May 22
Some progress! Here's a handful of Rocky's words out of the ~26 identified so far. The sound designers of Project Hail Mary really didn't need to go this far.
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Some progress! Here's a handful of Rocky's words out of the ~26 identified so far. The sound designers of Project Hail Mary really didn't need to go this far.
There seems to be a misconception about Grace's translation software that is bothering me more and more and we need to address:
It is *not* AI. It is not """interpreting""" Rocky's words/meaning. It only picks up literal words.
This is how it works:
Eridian words are musical notes/chords
Soundwaves are physical, and at different frequencies they make different patterns! These physical patterns, and therefore Eridian language, is formulaic and repeatable. This is easily processed by computers in a reliable way. This is also lucky for Grace!!
Grace and Rocky create a database that maps notes/chords to words
When Rocky speaks, the computer looks up the exact notes in their pre-made database and returns the associated word
It is a FORMULAIC LOOKUP, NOT AI
Rocky isn't saying "My loneliness knows no bounds, and I have forgotten my soul in the endless abyss" which the translator outputs as "Rocky in space too long"
Rocky is literally saying "... Rocky in space too long" knowing that that's the only words the translator has to draw from.
It's a bit terrifying to me how quickly people are just accepting "yeah computers must be intuiting basic meaning" because that's the opposite of how it works. They don't "understand" anything. They take gads of data and turn it into something that looks like it has meaning, not the other way around. I know I'm fighting a losing battle here, and maybe I'm just being a pedantic asshole, but god do I hate how pervasive this misconception is.
appreciate the movie keeping Rocky and Adrian kind of gender neutral
Grace assigns “he” to Rocky as a form of connection and camaraderie, but he offers Rocky a choice of feminine voices
Adrian is a unisex name. it leaves the concept of eridian gender and reproduction up to imagination which is way more realistic
Something ive been thinking about as a billingual person who has lived for 15 years in a predominantly english speaking country and now speaks my native language Kinda Weird, I'm really interested in the idea of Grace developing a really strange accent after living on erid for like. 30 years. Grace still speaks english of course, his vocal chords arent built for the eridian language, and so he speaks english the eiridans speak their language. But when he speaks english, after all those years with the only responses he hears being musical notes, maybe his words start having strange intonations, stress being placed on different syllables, a more melodic, rhythmic tone to speaking. Maybe he starts using pitch more, subconsiously, varying pitch to match what hes trying to convey, similar to the eridians. His sentence structure would change too I think, he would start phrasing things more aligning with eridian sentence structure, just like saying "question" and "statement" at the end of sentences. All of this would happen slowly over time and he wouldnt even notice it, the eridians who are not versed in different human dialects and accents wouldnt notice it either. But it would change all the same. Maybe if somehow someway humans ever got in contact with grace again, some super radio transmitter or they just straight up send astronauts, whatever, I think the very first thing they would notice would be graces accent. Ryland grace has the most unique english accent in history, it sounds, frankly, completely alien.
I really don't like this trope about monocultural monoetnic alien planets, so let's talk about Erid.
Imagine Grace and Rocky on their way back. They both don't like the idea of going into the coma. And they have like... all Earth media ever created: every film, book and article. Why not dive into translation and linguistics at all? They have about four years alone in space. So Grace tells Rocky that humans have about 7,000 language in existence and about 40 of them being the most widely spoken.
And I have two variants.
In the first one Rocky says "yeah, same situation" and Grace is very curious but kinda shocked and scared. He's a huge Star Trek nerd. What do you mean aliens have more than one language???
Or, and it's even funnier, I think, Rocky says "you're lucky, now we have only one language and one country".
"What do you mean 'now'???"
"There was a big war, we won, so only one language."
"And when was that?"
"About a thousand years ago."
And Grace sighs with relief... but then realizes that in human years it was basically World War II and he's heading to the planet of victorious Hitler.
Big rock-spider Hitler.
Or Rocky could say smth like "No-no-no, we were on the defensive, and they killed each other", I don't know.
Not to be the language-psychology nerd that I am, but I've seen several instances of Rocky POV which involve him referring to Grace's arms and legs as his "tactile arms" and his "walking arms" or some other broadly synonymous description. But it's not like we don't have a word for limb. Our arms and legs are distinct in their build, but the function of the words' distinction is context dependent.
Eridians use a base six model which implies that they generally use two of their limbs primarily as hands consistently, using their other three to stabilize themselves (unclear if they need all five to actively walk as far as I can tell, correct me if I'm wrong). This makes sense as their limbs don't have any kind of flare out at the ends so they would need at least three to balance on reliably.
All that is to say they probably would have two different words for arms and legs in the same way that we have two different words for hands and fists.
y'all know the sort of fart sound rocky made when grace asked what rocky's name for him was?
eridians basically have super-sonar, right. rocky can hear grace easily from across the ship and can "see" through walls. that's why grace look disgust when eat; rocky can hear his squishy human organs working and probably making all manner of wet squelching sounds that humans don't even notice.
just like grace saw a weird alien and called it "rocky" because it looked like a rock, ♫♩♪♫ saw a weird alien and called it "phbbt" because it looked like gross wet squelching noises.
I had a thought about Eridians and pronouns on the drive home. Now, I haven't read the book yet or anything else Andy Weir has out on Eridians, so idk if I'm missing something that's already out there, these are just some thoughts I had.
As Eridians don't really have a gender, especially not like how humans experience gender, they don't have gendered pronouns. However, I think they could have different pronouns to refer to different things. Referring to a person and referring to an object could have different pronouns. So the pronoun for a person could be like ♩♩♬°♪ while the pronoun for a thing is °♫♩♫ for example. They could have other pronouns to differentiate other things like places or ideas, and potentially different pronouns, or at least inflections, that can distinguish different levels of familiarity with a person. So maybe the pronoun you use to refer to your mate is slightly different from the one used for your child which is a bit different from the one used for a friend and so on. So if ♩♩♬°♪ is standard for referring to another Eridian, maybe making the last note higher means they're a friend while adding a ♩ to the end means they're your mate.
Well, at some point the topic of pronouns will come up on the 4 year long trip when there's not much else to do. Probably from Rocky asking why Grace uses 'he' for himself but 'she' for Stratt. Which leads to a discussion on human genders and how Grace is male while Stratt is female and how important gender can be to humans. This also leads to Rocky asking why Grace used 'he' for Rockh, which leads to Grace having to analyze and explain his reasoning, which probably breaks down to some combination of a history lesson on misogyny and the patriarchy, Grace addressing his own internal biases from having existed in American society, and that he/him are the pronouns he uses and it could be some amount of projecting himself onto Rocky. But Grace can change what pronouns he uses to refer to Rocky if Rocky would prefer something else.
Which makes Rocky think. Eridians don't have different genders and so no different pronouns. To Rocky, it makes no difference if Grace uses he, she, they, or it to refer to him. That's not a concept that Eridians have and so none of the words hold any real meaning for Rocky. But I think he could decide to stick with the he/him pronouns because that's what Grace gave him and they feel more special than any of the other options because of that. Rocky isn't male, so 'he' doesn't feel right because it's aligned with his gender, 'he' feels right because that's how Grace refers to him. It's emotionally special in a different way.
But Rocky also realizes that while he would have been just as happy with 'she' or 'it' if that's what Grace had used when he first started referring to Rocky, Grace doesn't feel the same way. These pronouns mean something to him. It's like how using the pronoun inflection for a place to refer to a person would be seen as weird and rude. But Eridians don't have any pronouns for gender.
So Rocky makes one.
It's a simple inflection added onto the end of the standard person pronoun, a slight humm. It's the closest sound Rocky can make to the way Grace says 'him'. Rocky takes how Grace refers to himself and adds it, as best he can, onto the Eridians' pronoun so that they can refer to him properly.
