One word

A linguist stands in front of a glass wall. On the other side, something vast and patient draws a circle of ink in the air. In Arrival (2016), Dr Louise Banks learns that circle-writing, Heptapod B, and in learning it comes to see time the way the visitors do: all at once, beginning and end together. Ted Chiang, who wrote the original story, “Story of Your Life” (1998), thought it “unfilmable”, and was very happy with the film.

Does language shape thought?

The film borrows a real idea, often called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Its strong version, that your language decides what you are able to think, is rejected by most linguists. A weaker version, that language nudges what we notice, has real evidence behind it. Russian has two basic words for blue, and Russian speakers are a fraction faster at telling light blue from dark blue (Winawer and colleagues, 2007). Speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre in northern Australia say “north” and “south-east” where English speakers say “left” and “right”, and they stay oriented in a way most of us cannot (Boroditsky and Gaby, 2010). Language does not build a prison round the mind. It does tilt the floor.

One word for God

So what about the word our whole site begins with? Hebrew Elohim and Eloah, Aramaic Alaha, Arabic Allāh: one family of words for God. Most linguists derive Allāh from al-ilāh, “the God”; some Muslim scholars hold it is a proper name with no derivation at all. Either way, it has no plural and no feminine, and Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews use it too: an Arabic Bible opens John's Gospel with the Word that was with Allāh. Maltese Catholics pray to Alla.

Each faith has noticed how words shape reverence. Jews do not pronounce God’s four-letter name; in prayer they say Adonai, “my Lord”, and in conversation often HaShem, “the Name”. Muslims learn the 99 Names, each one a doorway rather than a definition. Christians speak of Christ himself as the Word.

What the circle teaches

Louise’s gift is not a new fact but a new way of holding facts: seeing a whole life, joy and grief together, and choosing it anyway. The faiths make a similar claim about God’s knowledge, which al-ʿAlīm, the All-Knowing, describes: not a list learned one item at a time, but everything known at once. No human language can hold that. Every faith keeps trying anyway, with more than one word, and with silence when words run out. So the question the film leaves us with is a good one to take home: which word for God did you learn first, and what did it teach you to expect?