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Among human languages – which follow the same underlying principles, and differ in interesting but ultimately constrained ways – this proposal has been shown to be not only wrong, but dangerous. The film, based on a short story by Ted Chiang, draws on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the idea that the language we speak constrains our view of the world. It is this uncertainty about how an alien language might differ from human language that makes the premise of ARRIVAL so thought-provoking.
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Even seemingly benign concepts, like asking a question, may have no direct correlate in Heptapod. Despite the urgent orders of military generals to get to the point – why are they here? – Dr Banks insists that she must start with the basics. Dr Banks also knows that progress doesn’t happen overnight. As Dr Banks knows, establishing a positive working relationship is the first step in any data-gathering activity.
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While theoretical linguists are interested in the abstract properties of language – the formal system that allows us to put sounds together to make words, and words together to make sentences – access to that system is not direct, but must be done by careful work with native speakers of the language in question. Inside the Heptapod shell, she takes off her space suit and approaches the glass divide. In ARRIVAL, Dr Banks approaches the daunting task of deciphering the Heptapod language as any good fieldworker would. Linguists who coined the term ‘Universal Grammar’ had only the universe of human beings – not Heptapods – in mind. But when it comes to describing the grammar of ARRIVAL’s Heptapods, even the most basic human language distinction, like the difference between ‘nouns’ and ‘verbs’, is no longer a given. A linguist who learns that a subject of a transitive sentence in Ch’ol triggers a special prefix on the verb is not surprised to also learn that possessors trigger an identical prefix on a possessed noun – because exactly this pattern is found in unrelated languages around the world. Linguists working on under-studied human languages benefit in different ways from the same head-start. Children acquiring language have a head-start: they come hard-wired with the basic building blocks of language. Findings like these lead linguists to hypothesise that variation is constrained to certain parameters. Niuean, a Polynesian language spoken on the island of Niue, shares a number of grammatical properties with Ch’ol, the Mayan language that I had arrived to study. The syntax of Japanese looks remarkably like the syntax of Quechua, an unrelated language indigenous to the Andes mountains in South America. In fact, languages tend to follow certain recipes in their grammars. At first glance, languages show a high degree of variation – the grammar of English is different from the grammar of Japanese, which is different from the grammar of Inuktitut –but linguists have discovered that languages vary in limited and constrained ways. What linguists call ‘Universal Grammar’ is the human capacity for language: core principles that all human languages share. By the age of five, nearly every child has mastered a complex system that organises sounds into sentences, and can produce and comprehend an infinite number of novel utterances – a feat that anyone who has tried to learn a new language as an adult can appreciate. While children make mistakes along the path of acquisition, even these mistakes follow certain patterns and developmental trends. Human babies – remarkably unskilled at basic tasks like tying their shoes and adding sums of numbers – effortlessly learn any language to which they are sufficiently exposed. Language sets humans apart from all other species. In many ways, though, the comparison is hardly fair I had Universal Grammar on my side. There, she is tasked with deciphering the language of the recently-arrived Heptapods. A similar mixture of panic, excitement and self-doubt must have begun to settle in as she was being rushed by military helicopter from her comfortable university office to the site of an enormous alien spaceship.
ARRIVAL LINGUIST MOVIE
I have to imagine that Dr Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams), the fictional linguist and protagonist of the movie ARRIVAL, knows the feeling. Overwhelmed, with only rudimentary Spanish and my courage quickly slipping away, I asked him to remind me again what exactly I was supposed to do. After negotiating my stay with a surprised host family to be, Haviland got ready to head back to the city. My linguistics professor, renowned Mayanist John Haviland, drove us for six hours down winding mountain roads from the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas into the hot Chiapan lowlands, to a Ch’ol-speaking Mayan village called Campanario. Just after finishing my sophomore year in college, I arrived in Chiapas, Mexico, for my first summer of linguistic fieldwork.