A written form for Heptapod B was developed for Arrival by production designer Patrice Vermette and his wife Martine Bertrand, based on the descriptions in "Story of Your Life".
[3] He worked alongside McGill professor Morgan Sonderegger, who served as a linguistics consultant and assisted in splicing the sounds during the development of the language.
[4] While Martine Bertrand and Patrice Vermette are given credit for the creation of Heptapod B in Arrival, the language was a collaborative effort of the crew.
Due to this, Heisserer's circular illustrations of Heptapod B initially bore a strong resemblance to J. R. R Tolkien's Tengwar script.
[5] Afterwards, Vermette, the production designer for Arrival, worked alongside other crew members to further develop Heptapod B.
Bertrand approached Vermette with some designs for Heptapod B, which deviated from the more mathematical or hieroglyphic conceptualizations the crew had come up with, and instead appeared as more "inky and smoky" characters.
[21] Heptapod A uses case markers to indicate whether a noun is a subject or object of the sentence; the language has a free word order, which extends to conditional clause,[22] unlike the majority of natural languages, where a fixed word order of an antecedent always preceding its consequent for this construction is a linguistic universal.
[28] The lack of large scale recursive center embedding has been claimed to be an issue of human short term memory,[29] due to the difficulty of remembering large numbers of pairs of subjects and predicates; the depth of center embedding is for the most part zero in spoken language, and rarely exceeding three in written language.
[28] Visual inflections are used to show noun declension, including: Heptapod B does not contain punctuation, as it does not represent spoken language - instead, the syntax of a sentence is determined by the way in which semagrams are combined.
While the former is based on an understanding of the world in terms of cause and effect, that is, events ordered sequentually in time, the latter is a formulation of classical mechanics whose point of view is global and not sequential, as it describes the motion of a system like that which minimizes (or maximizes) the energy required; this is known as the least action principle.
[36] [37] Chiang uses a teleological interpretation of least-action principles to suggest that heptapods view time holistically, and therefore can see both the present and future simultaneously.