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A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

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Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#61

Post by awinter-py »

thefalcon wrote: post #51
awinter-py wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

natives of grid-based cities can always find north as well. Interestingly the street grid isn't a language feature.

My city is grid based, but downtown is rotated 45 degrees from the cardinal directions. This leaves me constantly confused and confounded while downtown, not least because the transition streets from downtown to the rest of the city are all at crazy angles (that is, unlike anything where I grew up). As you say, this isn't a language feature. For me the concepts of N,E,W,S and the easy visualization matters more than…

fascinating. what city?

It sounds like you're not a native -- in your observation, is the ability to navigate easily in the 'rotated downtown' area correlated with having grown up nearby?

That would make a cool study.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#62

Post by cnorthwood »

cletus wrote: post #2

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 lang…

We don't actually pause between words as we speak, and there are many languages which don't have spaces either.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

Razengan wrote: post #45
skizm wrote: post #25

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 som…

I'm a layman in this space but I've been thinking about the idea of numbers a lot, mainly for fictional world-building, how aliens may use them, and wondering if they really are universal.. One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting , but kind of a hackjob for measuring . Like sure, integers may exist in reality…

[deleted]

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#64

Post by 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.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#65

Post by 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.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#66

Post by 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).

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#67

Post by rdtsc »

skizm wrote: post #25

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 som…

Walking and eating are also universal. Because they can actually eat something in front of them and point to it. They can walk in front of the aliens and point to the action and say "this is what we area talking about". Consuming nutrients and locomotion is not a bad first thing to focus on.

Numbers are more abstract. They couldn't just draw a number "2" for example. Or show 2 apples because it might seem they are just talking about apples and not numbers.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#68

Post by yourapostasy »

Robotbeat wrote: post #16
maxxxxx wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Visible is pretty smack dab in the middle of the Sun's peak spectrum: 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, esp…

> 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?

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#69

Post by Razengan »

[deleted] wrote: post #63
Razengan wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a layman in this space but I've been thinking about the idea of numbers a lot, mainly for fictional world-building, how aliens may use them, and wondering if they really are universal.. One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting , but kind of a hackjob for measuring . Like sure, integers may exist in reality…

[deleted]

Ah I meant 1D. My thought train at the time was occupied with our writing systems being 2D.

Re: A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)

#70

Post by zingermc »

thesz wrote: post #64

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 ev…

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.
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