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EDIT: SPOILER alert for the sensitive gents I read the "Story of Your Life", which Arrival was based on. It was a very good read. I read it 2 hours in one brea

by mad44 10y ago

EDIT: SPOILER alert for the sensitive gents I read the "Story of Your Life", which Arrival was based on. It was a very good read. I read it 2 hours in one breath. Here is a tongue-in-cheek review. The aliens were using a declarative language. (The narrative calls it teleological, but I like the programming language analogy.) https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+language&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=declarative+language https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang... The linguist uses imperative language. https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+language&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=imperative+lang... At the end of the story, the linguistic sees the benefits of using declarative/functional language and becomes a convert ;-)

maneesh 10y ago
That is certainly not spoiler free
ssivark 10y ago
[SPOILER ALERT] My interpretation of the duality was somewhat different. Human speech is sequantial and the signal is transmitted as a time-series. On the other hand, it seemed like the language used by the aliens was much more like a Wavelet transformed [1] version of the time-series signal, where: The structure is decomposed into coarse and fine details. The coarse details (forming the backbone of the message) do not have a particular location in the sequential representation. The finer details are placed at an appropriate position (the sequential part is important). I now wonder if there is a link between what I thought and what you pointed out :-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelet_transform#Principle