20 Things You Didn't Know About Arrival
11. The Logogram Bible
Most fictional languages in different media tend to be well thought out forms of communication that go beyond being simple collections of symbols and sounds lacking in any linguistic meaning or structure attached to them.
Fully fleshed languages such as Klingon, Elvish and Newspeak paved the way for newer tongues such as Dothraki, Na’vi and the dialect employed in Villeneuve's 2016 sci-fi opus. The director, picture’s screenwriter Eric Heisserer, production designer Patrice Vermette and the larger production team developed a fully functioning visual language that featured over 100 words (70 of which appeared in the film).
They (alongside famed coding experts Stephen and Christopher Wolfram) also developed a ‘Logogram Bible,’ a visual dictionary that helped give each symbol a specific meaning and weight behind that helped the artlang (artistic language) avoid the trappings of tongues of its ilk. Seeing that the film earned numerous nods for its screenplay and production design, it is safe to say that their efforts paid off.