[Xenolinguistics] Arrival (2016)

Arrival is a 2016 film about xenolinguistics- the study of extraterrestrial languages. It stars Amy Adams as "Louise Banks", a professional linguist who is hired to communicate with extraterrestrial lifeforms in a spaceship above Montana, USA. I'd recommend it to anyone, but particularly (of course) people with an interest in language or aliens. Here I'll take a look at the interesting linguistic concepts in the film.

Spoilers ahead!

In the film the alien species inhabit a smokey field inside their spaceships, and propel themselves with seven tentacle-like appendages, for which they are named heptapods (seven-feet) by the Americans. They communicate by releasing ink into this field and manipulating it to form circles which contain multiple words. The film provoked a lot of reflections about the nature of language.

• Louise warns that they must carefully anticipate misunderstandings in translation, as she fears that they could seem hostile to the heptapods. 
• The heptapods present a phrase which is translated as "offer weapon". The Chinese interpret this as "use weapon" and fear that they are being threatened. Louise notes that the word for "weapon" could also be interpreted as "tool", meaning that the aliens are offering a tool to humanity. The optimism of the USA and the paranoia of the Chinese cause the two nations to gain completely opposite perspectives of the heptapods messages.
• Longitudinal peaks in the baseline represent words. I found this reminiscent of logograms in real world languages.
•  The aliens in the film are capable of "writing" thousands of words from memory in a 3-dimensional space simultaneously and a character is able to use computers to find a pattern in the spatial arrangement of the words. He is able to deduce from the blank spaces, that the "text" is one of a set of five pieces. The five sets can fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. It is interesting to imagine how human language would be different if we, like these aliens, could write in three dimensions rather than two.
• The main story arc of the film involves the sapir-whorf hypothesis. Sapir and Whorf hypothesised that the structure of a language could influence the thinking of the people who speak the language, and the culture of the entire society. In the film, Louise experiences visions of a future which has not yet occurred, with increasing clarity, as her understanding of the heptapod language increases. She postulates that as she learns the new language, her brain structures are changing enough to facilitate a new plane of cognitive ability.
• Each ink circle sentence is a non-linear form of communication as it has no beginning or end. The circle can be read backwards or forwards similar to a palindrome in the English language: its meaning is the same when reversed. Examples of palindromes include the words reviver, noon, and racecar. 

RACECAR palindrome in circular form. Try reading it in both directions.

In the film the palindromic structure is a key plot point. The extraterrestrial language skills, which Louise obtains while learning this language, are analogous to mathematics. The aliens teach her their language to facilitate human advancement, in the same way that humans could teach mathematics to a primitive alien species. The newly obtained language skills allow her to perceive all points of her existence in time simultaneously. She sees her lifespan as a circle without beginning or end and her perception of it can move in either direction. She is simultaneously aware of all of her life experiences, from before meeting the aliens, and from after they leave. This allows her in the present, to perceive information, which is communicated to her in the future.

In reality, I would argue that the film ignores the causal chain of information obtainment.

The film suggests that by changing the English language to a non-linear form, I could obtain knowledge of events that have not occurred yet. Yet according to modern physicists, for information to be transmitted from my brain in the future, to my brain in the present time, the information must be propagated by some kind of medium, faster than the speed of light. Therefore simply knowing a non-linear language, could not grant you a non-linear perception of time. 

Rather, having a non-linear perception of time would facilitate non-linear language. English for example is designed to work with a unidirectional linear flow, because our reality (as we know it) exists as a sequence of connected events, with our conscious perception moving 'forward' in time. Some languages teach the speaker to present the components of a sentence in a different order, for example verb before subject, but the order of this is somewhat arbitrary. Whatever order the words are presented in, you will only meet a small delay in obtaining the information needed to build the complete picture in your mind. However, if an alien presented a human with communication which lacks any means of determining the temporal order of events, the human would lack a complete understanding of what has occurred. 

Ultimately I am saying this: You cannot know what you haven't been told yet. That is why I began this article by introducing the film. If I began the article with this paragraph, and assumed that you already knew the introductory information which I will later give you, the result would be confusion.

As a science fantasy film, I found it to be creative and fun.

Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this article.