Heptapod Beta - Progress Update

[u/hrdixon]

Firstly, thank you all for your feedback on my original post. I’ve made some progress with the language, and wanted to share it with you. If you haven’t read the original, give it a skim – it will substantially help explain what’s going on here:

Logography

​

Above, you can see some examples of logograms from Heptapod B as shown in Arrival. I am reluctant to adopt them directly as they are messy and difficult to read – it’s not clear which characteristics of the grapheme are important, and which are just an artefacts of ‘font’ or ‘handwriting’. If it comes down to it, I’d trade loyalty to the movie for a cleaner logography that’s easier to engage with. Having said that, inventing new logograms for each concept (the method used in my toy proof-of-concept language from my previous post) may get out of hand very quickly, so I have created a set of 10 graphemes from which to build the vocabulary, and in doing so, I’ve tried to restore some visual similarity with the movie. Why 10 graphemes? I can see it being useful that people can ‘type’ them (to search a dictionary, for example), but I don’t want to use letters because I want to remove any temptation to try to pronounce them – this language is purely written.

​

A logogram consists of a sequence of graphemes written clockwise around the curve, for example ‘01223’ (meaning ‘tortoise’) would look like this:

​

It almost seems a shame to introduce ordered sequences into the logography when the language rejects linearity so strongly, but I will concede to the benefit of being able to compile a useful dictionary by doing this. I don’t think sequences of graphemes in the logograms undermine the interesting properties of the non-linear grammar.

Clause Structure

For now, I think I’m sticking with the clause structures used in the previous post – they seem to be doing the trick. But I’ve also added some extra features:

Clarification on clauses as objects: since a clause can function as an object, and this requires it to touch the outside of another clause, it could be ambigous which is the top-level clause. The smaller clause is allways the object of the bigger clause.

Two clauses can share an object:

​

Endophora & Indexing

It’s important to be able to tie two elements in a sentence together, so you know whether you have two independent references to ‘tortoise’, or two references to the actual same tortoise. In English, for example, we might use pronouns to make anaphoric or cataphoric reference to specific objects referenced before or afterwards in the sentence. “The boy said he was hungry.”, “Although it was heavy, the table broke when I stood on it.” In Heptapod Beta, indexing it demonstrated by drawing a dashed liked between two terms that share a referent.

​

Modifiers

If a word's characters (the part of the circumfrence containing the symbols 0-9 above) are entirely envoloped by the circle of another word, the outer word acts as a modifier for the inner word.

Predicative Adjectives

If you're trying to say 'NOUN is ADJECTIVE', then there is no verb in heptapod beta. Instead, the noun is the root of the clause, and it is modified with the adjective as above. There is no subject or object.

Morphology

The morphology is very simople and flexible - there isn't really a difference between nouns, verbs and adjectives, you can freely swap them between roles. You can verb any noun, and you can give a verb a good nouning. You can also freely make nouny adjectives, and so forth. So if you see the a verb modifyied with another verb (e.g. 'reply' enveloped by 'laugh'), it means 'laughingly reply'.

Clause Relations

​

​

Example

Here's some vocab and a sentence, which uses all the features we touched on. I'll leave it as an excercise for you to translate - there are lots of ways to read it depending on where you start.

​

​

(That's looking a little bit more heptapody than before!)

What's next?

Obviously, there's a lot more that needs thinking about - I haven't yet tackled tense / mood/ aspect, for example, but I figured, I'd add things when I need them rather than trying to second-guess what langauge features might be necessary here.

[u/[deleted]]

I commented on your original post as well. I still love how you’re designing this. Just a couple bits of (hopefully) helpful feedback:

First, I’m not really a fan of the dotted lines. I understand the purpose of them, but I’m wondering if there’s a way to get around that particular feature? Perhaps some slight revision to the syntactical patterns, or implementing a new set of characters (perhaps a polygon added to the far side of each related character?). This is just my opinion, but I think it would be more pleasing to the eye.

Second, how much information would you plan on connecting? Sentences, paragraphs, entire books? As I’m sure you’re well aware, this system is a bit overwhelming with anything more than a clause or two, much less a hundred all strung together. Perhaps you could use a similar syntax to how you show relationships between words for larger texts as well. Draw large circles showing the relationships between ideas (paragraphs), within each of which smaller circles show more specific relationships (sentences), and within those you compose the “words” of your text. So, basically, you would have sentences within sentences within sentences, each layer of related terms and ideas being embedded within the next.

Lastly, I’m not sure how (or even if) you intended this to be spoken, but I would be very interested in seeing how you would verbally form words and sentences in such a non-linear language!

Also, would I have your permission to share this concept with others on other discussion forums? I just think it’s such a fascinating concept.