It's not a universally accepted concept (as strong linguistic relativity) in linguistics, and of course, there's no way
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Arrival
Tsotha-lanti — 9 years ago(November 21, 2016 10:57 AM)
It's not a universally accepted concept (as strong linguistic relativity) in linguistics, and of course, there's no way to be sure it would apply to inter-species communications.
Imagine that. -
nardog — 9 years ago(November 21, 2016 11:12 AM)
The part where she brings that up is when the movie lost me. Not only is it a much disputed concept, almost the entire effort of modern linguistics is basically built upon Chomsky's criticism of it. It's inconceivable a renowned linguist like her would mention it without being dismissive.
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Otkon — 9 years ago(November 21, 2016 12:56 PM)
Modern Linguistics is not hardwired in lockstep to every thought Noam Chomsky has blathered.
And the point where she brings up Sapir-Whorf is the entire attempted point of the story. To human language, SW has slight implications in perceptions of shape, color, gender - multifarious things on spectra that can be categorized for economy. The film posits that the alien's orthography does something similar with time. But then botches the plot because of course we know that writing is not language at all but a symbolic representation of it - thrice removed from deep structure in regards to human language. The film clearly states that the alien phonology is not linked to the ink blot thingies.
And this is where my issue with the film lies:
It is not the language that causes her to see time in all directions but the vertical coffee stains of which she sure figured out a multitude with no comparative analysis to copious mental signifiers of the foreign subjects. They seemingly glanced over the intergalactic Rosetta Stone that unlocked the orthography. It would have been very easy with extant speakers to prep a Swadesh list of sorts and have the aliens show ink examples of basic concepts like plurality, anatomy, etc.
But no, the movie jumps right to "use weapon" when we already know the logograms were arbitrary. So how did they get to
weapons
if they didn't lay out various types of weapons before the aliens and see the same repeated symbol when the aliens understood hypernymic categorization. The film even says "they might not know tools from weapons". Well of course they might not, if you haven't shown them enough examples of both.
Then she just gets in the tank and all is revealed anyway. Um, ok.
It is ironic that Whorf's initial impetus to study language was based on what he perceived as people's subjective definitions of the word
empty
. Because that describes this movie's handling of linguistic theory.