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Rex Bachmann · 06-27-2008, 04:52 PM

Adam Lenhardt, I would thank you for such an effortful and laborious response. Your report on the "deaf language(s)" is informative and interesting.

However, I have to take issue with some of your other declarations, which, to my mind, are mere rehearsals of previous posters' highly questionable, if not downright erroneous, comments, which I had hoped (against hope, apparently) to have effectively put to rest in post #224.

(post #256):

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. . ., body language and facial expressions do play a much larger role in ASL (and other signed languages) than in verbal languages. Sarcasm, for instance, has to be conveyed entirely through facial expression and body language since the concept of tone of voice does not exist.

First of all, let me admit my own bias. Unlike some others around here, I have a problem with use of "language" (as in "body language and facial expressions") to refer to non-verbal (that is, nonvocal/nongraphic) communication. I find it okay as a metaphor, but as an exact parallel to spoken/written communication I find it shaky and find myself dubious.

Some have questioned whether animals "have language". Though not a settled issue, because no one has yet come up with a globally acceptable definition of the term, the fact is that even certain animals do have vocal communications of various kinds. Birds have calls, chirps, songs, and the like. Whales have "songs". Canines and felines have repetoires of growls, roars, barks, meows, whines, etc. Apes have various screeches, calls, grunts, etc. I don't know what the evidence is that any of these convey factual information, as opposed to emotions (DANGER, HUNGER, SUBMISSION, etc.) and the like. Maybe someone could enlighten us?

Honey bees supposedly "dance" to indicate to their hive mates the sources of nectar or pollen, but that is not what I'd call a "language". Gestures are subject to much cultural interpretation. If someone "gives you the [middle] finger" you may know it's meant as a (deadly) insult but can you translate it into specific words?

Some would argue that imagery per se is not true "language" (parallel to spoken language) and that pictography (images strung together as "narrative") is not true writing, since, although ideas may be conveyed, real "words" (human language) are not. Ideography is very borderline, and qualifies as "writing" to the extent that it ties in with logography, syllabary, or phonetic writing in mixed systems. (The Chinese system is mixed. Egyptian and Mayan Hieroglyphs are mixed. So is ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform. Heck, our system is mixed as well. We use symbols for words at times, e.g., <1> for "one" <&> for "and", etc.)

But, it seems from what you say that (Western) "sign languages" have "gestemes", an inventory of stereotyped gestures that bear contrastive conceptual meanings---but "no nouns"?---as well as some being used to represent alphabetic characters. I guess with those features I can accept the idea of "gestural language".

How, by the way, do educated deaf people from cultures where tonemics ("tones of voice" distinguish "words" from each other: má, mà, mâ, etc.) characterizes the local---[ahem]---spoken languages (e.g., the Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) or many native West African languages) make out with "sign language"? No native "deaf language"? Only European models???

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For this reason, Deaf people with their hands tied behind their back can still express themselves more effectively than hearing people can gagged.

I think that's a mighty big claim. "Express themselves more effectively" how?

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. . . we evolved to communicate through speech and hearing.

Yes. Yes, we did.

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. . . if we had evolved to this point without ears, I believe conversational language would have developed anyway. Developed, in fact, to the same level of complexity and sophistication currently enjoyed by contemporary spoken and signed languages. I think written language would also probably have developed, but it would probably be more along the lines of Egyptian hyroglyphics than the highly efficient 26-letter Latin alphabet we enjoy today. I say this because phonemes are based around sounds and do not exist, in my experience, with signed language.

[Uh-huh] . . . .

Brian Perry wrote (post #251):

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. . . . from a practical standpoint, it is the ability to put ideas into permanent written form that allowed humans to break the limits of learning solely from oral tradition.

But then again, perhaps reading and writing became so important to our development simply because the printing press was invented before radio and television. In other words, the primary benefit of writing to mankind seems to be the ability to rapidly expose one person's thoughts to thousands or millions of other people (both current and future generations).

But that's only a very recent occurrence (and has been eclipsed exponentially still by the "power" of voice and image over electronic media). Writing existed for thousands of years and very few of the people alive were directly affected by its existence. It's only by sheer luck that many millenia-old writings, even those carved in stone or metal, survived for us to have the benefit of much of the knowledge or many of the insights of those who went before us. Before the 1890s, for example, moderns didn't know that there had been a powerful and vast "Hittite" empire in the mountainous areas of eastern Turkey during the first half and part of the second half of the 2nd millenium B.C.E. "Hittite"---actually a misnomer by modern scholars; they called themselves "Nessites"---was a name known mostly through a couple of Bible mentions. And then the vast archives at Boghazköi were unearthed, and we now have a huge fund of cuneiform (and Hittite hieroglyphic) texts that renders not only one but up to four (related) new (as in, "previously unknown") Indo-European languages, plus at least two non-Indo-European languages, with associated (pseudo)historical, folkloric, religious, or mythological texts. Sheer luck (and a lot of archaeological perseverance). By contrast, we still have, to my knowledge, no texts from ancient Troy, located at the other end of the Anatolian peninsula, despite its massive architectural remains and participation in a thriving Aegean civilization (although it has been indirectly deduced that it, too, spoke a language related to "Hittite"). Nevertheless, one should ponder on the significance of the lack of text remains from such an "advanced" (for its time and place) society and how ephemeral that "written word" can be if the media on which it is recorded are lost, buried, hidden, or destroyed.

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But if that proliferation of ideas had somehow been possible via an electronic broadcast medium prior to the invention of the printing press, perhaps things would have turned out much differently.

If early man had found a preëlectronic technique of capturing sound, including the human voice, on, say, wax or clay impressions and reproducing that sound and preserving those impressions, who knows whether that would have at least dulled the incentives for the development of much of writing, esp. the clunky ideographic, logographic, and pre-syllabic/preälphabetic forms of it?

(post #232):

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. . . I think it is safe to say that without the written language, it's scary to think of how far less we would have progressed as a species.

We'll never know, now, will we? We don't know---and can't know---what possible adaptations might have substituted for writing systems.

It's like that line from Supernova (1999): "What if they'd never crucified Christ?---but they did!"

(post #251):

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I'm not positive about this, but I would guess that after a relatively young age, a person's vocabulary is increased mostly through reading and not listening. In addition, higher level learning (math, etc.) is greatly dependent on the visual --i.e., written--aspects of the "language" such as shapes, equations, etc.

I'd take another guess, if I were you. Of course, it depends on what kind of "vocabulary" you're talking about. Have you heard today's American young people speak? Have you ever really listened to what so many of them talk about? (I'm talking primarily, but not exclusively, about the white middle class here.) That vocabulary---much less the subject matter---wasn't gotten through any reading. Not to suggest it isn't heavily biassed for comedic effect, but, if the sampling of people paraded on the "Jaywalking"-feature of Jay Leno's Tonight Show is anywhere near representative, then the average education level of today's young (and some middle-aged) adults is not very high; nor is the vocabulary very deep. As for the educated elite, which is what you seem to be talking about, who knows? Do these people have much general "learned" knowledge about the world outside of their occupational specialties? My impression is that they don't. ("'Sixteenth president'? Uh--Uh, duh . . . . Carter???")

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However, much like spoken language before the King James Bible, it [sign language] varied wildly from region to region.

I don't know what you're trying to claim here. If the premise is that, somehow, language spoken after the promulgation of the King James Bible (which is actually based on the Wycliff Bible and whose language is older than the promulgation of the standard edition by at least a century, and probably more)---if it is that spoken English "varied less wildly from region to region" after said promulgation, then you've got another "think" coming to you.

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Because sign language lacked a lexicon, it could not be formalized.

Now, how was it a language if it "lacked a lexicon"? What does it mean for a "language" to "lack a lexicon"?

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. . . the man who says "puh-day-dah" can still understand the man who says "poe-tate-toh" only because they are both working from a common lexicon.

And how do you define "lexicon"? How does one have a language without a "lexicon"? The lexicon is what maps onto the reälia, that is, real-world content. In other words, you have to have something to talk (communicate) about before you even need to start to "converse" (in whatever form). And then you need something that will convey that object of your thoughts/perception into active (linguistic) communication. It seems to me that that is what a lexicon is.

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Dictionaries are merely compilations of observed conversational language. In this sense, Noah Webster did the same thing that l’Abbé Charles Michel de l’Epée did: he observed conversational language in practice, compiled it and formalized it.

Actually they compile many a nonconversational vocable. Try going through Merriam-Webster's unabridged dictionary and you will find huge numbers of so-called "obsolete" vocables or "obsolete" meanings to many a well used vocable. Many of these were Latinate vocabulary items (or vocables) introduced to the language solely in scholarly or literary writing, never apparently used in the spoken language, and not even catching on in scholarly circles (hence, their obsolescence).

Here one observes the elitist hypocrisy of ignoring and/or deprecating unfavored vocabulary ("four-letter words", slang", "patois", "jargon", etc.) on the pretext of its being too current and "ephemeral", even as words that have never even been "real words" in regular use in the language have gained permanent entry to the "official list" of English vocabulary, due chiefly to their Latinate pedigree.

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That being said, such formalization is a key milestone in the development of a language. It allows a language to extend beyond the limitations of mere geography. This is why the OED or M-W dictionaries, though nothing more than published arbitrary snapshots of the English language as it existed at that moment in time, are worthy of some reverence.

Yeah, well, your whole "formalization"-bit betrays the bias, which is taught by the system we have, in favor of the written word, as if the OED's or Merriam-Webster's---or, for that matter, Strunk-&-White's---saying "it's so" makes it so. (And by extension, if it's not there or it's denied there, "it ain't so".) Not valid, as I've been trying the point out all along.

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The "sounding out" phase of acquiring written language obviously does not exist in natural signed languages like ASL that lack phonemes. However, the process is the same.

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When we say the word word, do we mean that "string of sounds" or that "string of letters"? . . . . in the vast majority of cases, which has come first, the "string of sounds" or the corresponding "string of letters"?

I would argue that the "string of sounds" is the "string of letters", since the letters of the Latin alphabet (and basic combinations of those letters, like "ch" for the chuh[/u] sound) represent phonemes which are sounds. This is why I think a written signed language developed without a verbal inheritance would be logographic (like Chinese kanji) rather than phonographic or orthographic.

Do you understand the concept of the phoneme? I'm not clear that you do. There's a difference between phones (human speech sounds, of which there are an estimated 100,000 distinct ones in all the world's languages) and phonemes, the small, somewhat arbitrary, and divergent selection of human speech sounds out of that total that each language actually exploits to convey contrastive meaning (e.g., the distinction between, say, English [p] and English [b, which is voicing, in minimal pairs such as pat and bat). The hearing child learns the phonemes of his language by learning vocabulary (which may be augmented in the classroom) and contextual speech-patterns at home.

Okay, given your statement, let me ask you this---and be honest (with yourself!) as to your first, unfiltered answer: Is there OR is there NOT an "e" in vine? In pale? In love? In French bonne? Is there a "w" in French oui? In English sword? How about two? Is there a "c" in victuals? An "l" in walk or balk or (s)talk? What about half or salve? Is there a "z" in Spanish zorro?

What is the "string of sounds" in each of the following: staple, clothes, road, bear, main, spawn, flaccid, interest?

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The constraining force of formal language keeps regional variation from growing too unbearably great.

Oh, really? Tell me how. And tell me how "having a common lexicon"---however you define it---kept "regionalisms" in the Roman Empire from ending up as Italian, Sardinian, Catalan, Provençal, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc. (i.e., all the various Romance languages)? Tell me how the "constraining force of formal language" (in this case, medieval Latin) kept the "Holy Roman Empire of the German nation" (the "First Reich"---which, as the Germans love to point out, was not "holy", not "Roman", not "German", and hardly an "empire") from becoming France, Germany, the low countries, Denmark, parts of northern Italy, parts of Poland, etc., with all their divergent languages and dialects? How?!?

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An exhaustive record can accumulate the vastness of spoken language, . . . .

With factors of billions of utterances spoken every day, no it can't. That's a logistical impossibility and no desideratum, either. (Do you know how much garbage people really talk?)

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. . . but it will be out of date immediately upon publication and it will fail to take into account all of the non-verbal indications which are most pronounced in a signed language but are central to any conversational language.

You should see the writings of William Labov, who did much work (with mixed results) on "nonstandard" spoken Englishes(!) in American, mostly urban, dialects over the course of a generation.