by Neil Clarke
“So we’re stuck with using recordings?” asked Gary.
I nodded. “At least temporarily.”
“So now what?”
“Now we make sure it hasn’t actually been saying ‘aren’t they cute’ or ‘look what they’re doing now.’ Then we see if we can identify any of these words when that other heptapod pronounces them.” I gestured for him to have a seat. “Get comfortable; this’ll take a while.”
In 1770, Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour ran aground on the coast of Queensland, Australia. While some of his men made repairs, Cook led an exploration party and met the aboriginal people. One of the sailors pointed to the animals that hopped around with their young riding in pouches, and asked an aborigine what they were called. The aborigine replied, “Kanguru.” From then on Cook and his sailors referred to the animals by this word. It wasn’t until later that they learned it meant “What did you say?”
I tell that story in my introductory course every year. It’s almost certainly untrue, and I explain that afterwards, but it’s a classic anecdote. Of course, the anecdotes my undergraduates will really want to hear are ones featuring the heptapods; for the rest of my teaching career, that’ll be the reason many of them sign up for my courses. So I’ll show them the old videotapes of my sessions at the looking glass, and the sessions that the other linguists conducted; the tapes are instructive, and they’ll be useful if we’re ever visited by aliens again, but they don’t generate many good anecdotes.
When it comes to language-learning anecdotes, my favorite source is child language acquisition. I remember one afternoon when you are five years old, after you have come home from kindergarten. You’ll be coloring with your crayons while I grade papers.
“Mom,” you’ll say, using the carefully casual tone reserved for requesting a favor, “can I ask you something?”
“Sure, sweetie. Go ahead.”
“Can I be, um, honored?”
I’ll look up from the paper I’m grading. “What do you mean?”
“At school Sharon said she got to be honored.”
“Really? Did she tell you what for?”
“It was when her big sister got married. She said only one person could be, um, honored, and she was it.”
“Ah, I see. You mean Sharon was maid of honor?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Can I be made of honor?”
Gary and I entered the prefab building containing the center of operations for the looking glass site. Inside it looked like they were planning an invasion, or perhaps an evacuation: crewcut soldiers worked around a large map of the area, or sat in front of burly electronic gear while speaking into headsets. We were shown into Colonel Weber’s office, a room in the back that was cool from air conditioning.
We briefed the colonel on our first day’s results. “Doesn’t sound like you got very far,” he said.
“I have an idea as to how we can make faster progress,” I said. “But you’ll have to approve the use of more equipment.”
“What more do you need?”
“A digital camera, and a big video screen.” I showed him a drawing of the setup I imagined. “I want to try conducting the discovery procedure using writing; I’d display words on the screen, and use the camera to record the words they write. I’m hoping the heptapods will do the same.”
Weber looked at the drawing dubiously. “What would be the advantage of that?”
“So far I’ve been proceeding the way I would with speakers of an unwritten language. Then it occurred to me that the heptapods must have writing, too.”
“So?”
“If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier for us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes. It’s like picking out the letters in a printed sentence instead of trying to hear them when the sentence is spoken aloud.”
“I take your point,” he admitted. “And how would you respond to them? Show them the words they displayed to you?”
“Basically. And if they put spaces between words, any sentences we write would be a lot more intelligible than any spoken sentence we might splice together from recordings.”
He leaned back in his chair. “You know we want to show as little of our technology as possible.”
“I understand, but we’re using machines as intermediaries already. If we can get them to use writing, I believe progress will go much faster than if we’re restricted to the sound spectrographs.”
The colonel turned to Gary. “Your opinion?”
“It sounds like a good idea to me. I’m curious whether the heptapods might have difficulty reading our monitors. Their looking glasses are based on a completely different technology than our video screens. As far as we can tell, they don’t use pixels or scan lines, and they don’t refresh on a frame-by-frame basis.”
“You think the scan lines on our video screens might render them unreadable to the heptapods?”
“It’s possible,” said Gary. “We’ll just have to try it and see.”
Weber considered it. For me it wasn’t even a question, but from his point of view it was a difficult one; like a soldier, though, he made it quickly. “Request granted. Talk to the sergeant outside about bringing in what you need. Have it ready for tomorrow.”
I remember one day during the summer when you’re sixteen. For once, the person waiting for her date to arrive is me. Of course, you’ll be waiting around, too, curious to see what he looks like. You’ll have a friend of yours, a blond girl with the unlikely name of Roxie, hanging out with you, giggling.
“You may feel the urge to make comments about him,” I’ll say, checking myself in the hallway mirror. “Just restrain yourselves until we leave.”
“Don’t worry, Mom,” you’ll say. “We’ll do it so that he won’t know. Roxie, you ask me what I think the weather will be like tonight. Then I’ll say what I think of Mom’s date.”
“Right,” Roxie will say.
“No, you most definitely will not,” I’ll say.
“Relax, Mom. He’ll never know; we do this all the time.”
“What a comfort that is.”
A little later on, Nelson will arrive to pick me up. I’ll do the introductions, and we’ll all engage in a little small talk on the front porch. Nelson is ruggedly handsome, to your evident approval. Just as we’re about to leave, Roxie will say to you casually, “So what do you think the weather will be like tonight?”
“I think it’s going to be really hot,” you’ll answer.
Roxie will nod in agreement. Nelson will say, “Really? I thought they said it was going to be cool.”
“I have a sixth sense about these things,” you’ll say. Your face will give nothing away. “I get the feeling it’s going to be a scorcher. Good thing you’re dressed for it, Mom.”
I’ll glare at you, and say good night.
As I lead Nelson toward his car, he’ll ask me, amused, “I’m missing something here, aren’t I?”
“A private joke,” I’ll mutter. “Don’t ask me to explain it.”
At our next session at the looking glass, we repeated the procedure we had performed before, this time displaying a printed word on our computer screen at the same time we spoke: showing HUMAN while saying “Human,” and so forth. Eventually, the heptapods understood what we wanted, and set up a flat circular screen mounted on a small pedestal. One heptapod spoke, and then inserted a limb into a large socket in the pedestal; a doodle of script, vaguely cursive, popped onto the screen.
We soon settled into a routine, and I compiled two parallel corpora: one of spoken utterances, one of writing samples. Based on first impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic, which was disappointing; I’d been hoping for an alphabetic script to help us learn their speech. Their logograms might include some phonetic information,
but finding it would be a lot harder than with an alphabetic script.
By getting up close to the looking glass, I was able to point to various heptapod body parts, such as limbs, digits, and eyes, and elicit terms for each. It turned out that they had an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech. There were no other conspicuous orifices; perhaps their mouth was their anus, too. Those sorts of questions would have to wait.
I also tried asking our two informants for terms for addressing each individually; personal names, if they had such things. Their answers were of course unpronounceable, so for Gary’s and my purposes, I dubbed them Flapper and Raspberry. I hoped I’d be able to tell them apart.
The next day I conferred with Gary before we entered the looking-glass tent. “I’ll need your help with this session,” I told him.
“Sure. What do you want me to do?”
“We need to elicit some verbs, and it’s easiest with third-person forms. Would you act out a few verbs while I type the written form on the computer? If we’re lucky, the heptapods will figure out what we’re doing and do the same. I’ve brought a bunch of props for you to use.”
“No problem,” said Gary, cracking his knuckles. “Ready when you are.”
We began with some simple intransitive verbs: walking, jumping, speaking, writing. Gary demonstrated each one with a charming lack of self-consciousness; the presence of the video cameras didn’t inhibit him at all. For the first few actions he performed, I asked the heptapods, “What do you call that?” Before long, the heptapods caught on to what we were trying to do; Raspberry began mimicking Gary, or at least performing the equivalent heptapod action, while Flapper worked their computer, displaying a written description and pronouncing it aloud.
In the spectrographs of their spoken utterances, I could recognize their word I had glossed as “heptapod.” The rest of each utterance was presumably the verb phrase; it looked like they had analogs of nouns and verbs, thank goodness.
In their writing, however, things weren’t as clear-cut. For each action, they had displayed a single logogram instead of two separate ones. At first I thought they had written something like “walks,” with the subject implied. But why would Flapper say “the heptapod walks” while writing “walks,” instead of maintaining parallelism? Then I noticed that some of the logograms looked like the logogram for “heptapod” with some extra strokes added to one side or another. Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun. If so, why was Flapper writing the noun in some instances but not in others?
I decided to try a transitive verb; substituting object words might clarify things. Among the props I’d brought were an apple and a slice of bread. “Okay,” I said to Gary, “show them the food, and then eat some. First the apple, then the bread.”
Gary pointed at the Golden Delicious and then he took a bite out of it, while I displayed the “what do you call that?” expression. Then we repeated it with the slice of whole wheat.
Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd and a gelatinous ellipsoid. Raspberry pointed at the gourd while Flapper said a word and displayed a logogram. Then Raspberry brought the gourd down between its legs, a crunching sound resulted, and the gourd reemerged minus a bite; there were cornlike kernels beneath the shell. Flapper talked and displayed a large logogram on their screen. The sound spectrograph for “gourd” changed when it was used in the sentence; possibly a case marker. The logogram was odd: after some study, I could identify graphic elements that resembled the individual logograms for “heptapod” and “gourd.” They looked as if they had been melted together, with several extra strokes in the mix that presumably meant “eat.” Was it a multiword ligature?
Next we got spoken and written names for the gelatin egg, and descriptions of the act of eating it. The sound spectrograph for “heptapod eats gelatin egg” was analyzable; “gelatin egg” bore a case marker, as expected, though the sentence’s word order differed from last time. The written form, another large logogram, was another matter. This time it took much longer for me to recognize anything in it; not only were the individual logograms melted together again, it looked as if the one for “heptapod” was laid on its back, while on top of it the logogram for “gelatin egg” was standing on its head.
“Uh-oh.” I took another look at the writing for the simple noun-verb examples, the ones that had seemed inconsistent before. Now I realized all of them actually did contain the logogram for “heptapod”; some were rotated and distorted by being combined with the various verbs, so I hadn’t recognized them at first. “You guys have got to be kidding,” I muttered.
“What’s wrong?” asked Gary.
“Their script isn’t word-divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words. They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them. Take a look.” I showed him how the logograms were rotated.
“So they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it’s rotated,” Gary said. He turned to look at the heptapods, impressed. “I wonder if it’s a consequence of their bodies’ radial symmetry: their bodies have no ‘forward’ direction, so maybe their writing doesn’t either. Highly neat.”
I couldn’t believe it; I was working with someone who modified the word “neat” with “highly.” “It certainly is interesting,” I said, “but it also means there’s no easy way for us write our own sentences in their language. We can’t simply cut their sentences into individual words and recombine them; we’ll have to learn the rules of their script before we can write anything legible. It’s the same continuity problem we’d have had splicing together speech fragments, except applied to writing.”
I looked at Flapper and Raspberry in the looking glass, who were waiting for us to continue, and sighed. “You aren’t going to make this easy for us, are you?”
To be fair, the heptapods were completely cooperative. In the days that followed, they readily taught us their language without requiring us to teach them any more English. Colonel Weber and his cohorts pondered the implications of that, while I and the linguists at the other looking glasses met via video conferencing to share what we had learned about the heptapod language. The videoconferencing made for an incongruous working environment: our video screens were primitive compared to the heptapods’ looking glasses, so that my colleagues seemed more remote than the aliens. The familiar was far away, while the bizarre was close at hand.
It would be a while before we’d be ready to ask the heptapods why they had come, or to discuss physics well enough to ask them about their technology. For the time being, we worked on the basics: phonemics/graphemics, vocabulary, syntax. The heptapods at every looking glass were using the same language, so we were able to pool our data and coordinate our efforts.
Our biggest source of confusion was the heptapods’ “writing.” It didn’t appear to be writing at all; it looked more like a bunch of intricate graphic designs. The logograms weren’t arranged in rows, or a spiral, or any linear fashion. Instead, Flapper or Raspberry would write a sentence by sticking together as many logograms as needed into a giant conglomeration.
This form of writing was reminiscent of primitive sign systems, which required a reader to know a message’s context in order to understand it. Such systems were considered too limited for systematic recording of information. Yet it was unlikely that the heptapods developed their level of technology with only an oral tradition. That implied one of three possibilities: the first was that the heptapods had a true writing system, but they didn’t want to use it in front of us; Colonel Weber would identify with that one. The second was that the heptapods hadn’t originated the technology they were using; they were illiterates using someone else’s technology. The third, and most interesting to me, was that the heptapods were using a nonlinear system of orthography that qualified as true wr
iting.
I remember a conversation we’ll have when you’re in your junior year of high school. It’ll be Sunday morning, and I’ll be scrambling some eggs while you set the table for brunch. You’ll laugh as you tell me about the party you went to last night.
“Oh man,” you’ll say, “they’re not kidding when they say that body weight makes a difference. I didn’t drink any more than the guys did, but I got so much drunker.”
I’ll try to maintain a neutral, pleasant expression. I’ll really try. Then you’ll say, “Oh, come on, Mom.”
“What?”
“You know you did the exact same things when you were my age.”
I did nothing of the sort, but I know that if I were to admit that, you’d lose respect for me completely. “You know never to drive, or get into a car if—”
“God, of course I know that. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“No, of course not.”
What I’ll think is that you are clearly, maddeningly not me. It will remind me, again, that you won’t be a clone of me; you can be wonderful, a daily delight, but you won’t be someone I could have created by myself.
The military had set up a trailer containing our offices at the looking-glass site. I saw Gary walking toward the trailer, and ran to catch up with him. “It’s a semasiographic writing system,” I said when I reached him.
“Excuse me?” said Gary.
“Here, let me show you.” I directed Gary into my office. Once we were inside, I went to the chalkboard and drew a circle with a diagonal line bisecting it. “What does this mean?”
“‘Not allowed’?”
“Right.” Next I printed the words NOT ALLOWED on the chalkboard. “And so does this. But only one is a representation of speech.”
Gary nodded. “Okay.”
“Linguists describe writing like this—” I indicated the printed words “—as ‘glottographic,’ because it represents speech. Every human written language is in this category. However, this symbol—” I indicated the circle and diagonal line “—is ‘semasiographic’ writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There’s no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds.”