Reading Notes of The Story of Your Life
B - Quote
B - Annotation
B - Question
The recording sounded vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur.
Do you have any opinion about its linguistic properties? He asked.
“Well, it’s clear that their vocal tract is substantially different om a human vocal
tract. I assume that these aliens don’t look like humans?”
It doesn’t sound like they’re using a larynx to make those sounds, but that doesn’t tell me what they look like.”
“Only that establishing communications is going to be really difficult because of the difference in anatomy. They’re almost certainly using sounds that the human vocal tract can’t reproduce, and maybe sounds that the human ear can’t distinguish.”
The characters are making assumptions base on their previous knowledge of the body structure of themselves. Their previous knowledge is like a frame that confines their mindset, they seem like that they couldn’t think out of this confinement. What I learned in psychology that people tend to use schemes of memory, norms, and knowledge they know to justify new knowledge.
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. (Page 12)
Again, despite whether rules created by human-like syntax or graphemics exists in heptapods’s writing, human still tried to understand heptapod’s writing in their own way. They tried to put what they found into a fixed knowledge framework of their own.
One of the heptapods pointed to itself with one limb, the four terminal digits
pressed together. That was lucky. In some cultures a person pointed with his chin;
if the heptapod hadn’t used one of its limbs, I wouldn’t have known what gesture to
look for. I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its
body vibrate; it was talking. Then it pointed to its companion and fluttered again.
“Sure, sweetie. Go ahead.”
“Can I be, um, honored?”
I’ll look up om 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?”
“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’ radial symmetry: their bodies have no ‘forward’
direction, so maybe their writing doesn’t either. Highly neat.”
Humans assume that the heptapod’s body structure influences how their language is formed. Heptapod has no ‘forward’ directions because they have eyes in every direction of their body, which corresponds to the writing of their language, the rotation feature of their writing doesn’t have a fixed direction, instead, the interpretation is equal in every direction. The same comes in the hieroglyphic (象形文字) use by human. For example in Chinese’s 象形文字，originally, the component， 单人旁， mimics the structure of our human body. It has leg, arms and stands straightly under the influences of gravity. Some may interpret this body movement as if the person is making a bow, we may assume that it is because of our ancient living habit, that we usually bow to show respect.
Why did the author intersperse memories- epically memory with her past daughter- into the main stream of the story?
“Patience, good sir. Patience is a virtue.”
Vs.
“I wanna be in Hawaii now,” you’ll whine.
“Sometimes it’s good to wait,” I’ll say. “The anticipation makes it more fun when
you get there.”
You’ll just pout.
“A non-zero-sum game.”
“What?” You’ll reverse course, heading back om your bedroom.
“When both sides can win: I just remembered, it’s called a non-zero-sum game.”
“That’s it!” you’ll say, writing it down on your notebook. “Thanks, Mom!”
What is happening in the reality is corresponding with Louise’s memory. The dialogue between Louise and her daughter implies how the plot continues. The memory is written in future tense instead of past tense, which also implies that as Louise studies the language of Heptapod, she learned the ability to see the future. Everything in the plot is already predetermined. Human’s language follows the rule of cause and effect, whereas the Heptapod follows Fermat’’s law, that a light calculates the shortest path because it is emitted. Louise realized that she becomes similar to Heptapods who know their final destiny. When she sees the future, a sense of responsibility to change the tragic in the future will be aroused in her mind, these will control and affect her decision making, leading herself away from being a free-minded person. She sees her daughter’s death, however, she chooses to accept and follow the path of destiny and to have a free mind. Besides language, the author wanted to emphasize that everything has it inevitability. We cannot change everything into what we want, sometimes, the only thing we can do is to accept it.
More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought.
For me, thinking typically meant speaking in an internal voice’ as we say in the trade,
my thoughts were phonologically coded. My internal voice normally spoke in English,
but that wasn’t a requirement. The summer after my senior year in high school, I
attended a total immersion program for learning Russian; by the end of the Summer,
I was thinking and even dreaming in Russian. But it was always spoken Russian.
Different language, same mode: a voice speaking silently aloud.
The idea of thinking in a linguistic yet non-phonological mode always intrigued
me. I had a fiend born of deaf parents; he grew up using American Sign Language,
and he told me that he often thought in ASL instead of English. I used to wonder
what it was like to have one’s thoughts be manually coded, to reason using an inner pair
of hands instead of an inner voice.
Our language forms our ways of speaking. For example, in a language (kuuk Thaayorre), people don’t use the concept right or left, instead, they say, for example, there is a cup on your north. Therefore, they can easily perceive directions in their thinking processes. Another example, French people tend to define the gender of an object. They consider an object feminine or muscular. In the novel’s case, when people are familiar with a language, he/she will fall into the mindset that is dependent on the construction of the language. Therefore, sometimes it is good to ask ‘why am I thinking in this way’, ‘how can I change my way of thinking’?