“It appeared that a semagram corresponded roughly to a written word in human languages: it was meaningful on its own, and in combination with other semagrams could form endless statements. We couldn’t define it precisely, but then no one had ever satisfactorily defined “word” for human languages either.” (Story of Your Life, 140).
Let me begin by saying that I love the premise of this story. As a lover of languages, one of the things that has always bothered me with science fiction was the way in which human/alien communication is for the most part taken as a given. This is understandable; in most science fiction stories, an explanation of how the humans and aliens came to communicate would be intrusive and unnecessary to the rest of the story. But it has always nagged at me, this question of how we would communicate with aliens if given the opportunity. How would we be able to reconcile what would inevitably be two such different language systems? And I love that Ted Chiang decided to take on this question.
We were asked to pick out one word in this section of the story that we think speaks to the story as a whole and indicates the deeper meaning of the text. The above quotation made me think about the word “word” itself, and realized that yes, in fact, my concept of the definition of “word” was very vague. So, like any rational college student, I turned to the internet. Dictonary.com uses 85 words to define the seemingly simple “word” of which only about 20 were comprehensible to me: “a unit of language, consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation, that functions as a principle carrier of meaning.” The problem is, of course, that one is limited to using words to define the idea of a word, and so what seems intrinsic suddenly becomes very complicated. And this problem is reflected in the narrator’s attempts to communicate with the aliens in the story.
The narrator finds that the limitations of human concepts of words and language are what hinder her in her communication with the aliens. Specifically, while for most humans written words represent specific spoken words, with the aliens this is not the case. (Interestingly, the root of “word” comes from the Proto-Germanic wurdan, which in term comes from the Proto-Indo-European verb were- meaning to speak or to say.) Human writing systems refer to spoken words in representing ideas, but for the aliens, spoken words and written words are two entirely different concepts, further complicating the idea of what a “word” really is. It makes sense, of course, that alien language would have evolved in ways entirely incomprehensible to humans. Language is so dependent on various cultural and other environmental factors that it’s a miracle that the language of a species from another planet can even be deciphered in this story. But Chiang uses this alien language to disrupt our ideas about what language really is. To us, all human languages are ultimately just (as Shakespeare wrote) “words, words, words.” But here a language is introduced that does not even have that common denominator. I think Chiang might be making the point that while language may seem arbitrary in terms of conveying some ideas, the factors that create languages ultimately play a larger role in shaping the ideas that they convey.
A side note: I was interested, so I looked up the root of the word "kangaroo" based on the anecdote the narrator recounts about it's origin. It is apparently actually from the Guugu Yimidhirr (Endeavour River-area Aborigine language) word gaNurru meaning "large back kangaroo." (Not "What did you say?" as was recounted.)
