SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, Interesting) by moondrake on Wednesday June 21 2017, @11:50AM
About 20 years ago I was in Egypt and travelled with some Bedouins through the Sinai. I distinctly remember our fireplace was visited by a deaf man one night. He used sign language to communicate with the others. My guide told me he was from a village where they were all deaf (we have told them many times not to intermarry...). I have no idea if it was across the border (not how freely the Bedouins could travel those days), but since its pretty close, I'd like to think he used the same sign language.
What always bothered me about that story is that I could almost understand his sign language. I do not speak Arabic, but his sign language was quite expressive and not at all like what I usually see on television. (He told us he had a young son, which I immediately grasped from his gesturing). Normal languages, even sign languages, slowly develop into the use of words, syllables and letters (as mentioned in the article), but in this case, I wonder if not the need to communicate with other, non-deaf people keeps their sign language closer to simply visualizing meaning, and prevents this process (rather than just the fact that it is sign language as seems to be the explanation offered in the article).
In the same sense, I wonder if pictographic languages in the past started "devolving" in more phono-semantic characters like chinese (and eventually syllables or letters) as soon as a group people started to use them between themselves, and formal teaching made it unnecessary to make them understandable at first glance.