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Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don't sprout multiple heads, languages tend to veer away from certain forms that might spring from an imaginative mind. For example, one core property of human languages is known as duality of patterning: meaningful linguistic units (such as words) break down into smaller meaningless units (sounds), so that the words sap, pass, and asp involve different combinations of the same sounds, even though their meanings are completely unrelated.
It's not hard to imagine that things could have been otherwise. In principle, we could have a language in which sounds relate holistically to their meanings—a high-pitched yowl might mean "finger," a guttural purr might mean "dark," a yodel might mean "broccoli," and so on. But there are stark advantages to duality of patterning. Try inventing a lexicon of tens of thousands of distinct noises, all of which are easily distinguished, and you will probably find yourself wishing you could simply re-use a few snippets of sound in varying arrangements.
What to make, then, of the recent discovery of a language whose words are not made from smaller, meaningless units? Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new sign language emerging in a village with high rates of inherited deafness in Israel's Negev Desert. According to a report led by Wendy Sandler of the University of Haifa, words in this language correspond to holistic gestures, much like the imaginary sound-based language described above, even though ABSL has a sizable vocabulary.
To linguists, this is akin to finding a planet on which matter is made up of molecules that don't decompose into atoms. ABSL contrasts sharply with other sign languages like American Sign Language (ASL), which creates words by re-combining a small collection of gestural elements such as hand shapes, movements, and hand positions.
Researchers theorize the sign language hasn't re-used simpler elements to create new words because gestures can accommodate a wider range of variation than sounds can, such that many more unique signifiers are possible.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday June 20 2017, @09:15PM
Also, by the way, I don't buy the common linguistics assumption of the "arbitrariness of the sign" either. That is, many linguists would tell you that the connection between a word and its referent is arbitrary -- e.g., there's no reason why CAT should refer to a feline animal rather than, say, to a canine or bovine animal.
On one level, that's obviously true for most modern languages. Onomatopoeia is an exception, which is why we have a special term for it. But there are fringe linguistics theories that look at language development at the phonetic level and postulate primitive languages had such connections between sound and representation. Arguably, I think there are remnants in most modern languages, often only retained in very old roots that might be composed of only a couple phonemes. But there's only so far such imitative sound representations can take you, and when you need more words, you start reusing them, thereby losing the iconic connections between signifier and signified. A language where there are more possibilities for imitation could obviously continue vocabulary expansion further without reuse.