Infofiche

Spoilers for Story of your Life by Ted Chiang and also the film Arrival.

Story of your Life is a powerful short story by American author Ted Chiang. It's another one of those stories I rarely consider which are much more about their fictional languages than what those languages can be used for. Like China Miéville's Embassytown, Chiang's concern is chiefly what an alternative cognition could be like. In this case one which makes memories time-symmetric, allowing you to 'remember the future', and the sorts of emotional journeys this facilitates.

Beneath the fold I'll discuss how Chiang achieves this, why I think his story is so effective and on the prevalence of stories that could be described as 'first-contact with language'.

But first, a summary. If you haven't already read Story of your Life, I highly recommend you do so now. It's only short, an easy read and even if you've watched the film you'll still gain something from it (the story has a much narrower focus from the film, and from what I've heard misses out the bad bits).

A first-contact story, Story of your Life is concerned with the mysterious alien heptapods and communicating with them. Huge ships in orbit leave large glass discs standing all over the world and use them to converse with humans. We are focussed entirely on American efforts, and even more narrowly on those of Louise Banks, a linguist with fieldwork experience and a physicist, Gary Donnelly who have been tasked by the military with working out heptapod language and technology respectively. They do this in the usual monolingual fieldwork way, pointing at things, making sounds, acting things out, making recordings and building up a glossary of the heptapods' spoken language.

Louise manages to get a projector and begin showing the heptapods written language, in order to get samples of their own. It's radically different to the spoken language, written in such a way that requires you to know the entire sentence before you start. In a similar way, the heptapods are baffled by most human physics until they are shown Fermat's principle of least time - this they seem to grasp immediately, and it similarly requires knowing the outcome beforehand. Their physics seems built around such variational statements.

This in turn makes Louise think about the sort of cognition that would use a written language necessitating foreknowledge of the completed sentence, and find the analogous idea of Fermat's principle natural. As she does, she gradually learns the heptapods' written language and - in a Whorfian twist - discovers she too begins having premonitions of the future. The US and aliens participate in a gift exchange with Louise as translator, and then they leave Earth abruptly and without saying what they were here for, but leaving a few people with the gift of remembering the future.

All the while, the text has been alternating between Louise's efforts with the heptapods and passages that read like flashbacks: "I remember one afternoon when you are five years old..." except they are written in the future tense; "...you'll be colouring with your crayons while I grade papers". These tell the parallel story of Louise's life after the heptapods leave, of the childhood, adolescence and adulthood death of the child she has with Gary interspersed with that of her meeting him.

It's an excellent idea brilliantly executed and fits perfectly with the science-fictional content of the 'present tense' sections. And that's it, that's the story. It's only short but packs a punch!

So what's going on here? Well we clearly have a very strong case of strong linguistic relativity (more on that in a moment), whereby simply learning the right language - Heptapod B - Louise gains the (science-fictional) ability to remember the future. We also have monolingual fieldwork and first contact. The union between the 'hard' SF of aliens and the linguistic relativity (remember that SF hardness is about the appearance of rigour) and the 'soft' of the emotional arc to the story is characteristic of Chiang's work in general and is what makes it so effective.

I have realised that I have somehow managed to avoid writing about linguistic relativity in much depth so far. This idea originates (in the Western context at least) around the turn of the century, stemming from Franz Boas' anthropological idea of cultural relativity - the idea that your culture determines (or at least contributes to) your cognition. This got picked up by an American linguist, Edward Sapir, whose protégée (also a fire prevention engineer and sometimes SF author) Benjamin Lee Whorf went furthest with the idea and published an influential case study of the Uto-Aztecan language Hopi suggesting that its speakers had a radically different way of speaking about time (he argued that they had no direct 'time' words that partitioned a period into commensurable pieces) which made their conception of the world as 'timeless'. As revenge, linguist Ekkehard Malotki published a long (600+ pages) monograph about the grammar of time in Hopi in 1983. Safe to say that the Hopi still speak their language just fine with whatever grammar it uses for time, and academics still argue about what Whorf meant in the first place, and whether he was right or not.

So that's the short history. The linguistic content of the idea is thin. Whilst it does seem to hold in the weaker cases (for example, languages with more words for colours do a better job distinguishing those colours - Russian's famous two words for blue), the stronger cases don't seem to hold water. This becomes contentious when discussed in the context of linguistic universals which would have all language share the same fundamental features which are dependent on a basic, common, cognition. Showing definitively that your basic cognition can be significantly affected by the language you speak would be the a very good counterexample, and people want to find that.

Additionally there have been no proven cases of this sort of strong linguistic relativity (also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and it's broadly out of fashion with linguists, but not with sociolinguists who like to posit linguistic factors as driving differing global rates of gender equality, risk aversion and political persuasion. Such studies have been shown to be generally statistically insignificant and simply an consequence of there being so many possible correlations [2] .

Despite this, it remains an incredibly popular idea with SF authors - not least Chiang and Miéville (also Elgin, Delaney and Vance) because it offers an easy way to 'import' alternative cognitions into a story and 'download' them into a character's brain to think with an explore; they simply have to learn the language and that can be as easy as you like. This is even easier if your story already has aliens in, because if they're alien enough they'll have the weird cognition, and if they are personalized [1] they will nearly always have language. That's why I think this is such a common idea in science fiction, especially if we consider Suvin's criteria of 'cognitive estrangement' - linguistic relativity achieves this in a single go by giving the author direct access to an estranging cognition.

Story of your Life is the best 'linguistic relativity' story I've read so far. The linguistic relativity becomes the core to a tragic arc and poignancy to a story containing compelling characters and fun science and linguistics. All this is packaged in elegant prose that is fun to read and paced well. The passages about Louise's and Gary's work with the heptapods are clear and well explained without seeming contrived (aided by the fact they are both ignorant of each others fields).

I really enjoyed reading it and using it as an excuse to think and talk about linguistic relativity more broadly. Although I think the spoilers in this post will lessen the experience - I'm going to recommend you all go and read Story of your Life and Chiang's other work again at the end of this post. It's really worth it.

Thanks for joining me, I hope you have a good month and I'll see you in 4 weeks for the final (and tenth) post of this year.