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.It turned out that they had an orifice on the underside of their body, lined with articulated bony ridges: probably used for eating, while the one at the top was for respiration and speech.There were no other conspicuous orifices; perhaps their mouth was their anus too.Those sorts of questions would have to wait.I also tried asking our two informants for terms for addressing each individually; personal names, if they had such things.Their answers were of course unpronounceable, so for Gary's and my purposes, I dubbed them Flapper and Raspberry.I hoped I'd be able to tell them apart.* * * *The next day I conferred with Gary before we entered the looking-glass tent.“I'll need your help with this session,” I told him."Sure.What do you want me to do?""We need to elicit some verbs, and it's easiest with third-person forms.Would you act out a few verbs while I type the written form on the computer? If we're lucky, the heptapods will figure out what we're doing and do the same.I've brought a bunch of props for you to use.""No problem,” said Gary, cracking his knuckles.“Ready when you are."We began with some simple intransitive verbs: walking, jumping, speaking, writing.Gary demonstrated each one with a charming lack of self-consciousness; the presence of the video cameras didn't inhibit him at all.For the first few actions he performed, I asked the heptapods, “What do you call that?” Before long, the heptapods caught on to what we were trying to do; Raspberry began mimicking Gary, or at least performing the equivalent heptapod action, while Flapper worked their computer, displaying a written description and pronouncing it aloud.In the spectrographs of their spoken utterances, I could recognize their word I had glossed as “heptapod.” The rest of each utterance was presumably the verb phrase; it looked like they had analogs of nouns and verbs, thank goodness.In their writing, however, things weren't as clear-cut.For each action, they had displayed a single logogram instead of two separate ones.At first I thought they had written something like “walks,” with the subject implied.But why would Flapper say “the heptapod walks” while writing “walks,” instead of maintaining parallelism? Then I noticed that some of the logograms looked like the logogram for “heptapod” with some extra strokes added to one side or another.Perhaps their verbs could be written as affixes to a noun.If so, why was Flapper writing the noun in some instances but not in others?I decided to try a transitive verb; substituting object words might clarify things.Among the props I'd brought were an apple and a slice of bread.“Okay,” I said to Gary, “show them the food, and then eat some.First the apple, then the bread."Gary pointed at the Golden Delicious and then he took a bite out of it, while I displayed the “what do you call that?” expression.Then we repeated it with the slice of whole wheat.Raspberry left the room and returned with some kind of giant nut or gourd and a gelatinous ellipsoid.Raspberry pointed at the gourd while Flapper said a word and displayed a logogram.Then Raspberry brought the gourd down between its legs, a crunching sound resulted, and the gourd reemerged minus a bite; there were corn-like kernels beneath the shell.Flapper talked and displayed a large logogram on their screen.The sound spectrograph for “gourd” changed when it was used in the sentence; possibly a case marker.The logogram was odd: after some study, I could identify graphic elements that resembled the individual logograms for “heptapod” and “gourd.” 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?Next we got spoken and written names for the gelatin egg, and descriptions of the act of eating it.The sound spectrograph for “heptapod eats gelatin egg” was analyzable; “gelatin egg” bore a case marker, as expected, though the sentence's word order differed from last time.The written form, another large logogram, was another matter.This time it took much longer for me to recognize anything in it; not only were the individual logograms melted together again, it looked as if the one for “heptapod” was laid on its back, while on top of it the logogram for “gelatin egg” was standing on its head."Uh-oh.” I took another look at the writing for the simple noun-verb examples, the ones that had seemed inconsistent before.Now I realized all of them actually did contain the logogram for “heptapod"; some were rotated and distorted by being combined with the various verbs, so I hadn't recognized them at first.“You guys have got to be kidding,” I muttered."What's wrong?” asked Gary."Their script isn't word divided; a sentence is written by joining the logograms for the constituent words.They join the logograms by rotating and modifying them.Take a look.” I showed him how the logograms were rotated."So they can read a word with equal ease no matter how it's rotated,” Gary said.He turned to look at the heptapods, impressed.“I wonder if it's a consequence of their bodies’ radial symmetry: their bodies have no ‘forward’ direction, so maybe their writing doesn't either.Highly neat."I couldn't believe it; I was working with someone who modified the word “neat” with “highly.” “It certainly is interesting,” I said, “but it also means there's no easy way for us to write our own sentences in their language.We can't simply cut their sentences into individual words and recombine them; we'll have to learn the rules of their script before we can write anything legible.It's the same continuity problem we'd have had splicing together speech fragments, except applied to writing."I looked at Flapper and Raspberry in the looking glass, who were waiting for us to continue, and sighed.“You aren't going to make this easy for us, are you?"* * * *To be fair, the heptapods were completely cooperative [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]