![]() In one study, Chinese-English bilinguals were asked to arrange pictures of a young, mature, and old Brad Pitt and Jet Li. ![]() This affects the way observers perceive the spatial unfolding of the ageing process. The word shàng (up) is used to talk about the past – so “last week” becomes “up one week”. The word xià (down) is used to talk about future events, so when referring to “next week” a Mandarin Chinese speaker would literally say “down week”. Mandarin Chinese employs a vertical time axis alongside a horizontal one. Those that are bilingual in Spanish (a future-in-front language like English) tend to make forward moving gestures, whereas those with little or no knowledge of Spanish gesture backwards (consistent with the Aymara future-is-behind pattern), when talking about the future. These differences in how time is visualised in the mind affect how Aymara speakers gesture about events. We look forward to the good times ahead and to leaving the past behind us.Īmy Adams as linguistics expert Louise Banks in Arrival. Visualising the future as in front of us (and the past as behind us) is also very common in English. For example, in Swedish, the word for future is framtid which literally means “front time”. Because time is so abstract, the only way to talk about it is by using the terminology from another, more concrete domain of experience, namely that of space. The really cool thing about time is the way we actually experience it is in some ways up to our imagination and our language. ![]() We cannot touch or see it but we organise our whole lives around it. Time is fascinating because it is very abstract. The way that bilinguals handle these different ways of thinking has long been a mystery to language researchers. But different languages also embody different worldviews and different ways of organising the world around us. We have known for some time that bilinguals go back and forth between their languages rapidly and often unconsciously – a phenomenon called code-switching. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals. However, this study does show that learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. But unlike Hollywood, bilinguals sadly can’t see into the future. My new study – which I worked on with linguist Emanuel Bylund – shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. As one character in the movie says: “Learning a foreign language rewires your brain.” She discovers the way the aliens talk about time gives them the power to see into the future – so as Banks learns their language, she also begins to see through time. In the film Arrival, Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks who is trying to decipher an alien language. ![]() It's part of our history.It turns out, Hollywood got it half right. Vermette told Insider, "We looked into ancient Asian language, Arabic language, tribes from Northern Africa. Vermette and Bertrand researched existing languages and created 100 variations of the tendrilled circle. A few days later, she showed her husband a version of the tendrilled circles you see in the film, and the beginnings of an alien language were born. Vermette struggled for a while before his wife, artist Martine Bertrand, offered to help. He told Space about the struggles he had making such a familiar shape interesting to audiences, saying, "We wanted to have something that was aesthetically pleasing, and that could not at first know that it's a language or not. With this in mind, the film's director, Denis Villeneuve, wanted the Heptapods' language to be based on circles, which was a challenge to Vermette. In an interview with Space, the film's production designer, Patrice Vermette, discusses how real-world linguists and archeologists assisted in the creation of the Heptapod language. Watching the dark wisps of ink arrange themselves into obscure shapes is captivating, cinematic, and in fact, scientific. Of course, there's no way for mere humans to know which Hollywood take is most accurate, but there are some ideas about extraterrestrials that are more intriguing than others.Ģ016's "Arrival" features aliens known as Heptapods who communicate by secreting intricate, inky circles that are later translated into various human language. Steven Spielberg's aliens prefer music and have lightbulb fingers, while James Cameron invented a whole new language for his alien characters. In those movies, filmmakers imagine how creatures from other planets might look, sound, and most importantly, how they might communicate. Today, instead of finger painting strange figures on rocks with natural pigments, people write aliens into scripts and watch movies about them.
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