Arrival is a melancholy movie, very deliberately built out of paradoxes: fear commissions the operation of reason. Violence induces compassion. Visitors arrive without traveling. Hope exists in the sure knowledge of tragedy. Being a piece of art, it expresses these paradoxes with particular symbols, from the lexical to the musical to the visual idiom that we’re used to in the movies around us. And being a piece of science fiction, it’s concerned with the world of the creators far more than with the world of the fiction, which serves as an extended metaphor for the human experience.
Category: language
Knowability: Intuition and Reason
Is “everything in the universe ultimately knowable via the scientific method as we currently understand it?”
Steerscript
This is a script derived from something much like the Roman alphabet and used to write an English-like language that has evolved over the course of centuries, separated from any other speakers. There are some distinct features of it; noticeably, the “qu” digraph is extinct, though the various “*h” digraphs remain. You’ll notice also that the x is the familiar one we use as the most basic element of algebra and logic. You’ll also note that several other commonly used Greek letters — rho and phi — are hybridized with their Roman counterparts.