IS WRITING A TECHNOLOGY OR A LANGUAGE? LET’S ASK SOME ALIENS

Arrival is Hollywood film who’s the main idea is linguistic. Arrival is based on Ted Chiang’s contemplative science-fiction novella ‘The Story of Your Life’, in which linguistics is also the main topic. It reminds of the different ways of spoken and written the language and how it changes the way we look at the world.

This movie brings up the idea of how could we can “talk” to aliens without actually having a “hand-wavy universal translator”. There are examples of real world parallels in the linguistic fieldwork with a monolingual population. Without a shared communication system or a shared understanding of the world, we wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other.

Language is messy but aliens language is probably messier (or at least that’s what we like to think). One of the most useful solutions could be to create some type of artifact that could help record and dissect real linguistic forms and codified into writing.

In this story, the alien’s speech is labeled as Heptapod A. Not the easiest language to mimic. Later in the movie is discovered that aliens have a kind of semasiographic writing system known as Heptapod B, and it turns out to be completely different to their spoken language. It has no real words.

This is very similar to what we call “human language” because the language we use to write and the kind we use when we speak are not the same. Think of an early age child, for example, they tend to write, as they would speak. It takes time for them to practice and learn to write in a more verbose written style. In a language like French, the spoken and written forms can be so syntactically different there can be literacy difficulties for even native speakers as they learn the written language. Many linguistic archaisms such as certain verb tenses that aren’t really used in spoken French remain alive and well in its written form.

I believe this article describes writing technology as a technological determinist, because as it is mentioned in the article. It will be almost impossible to communicate with aliens because we assume that they don’t speak our language. So we will have to create some type of machine to be able to translate what they are saying and codified it into writing. That way we could be able to communicate with the aliens. So to answer the question on the title, writing is a technology.

http://daily.jstor.org/is-writing-a-technology-or-a-language-lets-ask-some-aliens/