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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday June 20 2017, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the guess-what-this-gesture-means dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by moondrake on Wednesday June 21 2017, @10:17PM (2 children)

    by moondrake (2658) on Wednesday June 21 2017, @10:17PM (#529245)

    no idea about the different sign language, but in contrast to what you seem to suggest, chinese characters are not pictographs or evenideograms (at least about 90% isn't). It is sometimes used as a trick during teaching, but most are not actually little drawings of what they are meant to represent (well some are, I think a few 100).

    Then there is a still relative small set of ideograms. These are not really pictures though. More like a convention of how to express an abstract idea.

    There are many phonetic elements (i.e. you write it like that because at some point in time, it was pronounced similar to another word, and you add (sometimes part of) that character to this new character. In the end, you are left with many elements that have to do with how the word sounds, not unlike our alphabet actually.

    Most characters are mixtures of the above. So not holistic, but compounds, just as our words consists out of letter (in addition, many words consist out of at least 2 characters, even although the meaning can in theory be conveyed with only 1).

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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:03AM (1 child)

    by pTamok (3042) on Thursday June 22 2017, @07:03AM (#529392)

    Thanks for the reply. I am now better informed.

    I confess, I wondered what an 'evenideogram' was? Some kind of linguistic jargon I had not come across? A new classification of writing elements I hadn't seen before?

    Then it struck me.

    D'oh!