heptapods
(noun) The term used for the visiting aliens, because they have seven limbs ("hept-" means "seven").
Example from text: "'The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them 'heptapods'" (97).
Heptapod A
(noun) Heptapod A is the heptapods' spoken language. It has a set of strange linguistic rules that are nevertheless understandable to the researchers. In particular, it is notable for its free word order and center-embedding of clauses (look a bit lower on this page for a definition of these terms). Dr. Banks describes the sound of heptapods speaking Heptapod A as "vaguely like that of a wet dog shaking the water out of its fur" (91). It is impossible for humans to speak Heptapod A, because we have different vocal tracts from heptapods. In the middle of "Story of Your Life," Dr. Banks discovers that the heptapod spoken language, Heptapod A, is a completely different language than their written language, Heptapod B. This kind of separation between spoken and written languages is not found in human languages.
Example from text: "'In fact, it'd be more accurate to refer to the writing system as 'Heptapod B' and use 'Heptapod A' strictly for referring to the spoken language'" (110).
Heptapod B
(noun) Heptapod B is the heptapods' written language, which is completely distinct from the heptapod spoken language, Heptapod A, and has its own grammatical rules. It is a semasiographic writing system, meaning that their symbols have no spoken counterparts. When heptapods write in Heptapod B, their semagrams are all connected, which means that they employ multi-word ligature. There is no punctuation: heptapods change the meaning of their semagrams based on the orientation of each part. Additionally, when heptapods are writing, they do not separate semagrams into words, sentences, or paragraphs. Simply put, the more information a heptapod wants to convey, the larger the size of its semagram.
Heptapods know every line that will make up a sentence before the entire sentence is written, which suggests that they have a teleological perception of time that is different than our human chronological perception of time. In order to be able to write fluently in Heptapod B, Dr. Banks must begin seeing time all at once rather than sequentially. This gives her the ability to see the future.
Example from text: "When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A 'sentence' seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and paragraph, or page, was size" (112).
Linguistics
(noun) The scientific study of a language and its structure.
Example from the text: "Colonel Weber wasn't budging. 'Do you have any opinion about its linguistic properties?' he asked" (91).
Vocal Tract
(noun) the cavity in human beings and in animals where sound produced by the larynx (mammals) or syrinx (birds) is filtered.
Example from text: "'Well, it's clear that their vocal tract is substantially different from a human vocal tract. I assume that these aliens don't look like humans?" (91).
Looking Glasses
(noun) Heptapod communication devices, which acted as two-way communication devices, presumably with the ships in orbit.
Example from text: "At the center of the encampment was one of the alien devices, nicknamed 'looking glasses'" (93).
Phonology
(noun) A branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds.
Example from text: "In front of the tent was an equipment cart loaded with goodies borrowed from the school's phonology lab; I had sent it ahead for inspection by the army" (96).
Radially Symmetric
(adjective) symmetric around a central axis, such as the bodies of jellyfish or starfish.
Example from text: "It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. it was radially symmetric, and any of its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg" (97).
Monolingual
(adjective) a person or society that speaks only one language. (The prefix "mono-" means one.)
Example from text: "This would be my first attempt at conducting a true monolingual discovery procedure" (97).
Spectrograph
(noun) (also called Spectogram or Sonogram) A visual representation of an acoustic signal.
Example from text: "I went back to my computer; on its screen were two virtually identical spectrographs representing the fluttering sounds" (98).
Delimit
(verb) Determine the limits or boundaries of.
Example from text: "At my computer I delimited certain sections of the spectrograph and typed in a tentative gloss for each."
Gloss
(noun) A brief notation, especially a marginal one or an interlinear one, of the meaning of a word or wording in a text.
Example from text: "At my computer I delimited certain sections of the spectrograph and typed in a tentative gloss for each."
Prefab
(adjective) Short for "Prefabricated," which means "made beforehand," often referring to mass-produced (as opposed to custom-built) buildings
Example from text: "Gary and I entered the prefab building containing the center of operations for the looking-glass site" (100).
Grapheme
(noun) The smallest functional unit in a writing unit that corresponds with sounds (the letter "s" is an example of a grapheme).
Example from text: "'If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier for us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes. It's like picking out letters in a printed sentence instead of trying to hear them when the sentence is spoken aloud" (101).
Phoneme
(noun) A unit of sound that distinguishes one word or letter from another in a spoken language (the sound that you make when you read "s" aloud is an example of a phoneme).
Example from text: "'If the heptapods have a mechanical way of producing writing, then their writing ought to be very regular, very consistent. That would make it easier for us to identify graphemes instead of phonemes. It's like picking out letters in a printed sentence instead of trying to hear them when the sentence is spoken aloud" (101).
Corpora
(noun) (plural for "Corpus") a large and structured set of texts.
Example from text: "We soon settled into a routine, and I compiled two parallel corpora, one of spoken utterances, one of writing samples" (103).
Logographic
(adjective) A written character that represents a word. Chinese characters are generally logograms. Each character does not represent individual sounds.
Example from text: "Based on first impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic, which was disappointing; I was hoping for an alphabetic script to help us learn their speech."
Alphabetic
(adjective) A standardized set of written symbols or graphemes that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages (for example, the letter [grapheme] "s" represents the sound [phoneme] "s").
Example from text:"Based on first impressions, their writing appeared to be logographic, which was disappointing; I was hoping for an alphabetic script to help us learn their speech."
Ellipsoid
(noun) A three-dimensional figure whose plane sections are ellipses or circles.
Example from text: "Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd and a gelatinous ellipsoid" (105).
Ligature
(noun) In hand-writing, a ligature is made my joining two or more characters in an atypical fashion by merging their parts, or by writing one above or inside each other. In Heptapod B, there is multi-word ligature, meaning that their characters for individual words and modified and brought together so that they form a new, different character.
Example from text: "They looked as if they had been melted together, with several extra strokes in the mix that presumably meant 'eat.' Was it a multi-word ligature?" (105).
Semasiographic
(adjective) Images or characters that represent ideas, unrelated to any spoken language. The example that Dr. Banks uses in the text is that of a circle with a line drawn through it. This symbol means "not allowed" but it does not directly represent any speech.
Example from text: "I saw Part walking toward the trailer, and ran to catch up with him. 'It's a semasiographic writing system'" (108).
Glottographic
(adjective) Writing that represents speech (every human language is like this).
Example from text: "'Linguists describe writing like this'—I indicated the printed words—'as glottographic because it represents speech. Every human written language is in this category. However, this symbol'—I indicated the circle and diagonal line—'is semasiographic writing, because it conveys meaning without reference to speech. There's no correspondence between its components and any particular sounds" (108).
Semagram
(noun) A written character in Heptapod B. Dr. Banks suggests this term because written words in Heptapod B do not represent any spoken language.
Example from text: "In the next report I submitted, I suggested that the term 'logogram' was a misnomer because it implied that each graph represented a spoken word, when in fact that graphs didn't correspond to our notion of spoken words at all. I didn't want to use the term 'ideogram' either because of how it had been used in the past; I suggested the term 'semagram' instead" (111).
Syntax
(noun) The set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences in a given language. This includes word order, which determines the order of parts of speech within a sentence.
Example from text: "When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A 'sentence' seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and paragraph, or page, was size" (112).
Subject-Predicate Pairings
(noun) A subject-predicate pairing in a sentence is called a clause (i.e. a subject paired with a verb). All sentences contain at least one subject-predicate pairing. Any subjects by themselves (such as "the author of the book") or predicates by themselves (such as "going for a swim") do not constitute clauses.
Example from text: "When it came to sentences in Heptapod B, though, things became much more confusing. The language had no written punctuation: its syntax was indicated in the way the semagrams were combined, and there was no need to indicate the cadence of speech. There was certainly no way to slice out subject-predicate pairings neatly to make sentences. A 'sentence' seemed to be whatever number of semagrams a heptapod wanted to join together; the only difference between a sentence and paragraph, or page, was size" (112).
Free Word Order
Dr. Banks uses the phrase "free word order" to characterize the word order in Heptapod A.
Word order determines the placement of the subject, object, and verb in a sentence. All human languages have consistent word orders. About half of human languages use subject-object-verb (SOV) word order, including Japanese and Turkish (e.g. "She him loves"). One third of human languages use subject-verb-object (SVO) word order, including English (e.g. "She loves him").
Some human languages have flexible word order, such as Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese, and Latin. In these languages, inflection, rather than word order, conveys meaning in a sentence. However, it should be noted that there are preferred or basic word orders in most of these languages, and the word order is not essentially "free."
There is one universal among all human languages, including those with flexible word order: in conditional statements, the cause always comes before the effect. For example, "If you fill up the car with gas, it will run more smoothly."
In Heptapod A, however, heptapods are free to choose how they order their sentences. As Dr. Banks notes, if they are repeating a sentence that they just said, they are just as likely to change the word order as not. Additionally, heptapods do not use a consistent word order in conditional statements, and can place the effect before the cause. This distinguishes Heptapod A from any human language.
Example from text: "We made steady progress decoding the grammar of the spoken language, Heptapod A. It didn't follow the pattern of human languages, as expected, but it was comprehensible so far: free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language 'universal.' It also appeared that the heptapods had no objection to many levels of center-embedding of clauses, something that quickly defeated humans. Peculiar, but not impenetrable" (113-4).
Center-Embedding of Clauses
In linguistics, center-embedding is the process of layering a phrase in the middle of another phrase of the same type. It is technically grammatically correct; however, it can lead to difficulty with parsing the meaning because of humans' limited short-term memory.
The following is a common example of center-embedding:
1. A man that a woman loves.
2. A man that a woman [that a child knows] loves.
3. A man that a woman [that a child [that a bird saw] knows] loves.
4. A man that a woman [that a child [that a bird [that I heard] saw] knows] loves.
Clearly, the sentence "A man that a woman that a child that a bird that I heard saw knows loves" is very difficult to read. Therefore, linguists generally suggest avoiding center-embedding several clauses within a single sentence. Evidently, because heptapods have memories superior to those of humans, they are able to center-embed their clauses with no difficulty.
Example from text: "We made steady progress decoding the grammar of the spoken language, Heptapod A. It didn't follow the pattern of human languages, as expected, but it was comprehensible so far: free word order, even to the extent that there was no preferred order for the clauses in a conditional statement, in defiance of a human language 'universal.' It also appeared that the heptapods had no objection to many levels of center-embedding of clauses, something that quickly defeated humans. Peculiar, but not impenetrable" (113-4).
Morphological
(adjective) Relating to the study of the rules for forming admissible words. Most of the time, this has to do with the inflection of words. In Heptapod B, the morphology is two-dimensional, meaning that it solely exists in writing.
Example from text: "Much more interesting were the newly discovered morphological and grammatical processes in Heptapod B that were uniquely two-dimensional."
Inflection
(noun) A change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender (e.g. changing "walk" to "walked" makes the verb past tense). Also, a change in the pitch or tone of the voice (e.g. raising the voice at the end of a question).
Example from text: "Depending on a semagram's declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke's curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means" (114).
Declension
(noun) Declension relates to the inflection of nouns, adjectives, or pronouns. It also refers to a class of nouns or adjectives that have the same inflectional forms. In English, declension is most visible in pronouns, which change according to gender (e.g. "The ball was his/hers/theirs").
Example from text: "Depending on a semagram's declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke's curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means" (114).
Undulation
(noun) The action of moving smoothly up and down in a wave-like manner.
Example from text: "Depending on a semagram's declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke's curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means" (114).
Radicals
(noun) Most commonly, "radicals" are parts of Chinese characters, which are used to classify these characters in dictionaries. Put simply, radicals are characters that convey the meaning of a logogram (or, in the case of Heptapod B, a semagram).
In linguistics, "radicals" are also used to refer to word roots, after all affixes (i.e. prefix, suffix) are removed.
Example from text: "Depending on a semagram's declension, inflections could be indicated by varying a certain stroke's curvature, or its thickness, or its manner of undulation; or by varying the relative sizes of two radicals, or their relative distance to another radical, or their orientations; or various other means" (114).
Index of Refraction
(noun) Also called "refractive index." This is the measure of how much a ray of light will bend when passing from one medium to another (i.e. from air to water).
Example from text: "'Okay, here's the path a ray of light takes when crossing from air to water. The light ray travels in a straight line until it hits the water; the water has a different index of refraction, so the light changes direction'" (116).
Sinuous
(adjective) Having many curves and turns; lithe and supple.
Example from text: "Finally I froze the video right after the first stroke was completed and before the second one had begun: all that was visible onscreen was a single sinuous line" (122).
Hangdog
(adjective) Having a dejected or guilty appearance; shamefaced.
Example from text: "He did a wonderful hangdog expression" (124).
Causal
(adjective) The characteristic by which events, processes, states, or objects are viewed as having a cause and an effect. Most of human laws of physics are causal. See, for example, Newton's first law: an object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
Example from text: "'The thing is, while the common formulation of physical laws is causal, variational principle like Fermat's is purposive, almost teleological'" (124).
Purposive
(adjective) Having or tending to fulfill a conscious purpose or design. In the excerpt below, Dr. Donnelly describes Fermat's Principle of Least Time as "purposive," as it suggests that a ray of light will take the shortest possible path to its destination as if it were conscious of doing so or as if it knew where its destination was before it started.
Example from text: "'The thing is, while the common formulation of physical laws is causal, variational principle like Fermat's is purposive, almost teleological'" (124).
Teleological
(adjective) Relating to or involving the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arrive. When you see things in terms of teleology, you explain actions by their results rather than by their causes.
Example from text: "'The thing is, while the common formulation of physical laws is causal, variational principle like Fermat's is purposive, almost teleological'" (124).
Phonological Coding
(noun) The representation of spoken words in short-term memory. In other words, the "internal voice" is made up of spoken word sounds rather than images.
Example from text: "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" (116-7).
Graphical Coding
(noun) Also called "orthographic coding." This is the representation of written words in short-term memory. The "internal voice" is made up of written words or images rather than spoken words.
Example from text: "With Heptapod B, I was experiencing something just as foreign: my thoughts were becoming graphically coded. There were trance-like moments during the day when my thoughts weren't expressed with my internal voice: instead, I saw semagrams with my mind's eye, sprouting like frost on a windowpane" (117).
Borgesian
(adjective) Relating to the work or philosophy of author Jorge Luis Borges. Chiang uses "Borgesian" in "Story of Your Life" to allude to Borges' stories "The Library of Babel" and "The Book of Sand," in which everything there is to write in the world has already been written.
Dr. Banks imagines a Borgesian Book of Ages in which everything that will happen in the future is already written. As she does so, she wonders what would happen to free will in such a situation. She comes to the conclusion that no one would be able to read the book for free will to exist. However, she also comes up with an alternative answer: that knowing the future compels the person who knows it to act exactly as has been determined of their own volition.
Example from text: "I liked to imagine the objection as a Borgesian fabulation: consider a person standing before the Book of Ages, the chronicle that records every event, past and future" (131).
Photoreduced
(verb) Reduced in size photographically.
Example from text: "Even though the text has been photoreduced from the full-sized edition, the volume is enormous" (131).
Volition
(noun) The faculty or power of using one's will.
Example from text: "The existence of free will meant that we couldn't know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness" (132).
Bottleneck
(noun) One process in a chain of processes such that its limited capacity reduces the capacity of the whole chain.
Example from text: "For them, speech was a bottleneck because it required that one would follow another sequentially" (135).
Klaxon
(noun) A loud electric horn.
Example from text: "But when you're unhappy, you will become a klaxon, built for radiating sound; a portrait of you could simply be a fire alarm bell" (136).
Automaton
(noun) A moving mechanical device made in imitation of a human being; used in similes or comparisons to refer to a being that acts in a mechanical, unemotional, or uncontrolled way.
Example from text: "The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don't act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons" (137).
Amalgam
(noun) A mixture or blend.
Example from text: "My worldview is an amalgam of human and heptapod" (140).
