An Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

http://nautil.us/blog/the-unusual-language-that-linguists-thought-couldnt-exist

by hownottowrite • 12 years ago

84 48 12 years ago

jordigh• 12 years ago

Can a linguist explain? I don't know much about sign languages. Is there a corresponding concept of "phonemes" into which words in other sign languages can be decomposed into? And is ABSL already "mature" i.e. native language of some babies, or is it still in some sort of "pidgin" stage? Maybe it will become more "normalised" as time goes by.

By the way, I wonder why sign languages are the ones whose birth we can easily witness. Nicaraguan Sign Language is the textbook example of this.

SilasX• 12 years ago

Second this request. I get the feeling that this result is just an artifact of not treating hand signs as "subdividable into components" the same way words are.

That is, even if ABSL is unquie in having lots of holistic gestures that don't combine, those gestures themselves are still expressible as the combination of meaningless atomic components, eg "flat hand + lower half circle motion + doing it quickly". And just like with the sounds of other languages, those meaningless components will appear in other gestures that mean different things.

idlewords2• 12 years ago

Sign languages can spring up when you put a bunch of deaf kids together without any adults who know how to sign. This happens much more often than the analogous situation for spoken language.

ars2• 12 years ago

This happens much more often than the analogous situation for spoken language.

Citation needed.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptophasia

The analogous situation for spoke language simply doesn't happen as often. But there is nothing special about sign language here, the creation of language is the same either way.

ineedtosleep2• 12 years ago

I wouldn't call myself a linguist, but I've spent 3 or so years studying it at a university -- here's my take (after a relatively quick skim of the article and video):

The language hasn't evolved enough to have smaller divisible units. The use of the language, IMO, seems to be simplistic enough so that complex grammatical particles are needed. They probably have particles for simple particles like "that", "and", "the" or "this". A decent test would be to ask the ABSL speakers to create sentences in complex time-space situations.

Is there a corresponding concept of "phonemes" into which words in other sign languages can be decomposed into?

From my limited experience, I don't think signs can be divisible like phonemes. There are definitely morphemes[1], however.

And is ABSL already "mature" i.e. native language of some babies, or is it still in some sort of "pidgin" stage? Maybe it will become more "normalised" as time goes by.

It depends on what "mature" means -- and I also wouldn't consider it a pidgin. It's likely it's own language. If by "mature" one means that it's ready for both simplified transactions (i.e. S1: I want that apple. S2: Apple for a carrot? S1: OK) and relatively complex interactions (see the first interaction in the video of the OP), the language already accomplishes that. I would say that it's already mature.

The language will surely evolve as time goes on, especially once the "speakers" of the language get more connected. One big reason for ABSL's lack of "standardization" is probably due to the lack of interaction with different types of speakers -- I assume this is the case with rural areas such as theirs. Only then would speakers really analyze their speaking patterns and mold it into a way where they all understand each other.

I'm just typing this quickly at work, so any corrections are welcome.

[1] http://www.handspeak.com/study/library/?byte=m&ID=119

chch• 12 years ago

I have no specialty in signed language linguistics, but I would say that perhaps Location/Handshape/Movement could be considered similar to phonemes, or at least similar to subconcepts like 'place of articulation'.

Similar to spoken languages, the individual sounds/shapes may or may not mean something on their own, but they tend to be regular enough to be able to be described in a writing system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokoe_notation (note that Stokoe notation is described as a 'phonemic script' here).

kylebgorman• 12 years ago

Sign languages emerge when deaf kids (who aren't receiving other signed input) are together. To get the equivalent with spoken language, you'd have to put a bunch of (hearing) kids together on a desert island with no adult supervision. Deeply unethical, but that hasn't prevented people from proposing it.

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

I'd wager it's happened before in cities with a high initial immigrant population. Several families who don't speak a common language move into an area, and while the kids speak their native tongues at home, they might develop a private neighborhood pidgin to understand each other.

nirvdrum• 12 years ago

There have been variations of this run in the past, too:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation_experiment...

The James IV of Scotland experiment was the one I was familiar with, but it appears others have attempted it as well.

pessimizer• 12 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language_phonolo...

jacobolus• 12 years ago

Here’s the key bit: “Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new sign language emerging in a village with high rates of inherited deafness.”

It sounds like this language hasn’t existed long enough to evolve some of the characteristics of typical languages.

About a similar recently invented sign language, I recommend this RadioLab bit: http://www.radiolab.org/story/91730-new-words-new-world/ http://www.radiolab.org/audio/m3u/91730/

cel1ne• 12 years ago

I've learned sign-language for 4 years (Not deaf), I'm not a linguistic expert, but I don't really get this…

Most sign languages (which emerge naturally just like spoken languages, some even think that they might have been there before) have simple, atomic signs for concepts/things. There are combinations of course, like pointing to your earlobe to add "female" to the sign before. So the specialty is that this language has no such combinations at all?

There are also parts of sign languages which aren't categorized clearly, especially when explaining visual/spatial circumstances. When signing "I bought a table, it's wooden and has a fine white line engraved along the edge." you probably won't use signs for "fine", "line", "along" or "edge". You would just describe it visually. There is probably not even a sign for "edge" which applies to this context. Again, I'm not a linguistic expert, but I think that some of these characteristics might be hard to squeeze in "It's a word or not".

XaspR8d2• 12 years ago

The classification of the less-divisible "free-form" signs (especially those seen in narrative and spatial arrangements) is definitely a challenge to linguists, but that doesn't mean that they don't consider them to be constructed out of semantic or phonetic units at all. For example, different objects and methods of description are frequently represented using the same classifier handshapes, despite how varied their placement and combination can be.

On a similar note, the linguistic meaning of "word" is much, much fuzzier than native English speakers expect (letters surrounded by spaces). Trying to pin a particular level of structures across language categories becomes very difficult due to morphemic, phonetic, and syntactic processes that can break down word boundaries. (Even consider contractions in English for that matter. What makes don't one word when do not is two?) So the issue is, frankly, a mess, and many linguists tend to avoid using the term "word" cross-linguistically.

tokenadult4• 12 years ago

Yep, this just sounds like the language is at an early stage of development, still a "pidgin" and on its way to developing into a "creole" and eventually on its way to developing into a fully versatile language, by which time it will be much like any other sign language. The terminology I am putting in quotation marks here comes from studies of the origin of new spoken languages in communities that mix together people who don't have a common spoken language.[1]

[1] http://mufwene.uchicago.edu/pidginCreoleLanguage.html

http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/sum07/myths/cr...

https://www.uni-due.de/SVE/VARS_PidginsAndCreoles.htm

ineedtosleep2• 12 years ago

I'd argue that this isn't a pidgin or creole. Unless the language has had changes due to contact with other sign languages, it stands as its own language.

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

Pidgins are like bridges, though - a common set of symbols to communicate between two otherwise incomprehensible languages. Here, the two languages are (presumably) spoken Arabic, and, to start with, nothing at all.

duskwuff• 12 years ago

Many sign languages take form as a pidgin created through contact between many different forms of "kitchen signing" -- that is, idiosyncratic systems of signing created by deaf individuals and their families. While the languages involved aren't "normal" languages in the sense that the ones involved in typical pidgins/creoles are, the process is believed to be similar.

hawkice• 12 years ago

I'm actually curious if you could help explain the difference between this and Chinese (not sure if characters or radicals are the appropriate metaphor)? I feel that Chinese has a turtles-most-of-the-way-down writing system.

IIRC you tend to understand research finding quite well and can speak/read Chinese.

tokenadult4• 12 years ago

To answer your question, Chinese characters still represent SPEECH (not ideas or abstract concepts) and do so in a way that is specific to the particular Chinese (Sinitic) language that one speaks. The long story about this can be found in the books The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy[1] or Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems[2] by the late John DeFrancis or the book Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning[3] by J. Marshall Unger. The book Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention[4] by Stanislas Dehaene is a very good book about reading in general, and has a good cross-cultural perspective.

I'll give an example here of how Chinese characters reflect speech more than they reflect meaning-as-such. Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Visible-Speech-Asian-Interactions-Comp...

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Ideogram-Chinese-Characters-Disembodie...

[4] http://readinginthebrain.pagesperso-orange.fr/intro.htm

vorg3• 12 years ago

Chinese/Japanese characters do seem to be turtles all the way down. To use some examples from another comment in this thread of how those characters decompose like speech does to phonemes and signing does to individual component movements...

    他 = 亻+ 也
    說 = 言 + 兌
    普 = 丷 + 亚 + 日 
    通 = 之 + ( 龴 + 用 )
    話 = 言 + ( 千 + 口 )
    嗎 = 口 + 馬
    佢 = 亻+ 巨
    唔 = 口 + ( 五 + 口 )
    廣 = 广 + 黄
    東 = 木 + 日

xhedley• 12 years ago

I'm a native English speaker who learned Bahasa Indonesia in 1984 from adults whose native language was Javanese or Sundanese. Bahasa Indonesia was based on Court Malay or Trading Malay as the language of Indonesia after independence from the Netherlands after 1945. Bahasa Indonesia spoken by people over 21 in 1984 had no distinction between nouns and verbs, and was (for a beginner) admirably short of pesky grammatical rules. But my 18 year old Indonesian contemporaries who had spoken Bahasa Indonesia together at school since age 5 used a much more complex vocabulary and grammar. So I can vouch from experience that grammar and vocabulary of new languages change rapidly with time. As a previous poster said, sign languages for the deaf often evolve as new languages (pidgins/creoles). I think it's fascinating seeing how those new languages diverge and converge to 'expected' language behaviour.

craigbaker2• 12 years ago

Sandler et al.'s paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250231/ referenced in the article clears things up. The title: "The gradual emergence of phonological form in a new language". The abstract: The division of linguistic structure into a meaningless (phonological) level and a meaningful level of morphemes and words is considered a basic design feature of human language. Although established sign languages, like spoken languages, have been shown to be characterized by this bifurcation, no information has been available about the way in which such structure arises. We report here on a newly emerging sign language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, which functions as a full language but in which a phonological level of structure has not yet emerged. Early indications of formal regularities provide clues to the way in which phonological structure may develop over time.

pmr_2• 12 years ago

This clears up a lot. The whole article felt dubious from the start since it was lacking any examples of the language or an explanation of how functional the language is. The paper makes it clear: the language is young and regularities already emerge and it is interesting because the phenomena has not been studied "live" yet.

XaspR8d2• 12 years ago

It parallels the emergence of verbal pidgins -> creoles very well. "Recently born" languages frequently lack the grammatical structure that "mature" languages do. Sometimes levels of phonotactic structure are absent as well.

craigbaker2• 12 years ago

Even after reading the paper, I'm not convinced of their hypothesis that the "phonological level of structure has not yet emerged", though the language surely sounds unusual and interesting. They concentrate on variation within words having the same meaning, rather than on differences in form between words with different meanings. They claim that no minimal pairs can be found; but how could there be no closeness in form between any words, when you have a rich vocabulary with words like "lemon" and "scorpion" as they mention? Some word pairs must be closer than others, and so how are they distinguished? Maybe the problem is that they only studied 150 words?

They note that "the three sign languages whose phonologies have been most extensively studied (ASL, ISL, and SLN—Sign Language of the Netherlands) all have minimal pairs distinguished by features belonging to these categories [hand configuration, location, and movement]," and these generalizations seem to shape much of their analysis. I know they have to start from somewhere, but is this the right way for non-native users to study a new language with a potentially unusual phonology? A sample of three well-studied languages, two of which are presumably very familiar to or native languages of the investigators, seems insufficient for generalizing about potential variation. What does the phonology of other "young" sign languages look like? Were any native ABSL users enlisted in searching for contrasting features and minimal pairs?

I'm still very curious about their question of how phonological structure arises in new languages. I don't doubt that ABSL's phonological structure may be increasing in complexity and regularity, but I'm not convinced that it has no phonology at all.

Aardwolf• 12 years ago

FTA: for example, the sign for “lemon” resembles the motion of squeezing a lemon.

I wonder what the symbol for actually squeezing a lemon is?

pavel_lishin3• 12 years ago

I'd bet that it's just highly contextual. If you point to a bowl of lemons next to a pitcher, and sign "lemons", it would probably signify that the speaker wants you to squeeze those lemons into the pitcher.

I wonder what the sign for lemon juice is.

286c8cb04bda• 12 years ago

That's kinda close. In sign languages, individual signs can be decomposed into different elements: Hand shape, motion, position, et al. Related terms or ideas will use some of the same elements.

I'll use a couple of examples from American Sign Language:

1. The gender of a subject in a phrase is sometimes communicated by performing the corresponding motion with the specific hand shape in front of your forehead (for male) or in front of your chin (female).

2. A signer could communicate "a chair", "then he sat down", and "so help you god, jimmy, you better go sit down right now or i'm going to make you wish that you were never born" with what is basically the same sign (first two fingers on right hand tapping top of first two fingers on left hand), just by repeating it more times and with more emphasis.

peter303• 12 years ago

not COBOL?

golemotron• 12 years ago

I'm still not sure why APL and Kanji are not examples of the same thing. They are not spoken languages, but neither is sign language.

jeorgun2• 12 years ago

In fairness, both of them do have composed symbols; ⍟ is ○ + *, 走 is 土 + 正, and so forth. But since the compositions aren't really meaningful, I take your point.

snogglethorpe2• 12 years ago

The compositions in Chinese characters very often are quite meaningful...

tokenadult4• 12 years ago

See

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353518

my reply to another participant in this thread. Chinese characters (called "Kanji" in Japanese) are very much writing out of spoken words, and not at all what was described in the article kindly submitted to open this thread. Another participant provided the definitive answer about what is going on in the report submitted here. In all human communication systems, there is recombination of basic symbols, because there has to be.

Natsu• 12 years ago

They love to play games where multiple words have the same sound, though, in writing, to intentionally give things multiple interpretations.

At least in Japanese.

adamfeldman• 12 years ago

Nautilus is taking over the HN frontpage. I love it – their content is very high quality and thought-provoking, and often interesting to a large subset of HN readers

pmr_2• 12 years ago

Compare the article with any of the papers it references. This is pure fiction. All papers clearly state the sign language in question shows emergent regularities which clearly means that it is on its way towards duality of patterning. It is special since it is a great opportunity to study the phenomenon as it happens.

tcooks• 12 years ago

I can understand everything the mute people say without reading the subtitles, is it the same thing for everyone here or is it because of having lived for a long time in Italy?

I'd say the Arab ruling in southern Italy helped having a commong language to those peoples living in northern Africa, but maybe it's common knowledge.

Check this for comparision: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHZwYObN264

sevkih• 12 years ago

when the gene pool is a jacuzzi

wodenokoto• 12 years ago

If it is easier to learn an atomic language, wouldn't that then count as a genetic disposition towards atomic languages?

An Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

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