@coriander i just refused to engage critically with the linguistics of arrival when i watched it; i otherwise liked it too much
@aescling Yeah honestly as long as you don't think too much about that, it's phenomenal
The problem is "that" is the foundational conceit of the film
@coriander it is absolutely worth interpreting the shapir-whorf hypothesis but using such a purrepawstrous purremise as your vehicle fur it just does not work
@aescling Unfortunately the original short story also did this
@coriander like even the idea that human language is “linear” is Extremely contestable
@coriander it is mediated by a form of communication that is linear but it is absolutely not clear that the underlying mechanisms, internal representation, whatever are. linguists generally do not model language in a way that can be remotely considered linear at all
@aescling Linguistic models are relatively lineal but they also involve a lot of weird shit like Movement
@coriander i mean, i would not call trees linear
@aescling @coriander “linear” in the sense of having a one-dimensional serialization but not in the sense of that one dimension being perceived linearly with time; reading often involves a lot of jumping and backfilling
@aescling @coriander and i think it’s easy to argue that paralinguistic cues are signalled along a different axis than syntactic structures so it is multidimensional in that sense too
@coriander it would be a lot better if it did not try to say anything about language