The Alchemy of Linguistics

Rating: 9/10 (27 November 2016)

The movie tackles one of the infamous questions that we are still struggling to answer or at least to find a way how to answer: who are we and are we really alone?. Before the release of the movie I had some heated debate with some linguists about the possibility of humans to understand a completely different semiotic communication pattern than we. The movie goes around the idea that heptapods communicate through some pictographic writing system that use it to communicate with us. Is it only designed for us or they use that system to communicate between each other. I use French when I'm talking to French who don't understand English. One thing that I has some reserves about the movie is that the fact in a matter of weeks they have reached an understanding of this complex pictographic language while we, humans, failed to even decipher some of the ancient language of of our fellow species and there are some languages that are still a mystery till now. Consequently, it would not be a cinch to decipher such complex system. Also, the link between this pictographic language and its ability to reveal the future was not well spoken and it didn't burn well. Again this movie has made linguists look cool as it was described in some of the newspapers.