s the best way to decode an alien language? I’d say opinions are speculative at best.
@58/hopdavid: I’d say that examples of ancient scripts are beside the point. The task in the film wasn’t to decipher an ancient alien language with only written text available, it was to learn a currently spoken alien language with alien speakers at hand who were willing to cooperate.
Anybody can learn a completely unknown human language from a native speaker. You start with pointing to objects and learning the words for them, then you move on to actions, simple sentences, etc. Linguists are particularly good at this because they already know how to do it and because they know a lot about languages in general.
Nobody knows how different an alien language would be, but assuming from the outset that this kind of linguistic knowledge would be less useful than generic pattern matching skills seems strange. I like the idea to include a mathematician and start with numbers, but I’d still want a linguist to organise the data gathering and try to make sense of the results.
I wonder, in Banks position, if you knew having a child with Donnelly was going to be 12 amazing years, and an experience that would redefine your life, the suffering largely yours to live with after, would you choose to have that time, and have that child, or deny her existence, and deny yourself that time? And wouldn’t you, somewhere in the back of your mind hold onto the hope that your memory of the future was wrong, and that somehow you couldn’t change the path and she would survive? Maybe in the end, would you know, somehow, that you had already made the decision to have her, and that you didn’t have a choice?
Hopdavid, there seems to be nothing that I or anyone else in this thread can say that will convince you, so I am not going to attempt to do so any further.
@47/Blueshift: Read the original story very carefully, paying attention to the tense shifts. The scenes with the aliens are in past tense; the scenes with the daughter are in future tense (usually framed as “I remember when you’ll…”); and the first and last scenes of the story are in present tense, revealing when the narrator’s point of view really is. Obvious when it’s pointed out, but completely unobtrusive on first read — this is brilliant writing.
@57/Sunspear: The father was a physicist, not a linguist; he didn’t learn the language. In the story, the linguists apparently never told anybody they could remember the future.
I loved/will love/have loved this film so much as well. This follow-up article by Covington is excellent.
I read the story (novella) by Chiang prior (not a “short story”, as STORY OF YOUR LIFE won the Nebula novella category in 2000) to seeing the movie.
ARRIVAL may very well be the best science fiction film of this century. My slight issue with the film was the international warmongering subplot, which is not in Chiang’s story.
All the best, CHEERS!
Hi
A great movie, short story and post in my mind. I am really enjoying the focus on linguistics, it is an issue that is or should be so important to first contact SF that I cannot wait to see what other works you cover.
Happy Reading
Guy
@@@@@ 63: “I read the story (novella) by Chiang prior (not a “short story”, as STORY OF YOUR LIFE won the Nebula novella category in 2000) to seeing the movie.”
I remember it as very short, which is probably due to how fast I read it.
As for Arrival being the best SF film of this century, it is for me so far.
@@@@@ 61: “Hopdavid, there seems to be nothing that I or anyone else in this thread can say that will convince you, so I am not going to attempt to do so any further.”
Seconded.
@@@@@ Christopher L Bennett: Wow –you have a brilliant family!
The only ancestor I can boast of was the translator of the Bible into an obscure European language. But that was a while ago…
I had two major complaints with the movie, but I adored it nonetheless.
If the future is already written/premembered, then doesn’t that imply no free will? Without free will, there are no real stakes. It’s just some stuff that happened. The twist ending turns out to be that any tension or difficult choices we just saw the characters go through were false like the ending of The Usual Suspects.
It’s a false dichotomy to say Louise’s choice was between having Hannah or no child. If she indeed had a choice, she could have delayed intimacy by a second or two and probably conceived a healthier child with a more pleasant existence.
Oh man, this movie drove some very interesting conversations among my colleagues about how, realistically, one would approach learning an alien language. You wouldn’t be able to rely on the Chomskian theory of innate language at all. You’d have to throw all assumptions about brain wiring for language right out the window. You’d have to start completely from scratch, throwing things at the wall until something stuck. It would be the process of years of work! I guess it says a lot about my group that we thought that would be a great deal of fun.
I loved that Arrival leans into the scientific deconstruction of language, and the underpinnings of ideas that make up words. It hurt a little bit to see the plot hinge on Sapir-Whorf, but you can’t have everything. It does make for great science fiction!
I just figured they were Caffiends speaking in coffee stains.
@62. perihelion: “… the linguists apparently never told anybody they could remember the future”
That would defeat the entire purpose of the aliens’ visit. Unless that’s different in the novella too.
Loved the movie, article and comments. My thoughts are with those who question whether there was a choice and how future events are affected by our choices. Edgar Casey quantified his dream of the future by mentioning how they could be tempered by our choices. Not completely changed but mitigated, altered. The Dalai Lama did not on his prophesies for Tibet and, unfortunately, the opposite of his prediction came to pass.
@68/Lorenzo: Free will exists, up to a point. You have the freedom to do things that are possible under the circumstances, but not to do things that are impossible. You have the freedom to make a decision; you do not have the freedom to rewrite time so that you make a different decision.
In other words, how much free will you have depends on the context. A person standing in an open field has more freedom to choose their direction of motion than a person falling from a cliff. Similarly, a time traveler would be under more constraints on their choices than a normal person. Time travel is not an ordinary circumstance, so the constraints on a time traveler cannot be assumed to apply to everyone.
First of all, Star Trek: Enterprise had Hoshi the Terrified lured into service by a Bright Shiny New Language, and it turns out to be a really good thing when the away team is stuck in a alien ship.
I also strongly recommend NATIVE TONGUE by Elgin, since in their universe the only way to learn an alien language is to have a human baby and an alien baby grow up as friends. Given that the younger you learn a language, the better it sticks (which I have found to be the case), this is an interesting look at things.
Also, BABEL-17 by Delaney asserts thinking changes with languages, which may or may not be hooey, but Delaney sure made it work for the story.
@74 – I only made it halfway through the first season of Enterprise before I decided to watch something else (Babylon 5), and I was initially cautiously optimistic about Hoshi. And then they had her say “I can almost hear the syntax” and I wanted to throw my tablet across the room.
@75. CD: So you’re saying Hoshi was to linguists as Deanna Troi was to therapy counselors?
Alien on view screen, raging and spouting. Troi: “Captain… I believe he’s angry.”
And B5 is better than I remembered. Almost finished with a 5-season re-watch. Despite the occasional clunky acting, bad sets (the executive offices didn’t have any doors, so anyone passing in the hallway could overhear sensitive meetings), the primitive special effects, and the White Star fleet looking like a bunch of dead chickens, the writing is very smart and even prescient. Or perhaps what has gone before politically has come around again.
@sunspear/76 haha yeah, that sounds accurate :D
I’d never watched B5 before, and it was so good. I mean, yeah, it was totally 90s, and the Zima-sponsored episode sure was a thing that happened, but yeah. The politics were a bit too real.
And I liked the way they talked about languages, and their translator machines actually required data to work, and the computer took time to process it.
@75/CD Covington: “I was initially cautiously optimistic about Hoshi. And then they had her say “I can almost hear the syntax” and I wanted to throw my tablet across the room.”
In “Fight or Flight”, they had her say: “The grammar sounds bimodal.” That was also the episode where she learned an alien language in a matter of hours (or minutes?) and was able to talk to the aliens when the universal translator wasn’t. But at least they portrayed the translator as a device that needs to gather some data before it can start translating.
@76/Sunspear: B5’s “primitive” effects were revolutionary for their day. The new technology they used allowed complex CG animation to be achieved for a fraction of the cost of what had been possible before, which allowed far more elaborate shots than could be achieved with conventional techniques like miniatures and matte photography. True, it looked more recognizably CG, but the trade-off was worth it for the enormous increase in versatility and affordability. And it paved the way for SF/fantasy becoming commonplace on TV at last, because it was finally possible to do FX-heavy productions regularly on a TV budget.
@78/Jana: A universal translator is a necessary fudge to make storytelling about first contacts feasible without always focusing on the lengthy process of learning to communicate. So it’s an acceptable break from reality. The best you can hope for is the occasional handwave to convey the illusion that there’s some logical explanation behind it. I liked it that Enterprise tried to give a sense of that process. The early first season did a good job of making alien contact feel suitably challenging and mysterious, rather than the routine it is in the other shows.
@79/Christopher: I’m not complaining about the universal translator, I’m complaining about linguistic technobabble and Hoshi’s superpower.
@80/Jana: Well, that’s my point. Things like that are just handwaves to make a necessary impossibility feel a bit more grounded. They’re part of the fantasy conceit. They don’t actually hold up to analysis any more than anything else about language in Star Trek, but at least they help support the fantasy that there’s some logic behind it.
@81. CLB: “They don’t actually hold up to analysis any more than anything else about language in Star Trek”
Like a French captain with a strong Royal Shakespeare Company accent? Just imagine a Picard who sounds like Inspector Jacques Clouseau…
@81/Christopher: The part where Hoshi gathered data made the universal translator feel more grounded, but the part where she was better than the translator didn’t. That was a different fantasy, one about linguists.
And they could have had her say a less nonsensical sentence than “The grammar sounds bimodal”. Grammar doesn’t sound like anything, and I’m not sure what “bimodal” is supposed to mean. A language with only two modes? What would they be? Factual and non-factual? Even if we assume that it’s a futuristic term that has nothing to do with our concept of linguistic modality, “The language seems to be bimodal” would still be a better sentence.
@82/Sunspear: I was taught British English in school. Perhaps so was Picard, only with 24th century teaching methods that do away with foreign accents.
But what about an android who has perfect natural language capabilities except for idioms and contractions?
@84. Jana: Well the person who programmed him was just too damn prissy. You’d think he would’ve been fed some pop culture to help with idiomatic speech.
Forgot to add: I may be wrong, but don’t think Picard’s spoken French anywhere. And Sir Stewart doesn’t speak a lick, as far as I know. So there’s a casting conundrum for you.
I poke fun, but I’m excited about the new series. Maybe we’ll hear him actually speak some French, if only to his pittie.
@82/Sunspear: There is nothing at all implausible about Picard speaking English with an English accent. If you look at people who are bilingual from childhood, like a lot of Hispanic Americans, they can switch effortlessly in mid-sentence from speaking English with a flawless American accent to speaking Spanish with a flawless Mexican or Central American (or whatever) accent. They learned both languages at the same time, so they pronounce them both fluently. Similarly, it stands to reason that Picard, a native of a united future Europe, would’ve learned both British English and French from childhood, and it is therefore unreasonable to expect him to speak English with anything but a British accent. The only thing that would be implausible is if he spoke French with a British accent. (I’ve long found it amusing that Jonathan Frakes said “Jean-Luc Picard” with more of a French accent than Patrick Stewart did.)
@83/Jana: Yes. It is a fantasy. That is not in dispute. The point is that some fantasies are necessary to allow the story to happen and thus can be excused. Poetic license is not the same as error.
@84/Jana: “But what about an android who has perfect natural language capabilities except for idioms and contractions?”
There are plenty of autistic-spectrum people who have trouble understanding idioms and contractions. Both are usages where the true meaning is not stated outright but represented by a distinct word or phrase, and that hidden meaning can be hard for autistic people to grasp.
Really, looking back on TNG, it’s got a regrettable neurotypicality bias, because it insists that Data doesn’t act “human” because he doesn’t act neurotypical, which is literally dehumanizing to all the neurodivergent people in real life who behave very much like Data and have some of the same difficulties.
@CLB: you may have missed the point/joke: Picard doesn’t just speak English with an British accent (of which there are many, sometimes connected to specific schools (Eton) where one was educated), he speaks it with a pronounced theatrical accent, which makes sense for a classically trained stage actor. Perhaps he performed Shakespeare growing up as a wee French child. The other part of the joke is that Picard doesn’t actually speak any French.
This reminds me of the scene in The Americans where the Jennings daughter demands proof that her parents are from Russia. Her mother says a few things in Russian, probably phonetically rendered. The father remains completely silent, likely because the actor, although great otherwise, couldn’t speak a word of Russian.
@85/Sunspear: He sang Frère Jacques with the children in “Disaster”, does that count?
@86/Christopher: I did find it a bit odd that Picard pronounces his own name in such an un-French manner. He doesn’t do that in the German dubbed version, which I watched first.
“The point is that some fantasies are necessary to allow the story to happen and thus can be excused.”
Well, the fantasy that linguists learn languages incredibly fast wasn’t necessary for the story. Why not let Hoshi take over, but give her access to the translator’s files and have a slow, painful conversation with many pauses that still saves the day?
Are you sure that autistic-spectrum people have trouble understanding contractions? Unlike idioms, there is no hidden meaning there, it’s simply a shortened form of a word. Since we’ve been talking about French, what about the fact that “le” and “la” become “l’” when the following word starts with a vowel? Do French autistic-spectrum people have trouble with that? Or is the problem really that two forms of the same word are used, a formal one and an informal one? In that case, it wouldn’t be a problem with contractions per se, but a problem with linguistic registers. That would make more sense, because those have a lot to do with social interaction.
@87/Sunspear: I missed the joke too. I never noticed the theatrical accent. I have such a bad ear for accents in English, I usually can’t even tell who’s British and who’s American.
@Jana. Ha. I’d say not. I can sing it (more or less) and I’ve only had a couple years of high school French.
Picard’s cultural touchstones are either strongly British (Shakespeare) or American (Moby Dick; the Borg are his White Whale and he goes full Ahab for a bit). There’re very few French undertones or overtones about him.
Maybe one clue will be what he calls his dog in the next series. How do you say “Number One” in French?
@89/Sunspear: Numéro Un.
@Jana: So if “Number One” is a name and Picard is a native French speaker, he’ll call his pittie (pit bull) Numero Un, especially on the grounds of the Picard winery. I’m guessing he’ll translate it and say “Number One” for the joke effect.
(This also, of course, would mean that Number One is not a name, despite the delusion that’s persisted since the sixties.)
I recall a couple of instances in the first season when Picard drifted over into super French-ness: Data says something dismissive about the French language and Picard chastises him for it, and another time when Picard goes on about the French flag. That may have been in the same episode, I can’t be sure.
But yes, he’s probably the biggest French Anglophile ever put on film. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. That’s just how they roll in the future. United Earth and all.
@92/Spike: Personally, I liked it better when they had Uhura speak Swahili in the original series, and Scotty and Chekov with their accents, and patriotism, and kilt and bagpipes and stuff. Sure, a lot of it was stereotypes (although speaking Swahili wasn’t), but I liked the sense of a truly diverse international crew. The problem with the TNG approach is that it’s not so much a blending of cultures as a homogenisation. Everyone’s an Anglophile on United Earth. Although at least they celebrated the Hindu Festival of Lights in “Data’s Day”.
I think it was Babylon 5’s last season that had a good substitute for a “universal translator”. The humans meet a previously unknown alien race, so they send them a massive data file. It’s a complete artificial language designed to be very easily learned by computers, with explanations of the whole vocabulary and grammar in terms of universal concepts. The aliens are supposed to have their computers learn it and translate their message into it, and then the human computers can translate it into English. Still stretching credibility, but at least they were trying.
Of course the alien computers would first have to understand the data. Human languages aren’t just binary code.
In the Acorna series the only books they read are English-language classics like Shakespeare. There doesn’t seem to be any literature from after our time or other planets or non-English earth cultures.
@94 Gareth: You may be thinking of Crusade. They had an archaeologist/linguist on board the Excalibur.
@87/Sunspear: Yeah, Picard has an English school accent. So what? It’s the 24th century. Europe is politically and culturally united by then. It’s not the tiniest bit implausible that a French-born 24th-century human went to boarding school in England, which is right next door, an easy commute for a society with transporters. The meme that there’s something strange about it is not remotely funny or clever, just thoughtless and tiresome.
@88/Jana: “Why not let Hoshi take over, but give her access to the translator’s files and have a slow, painful conversation with many pauses that still saves the day?”
Because it’s a 42-minute episode. You can’t drag the pacing of a story to a halt with a slow, painful learning process. I thought we’d already established that this is the whole reason why it’s a necessary fictional conceit to streamline translation, whether by a person or a machine.
“Are you sure that autistic-spectrum people have trouble understanding contractions?”
Some do. You can’t generalize about autistic people; that’s the whole reason it’s called a spectrum. Laypeople have gotten the mistaken idea that “spectrum” means a scale from “less autistic” to “more autistic,” but that’s like assuming the color spectrum is just different shades of gray. What it really means is that autism is a collection of multiple different behavioral and perceptual issues that each person on the spectrum has a different combination of in different proportions. It’s like how different chemical elements have different emission spectra — one might have spectral lines in red, orange, and blue, while another might have them in orange, yellow, green, and violet, and so on. So two different people on the autism spectrum might have completely different expressions of it. This page explains it in more detail: https://theaspergian.com/2019/05/04/its-a-spectrum-doesnt-mean-what-you-think/
“Unlike idioms, there is no hidden meaning there, it’s simply a shortened form of a word.”
Simple to you or me, because we’re so used to the idea that we take it for granted. But shortening is still a form of analogy, one thing symbolizing something different. Using “he’d” to symbolize “he would” isn’t that different from using “hot” to represent “desirable” — it requires knowing that the word is a stand-in for something different, something that the brain has to cross-reference based on its recognition of the need to do so, and by accessing its memory of what the symbol stands for. It’s a multi-step process that has to be learned, more complex than most of us assume. It’s like walking. We do it without thinking, but that’s because we learned how to do it long ago and forgot what an intricate, challenging process it was to master. Easy is not the same thing as simple.
@92/Spike: Early TNG tried to make Picard a cartoonishly nationalist Frenchman, much like Chekov was for Russia. That was clumsy and annoying and it’s no wonder they overcorrected in the other direction. Plus it’s normal for TV characters to become more like the actors who play them over time.
@97/Christopher: “Because it’s a 42-minute episode. You can’t drag the pacing of a story to a halt with a slow, painful learning process.”
That’s not what I had in mind. I imagined giving Hoshi a handheld, making her look up words, making the conversation more tentative. Kind of what they did in TUC, only without the silly paper books.
“Using “he’d” to symbolize “he would” isn’t that different from using “hot” to represent “desirable””.
What? It’s completely different. “He’d” doesn’t symbolise “he would”. “He’d” and “he would” are two arbitrary sound sequences that symbolise the same mental concept. Unlike “hot = desirable”, there’s no obvious metaphor involved. It’s more like “fridge” and “refrigerator” or “bike” and “bicycle”. Or “a” and “an”, for that matter.
@96 Thanks, I’ll check it out.
@98/Jana: “What? It’s completely different.”
And red and green look completely different to me, but they look the same to someone with red/green colorblindness. Different people don’t perceive things the same way, so don’t assume that your way of processing information is the only one that exists.
@100/Christopher: I’m not talking about my way of processing information. I’m talking about language, and linguistics, because these are things I’m interested in. I’m talking about the fact that as far as I know, there is nothing special about contractions except the fact that they are spelled weirdly. When a child learns English as their first language, they may take “I’m” to be basic and “I am” to be derived, or vice versa, or take them as two unrelated sound-meaning pairs and realise much later that they are, in fact, related.
When you mentioned that some autistic-spectrum people have problems with contractions, I was intrigued and wondered what the problem was. Because I would be surprised if the problem was that they are contractions. It may be related to linguistic registers, as I mentioned above. Or the strange spelling, perhaps? In that case I would expect the same people to struggle with French “l’”, too, but not with German “im” (=in the). Or is it the fact that there are two similar but distinct sound sequences for the same meaning? In that case, I would expect them to struggle with “bike” and “bicycle”, too. On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect people who struggle mainly with metaphors to have problems with contractions. Perhaps I’m wrong – that would be even more interesting. If there’s any research that proves me wrong, I want to know about it. Please cite your sources!
@94, 96 – There was definitely a scene like that in B5, because I haven’t seen Crusade. I want to say it was season 2, maybe early season 3, because it was Sheridan and Ivanova, and it was before all the plot started happening all the time. There were new aliens, and they had a big translation matrix to upload to B5, whose computers had to process it for their translator systems, and it was going to take another 4 hours, or something. Maybe these aliens had had contact with the Minbari, so there was already some sort of structure in place they could base translations around, so it wasn’t their computers just trying to figure each other’s languages out. I dunno. Probably still not very plausible, but there was a veneer of trying to make it not look like magic.
Re Hoshi – in the dozen or so episodes I watched, there was an attempt to depict some of the painful learning process on occasion, or showing the UT still learning and not being perfect. I’d expect that, especially in humanity’s first forays into the black (since the Vulcans weren’t sharing info). But there was just so much “OMG NO WTF WHY” that I stopped watching. (Well, also I hated half the characters and didn’t care about the rest, so…)
Re UT in general – without it, there’s no “alien civilization of the week” TV show, so it’s a necessary evil. You can get more deeply into the perils of first contact and alien languages in novels, of course. But even with UT, make the handwavium plausible enough that it doesn’t make people hit pause and yell about the nonsense. (I assume this is what physicists feel like a lot of the time. I know this is what medical types feel like when watching House or other hospital dramas.)
@perihelion/62
Thank you! I‘ll read it again with that in mind.
@102/CD Covington: I liked Hoshi and Porthos.
@97. CLB. “Yeah, Picard has an English school accent.”
That is literally not what I said. You generalized the “British accent” part, of which I said a school accent is one of many available ones. (Read the context again.) What I said from the first post is that Picard has a specific classically trained stage accent. Because obviously the actor has that speech and accent.
No matter how unified Earth is in the future, no matter how much the French come to love British literature and theater, you won’t get a Frenchman sounding like that. Unless he was trained on the British stage.
Explaining in-universe why an Englishman was cast to play a Frenchman doesn’t work. I love Patrick Stewart, but Meryl Streep he’s not. Some actors can mimic accents, some can speak other languages. Others have one tone, that’s it.
So, explaining a real world circumstance of an actor’s abilities or style in terms of an imaginary/non-existent/arbitrarily defined pop culture universe is irrelevant.
About the only realistic way you can handle languages in that situation is to have all the civilizations be closely enough related that they can still understand each other. That still allows for plenty of interesting variation. Elizabethan England, Antebellum Georgia, and 21st century Canada all spoke a mutually intelligible language.
Sunspear @@@@@ 105
No matter how unified Earth is in the future, no matter how much the French come to love British literature and theater, you won’t get a Frenchman sounding like that. Unless he was trained on the British stage.
Well, it’s unlikely you’d get an English person sounding like that, either, since 24th Century accents probably won’t sound identical to 20th Century accents, even for people from the same geographic region.
(Realistically, Captain Kirk wouldn’t speak with William Shatner’s exact accent — but that’s a level of absurdly pedantic world-building we’re understandably not going to get, except in exceptional cases like The Expanse’s Belter accent.)
Here’s my head canon theory: Picard spent summers as a child at his grandfather’s house in England. Grandpa was a charismatic classically trained actor, so Picard went around emulating him. Which drove his conservative French father crazy. And so all the more reason to do it! :)
Now that still doesn’t explain his non-French sounding brother (and father too for that matter, who was shown in a Q created flashback), but… something something universal translator…
There’s a scene in First Contact where a character from post-apocalyptic America meets Picard and panics when she hears his voice. He hastily assures her that he’s not from the “Eastern Alliance”. I always wondered if she was reacting to his accent.
@107. Peter: I’d guess there would be a flattening out of accents. The more uniform the government and culture, the more alike everyone should sound, similar to how the mid-west flat accent predominates in the US.
Babylon 5 may be interesting in this context. Apparently the language of a unified Earthgov is English, which the ambassadors have to learn. None of the Minbari who speak English have accents, except for Delenn, because of course Mira Furlan speaks English with a Croatian accent. None of the Narn have accents.
Londo Mollari has a pronounced accent that’s an amalgam of things, including Jutasik’s Czech grandmother. He invented it out of whole cloth because he was sensitive to being criticized about accents. He’s pretty much the only Centauri that sounds that way. (Guess that makes it critic-proof.) Refa and maybe the old emperor are the only ones who (somewhat) imitate it. Vir, the “moon-faced assassin of joy,” sounds like a nebbishy Woody Allen.
Kosh is using a uTranslator, as the blinky lights on the front plate of his encounter suit indicate.
One interesting detail is about Wayne Alexander, who was born and raised in the US (California?) he had several roles on the show (Lorien, Drakh). One of them was as Jack the Ripper, who serves as the interrogator for the Vorlons. Apparently his upper-class English accent was so good that native speakers assumed he was an Englishman.
At least casting an actor strongly defined by their culture or language in a part not quite a good fit for them isn’t near as bad as this:
actors should be able to play any role
@109. Interesting. I thought it was because their camp was being attacked from orbit. Lilly looks up and calls it something and Cochrane is surprised. “After all these years,” I think he says. Anyway, I assumed they thought the Borg ship was an Eastern Alliance orbital weapons platform or some such, and she assumed Picard was part of an EA paramilitary team sent to take over the camp.
To bring it all back: Benoit Fiset, listed as language consultant for Arrival, will be “dialect coach / script translation (1 episode, 2019)” for Picard. Not sure if the single episode credit is accurate, but at least they appear to be giving language some consideration.
@106/Gareth Wilson: That would take all the fun out of space exploration! Not only couldn’t the characters discover alien civilisations, they couldn’t even rediscover lost human colonies.
@107/PeterErwin: That also means that time travel stories shouldn’t work the way they do. Kirk shouldn’t be able to pose as someone from the 20th century, nor Picard as someone from the 19th century. But perhaps they’re using the UT there, too.
@108/Spike: Surely Picard speaks French with his brother, and his nephew, and his father. We just hear it as English. English playing French shouldn’t have a French accent.
@@@@@ Jana – I liked Hoshi well enough, and the alien doctor was fun. I had to google to find out that Porthos was the dog, and that’s fair, dogs are cute :D
@101/Jana: Sorry, I can’t remember my sources. But what seems obvious when you’ve already mastered it can be harder for someone else to grasp. Yes, ‘ve is short for have, and ‘d is short for would. That seems simple enough. But on the other hand, dive is not short for endive, and lad is not short for salad. In those cases, the shorter word is completely unrelated to the longer word, and so it never occurs to us to associate them despite the shared letters. We associate contractions with the things they’re short for because we’ve learned to recognize them as contractions, as representations of something unseen. So it’s the same kind of mental processing as understanding symbolic or metaphorical speech, another way in which a word represents something beyond its immediately visible meaning.
Anyway, what most people (including writers in TNG’s later seasons) misunderstand about Data is that “Datalore” never said he was incapable of using contractions, just that he preferred to speak more formally and precisely, so that contractions were out of character for him (even though that character trait never existed until the moment it was mentioned; he’d used contractions fairly regularly up to that point, including earlier in the same damn episode!). It was only in “The Offspring” and “Future Imperfect” that it was retconned as something Data was literally incapable of doing, which made no sense. Especially since we still saw him use contractions when quoting another person or performing a fictional character.
Written contractions are an attempt to represent what happens naturally when you talk fast. If you look at speech sounds there are no clear borders between letters and words. They are an artifact of written language (and spaces between words are a relatively recent invention that doesn’t exist in all writing systems).
@116/birgit: But we’re talking about spoken contractions in Data’s dialogue — saying “It’s” instead of “it is” and the like. In that case, it’s a whole different sound, not merely the blurring resulting from fast speech.
@115/Christopher: No problem, perhaps I’ll stumble across it some day.
Concerning contractions as symbolic speech, all speech is symbolic. Language learners can learn contracted words like any others, without knowing that they’re short forms of other words. It only gets complicated in writing, when they have to put all these apostrophes in.
@118/Jana: Yes, and people can learn metaphors too. But it’s harder for some people than others. Normal language is symbolic, yes, but it’s only one layer of symbolism, a word and its definition. The problem is when you add a second layer, when the link between the symbol and its meaning is indirect.
Yes, and people can learn metaphors too.
Don’t you mean, ‘Sokath his eyes uncovered’?
;)
@119/Christopher: I agree with that. I just don’t think that contractions add a second layer.
@120/Spike: Shaka, when the walls fell.
@121/Jana: It’s not about how you think of it. It’s about how people whose brains work differently from yours think of it. The whole point is that the way you think is not the way they think.
It’s worth pointing out that the short story differs relevantly from the movie in one very important way:
In the story, conscious experience is ‘epiphenomenal’ – it has no effects on causality at all. So having it be non-sequential means that only the protagonist’s ‘experience’ changes, not the events that occur (including speech and other actions). The mind is basically just watching a movie, and learning the language causes scenes from the movie to be viewed non-sequentially. In the movie, conscious experience is part of causality, and thus can create ‘paradoxes’ like knowing and using a phone number you haven’t yet been shown.
I respect Chiang’s writing and thinking greatly, and I acknowledge that there are lots of people who hold the philosophical position that consciousness is an epiphenomenon. But there are two points: First, the idea is so obviously wrong to me that I can only consider it as a stupid error that I can barely comprehend people making, regardless of my sympathies to them personally; Second, the first arrangement would make for an unsatisfying movie.
@123/melendwyr: A time loop where a future event causes itself is not a paradox. A paradox is something that contradicts itself, that leads to two mutually opposing outcomes, like “This sentence is a lie” (if it’s true, it’s a lie, and if it’s a lie, it’s true). If an event from the future causes itself — she knows the phone number in advance because she sees herself learning the phone number in the future — that is an entirely self-consistent event and thus entirely allowable in physics and causality (see: Novikov self-consistency principle). It contradicts our assumptions about causality, which is why we think it’s a paradox, but assumptions are not reality. What matters is that the sequence of events doesn’t contradict itself.
A time paradox is something like the Grandfather Paradox — you go back and kill your grandfather, so you’re never born, so you don’t kill your grandfather, so you are born, so you go back and kill your grandfather, so you aren’t born, so… etc. It’s a cycle that never resolves, that has no meaningful result because each result leads to its own negation. But if you go back and save your grandfather, thereby making sure that you are born, then that isn’t a paradox. It’s a singular loop with a single consistent result — you are born. It’s a common mistake to call both of these cycles “time paradoxes” even though one doesn’t resolve and the other does. The only actual paradox is the one that doesn’t resolve.
@122/Christopher: Very funny. I’m using “I think” to soften my disagreement, and you turn it into a statement about different brains. Serves me right.
What I’m trying to tell you is that you and I know that “it’s” is a derived form of “it is”, but a child learning English doesn’t know that. A child probably hears, and therefore learns, “it’s” first. Therefore “it’s” and its meaning should be a basic sound-meaning pair. Or “s” and its meaning, because the same word “s” also occurs with other subjects.
@125. You have to be wary of people who try to redefine your argument for you.
It’s a debating tactic. Instead of addressing the nuance or detail of what you’ve said, the debater redefines the argument in his terms, or limits it to the range of his knowledge, then attempts to have you argue against that. Best option is to be direct.
@124: ” A paradox is something that contradicts itself”
The word ‘paradox’ has two distinct meanings. One is the logical paradox, a self-contradiction. They are impossible. The other is the counter-intuitive paradox, the situation which our first reactions incline us to think is impossible but actually is not.
An event causing itself isn’t paradox-One. It IS paradox-Two.