The Story of Your Life - Part 1

"Ah, I see. You mean Sharon was maid of honor?"
"Yeah, that's it. Can I be made of honor?"
(p. 128)

Though a considerable part of "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang is occupied by the narrator's interactions with aliens, the heptapods, and her attempt to understand their language--both in terms of spoken and the written language--what makes the story a bit more complicated are the insertions of the narrator's memories with her daughter. The weaving of anecdotes shared with her daughter helps heighten the theme of language within "The Story of Your Life."

For example, the narrator's descriptions of her first interactions with the heptapods reminded me of a baby's first attempts at learning and understanding the concept of language. The narrator says, "I heard a brief fluttering sound, and saw a puckered orifice at the top of its body vibrate; it was talking" (125). Although she doesn't know the spoken language of the heptapods, she uses various observations, including looking at repetitions in fluttering sounds, in order to try to understand the aliens' language. Similarly, when a baby tries to learn a language for the first time, he or she is forced to observe the moving of the mouth and learn words through connections and repetitions where the baby's mother or father may point to distinct objects and/or people and repeat the words they refer to. It is like how the narrator points at herself and her partner and indicates them as "humans" and attempting to use the same method on the aliens.

Another interesting element Chiang adds to the story is the realization of the complexity of the spoken language through the narrator's interactions with the aliens as well as direct quotes from anecdotes related to the narrator's daughter. Especially in terms of the spoken language, like the quote I have stated above, many words even in the English language sound like each other. For example, "maid" and "made" hold completely different meanings yet they sound the same. Such element in languages introduce difficulties for the narrator as she tries to understand the heptapods' spoken language through similarities in sounds. When I read the anecdote about her daughter and her misunderstanding of "maid" as "made," a question that was raised in my mind was... what if "flutter 1" and what also sounds like "flutter 1" from the narrator's observations of the heptapods' language may sound the same but hold different meanings?

Overall, as the narrator now begins to make observations of the heptapods' written language, I am excited to find out the new realizations her observations will give me about language in general.