![]() Early in the film, Forest Whitaker’s military commander bursts into the linguist’s office saying she’s atop the government’s list of Farsi experts - a list the government would not have, Coon said, because Farsi is spoken by millions of people. Whether Louise would even be contacted in the first place is another question viewers might have - the idea of high-level military commanders running down Steven Pinker acolytes can at first strain credulity.īut they would, Coon said, because they know a field linguist would be able to map sounds and understand new languages a lot more quickly than anyone else, though she questions the factors that brought them to Louise in the first place. There’s good reason to think alien language would be different.” Human language is part of the genetic endowment to humans. “But what the film leads you to think about is how different perceptual process might be and how their communication system might differ in corresponding ways. “I don’t know if I would go on the record to say a human learning an alien language would have their brain rewired,” Coon said with a slight laugh. While that latter idea is a little more far-fetched, Coon says, the notion of a nonhuman language containing different properties - and thus different thought-processes for its speakers - may be reasonable. But the movie cleverly finds a way to re-open the argument, asking if the postulate may hold water with nonhuman languages (because nonhumans may think differently than us Earth-bound folks in the first place).īy extension, it also asks if Louise might begin to think differently herself once she learns the Heptapods’ language, which is how she’s able to “use weapon” and open up time in the movie’s finale. The theory has generally been discredited in the linguist community. One core idea the movie takes up is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a theory of linguistic relativity that, in its strongest form, argues that language affects thought an English speaker and Finnish speaker, the hypothesis submits, will think in ways that are fundamentally different. ![]() ![]() The professor says that “Arrival’s” linguistic ideas are genuine, even if they’re sometimes outside the bounds of the field’s conventional wisdom. They then incorporated her notes into shots in the film. Coon tackled them as she would a Mayan dialect, scrawling phrases like “annotate noun” on its sheets and then sending it back to producers. There are between six- and seven-thousand languages in the world, and for most we’ve only begun to scratch the surface.” (If you’re curious you can read more about Coon’s work, and all that ergativity, here.)Ĭoon met with Adams before shooting began to explain how she went about her work she also received a FedEx package of logograms and was told, essentially, mark them up as you would any set of unfamiliar symbols. We’re interested in the structural properties we’re interested in understanding what underlies them. “That’s not what field workers - which is what Amy’s character is - actually do. “One of the big misconceptions about linguists is that we’re just people who know and speak and translate languages,” Coon said. What’s more, she made sure that Banks’ process for figuring out what they meant looked like that of a person actually studying a new method of communication. Still, there’s a consistency to the logograms as they’re used in “Arrival” - Coon helped vet them to make sure all the curlicues and flourishes matched on repeated uses of the words and concepts. So it’s not like the full-blown language of “Star Trek’s” Klingon or “Avatar’s” Na’vi, where teams were hired to create complex grammatical structures and a culture of armchair enthusiasts and speakers have sprung up in their wake. There were only about a 100 of them in use during the shoot (they worked off images included in Eric Heisserer’s script). The inkblots, known as logograms, were primarily devised by the film’s production design team under Patrice Vermette. The question many of us come away with: How much of a language is this really? Louise spends much of the film trying to communicate with the mysterious and only possibly threatening creatures, learning the Heptas’ language and teaching them our own. government after unidentified aliens known as Heptapods dock their crafts just above 12 global epicenters, including the United States. “Arrival” centers on Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a top specialist recruited by the U.S. “But you’d be surprised by all the emails I’ve been getting - a lot of talk about aliens.” ![]() “There was a lot in the script that has to do how we conduct field work to study a language,” Coon said in a phone interview. That prepared her - sort of - for all that the Heptapods were spraying on about. ![]()
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