
A Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/-the-unusual-language-that-linguists-thought-couldnt-exist
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jostmey
Ramblings of non-linguist:

The problem with the human body is that is extremely hard to share
information. We can absorb gigabytes of information through our eyes and other
sensory organs, but we can only emit a few bits of information. When we
communicate, we are essentially trying to share our thoughts through a very
narrow straw that limits the flow of information. The result of this
bottleneck is language. Language requires lots of context, common
understanding, and being able to view the world from the other person's
perspective to make sense of the tiny amount of information that one person is
sharing with another

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oh_sigh
Nit: we don't absorb gigabits of information. Perhaps there is that much
bombarding our senses St any given moment but the amount that actually makes
it into our brain is far less, probably on the order of a hundreds of bits/sec
max

~~~
ABCLAW
This is incorrect. Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude
more information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair.

Perhaps you meant we only commit a few hundred bits of information to long
term memory per second under uninteresting conditions?

*Sorry for piling on! I didn't see the other two replies and went to get coffee before finishing my reply.

~~~
Someone
oh_sigh:

 _" the amount that actually makes it into our brain is far less, probably on
the order of a hundreds of bits/sec max"_

ABCLAW:

 _" Even the spinal nerve bundle processes orders of magnitude more
information just in keeping you balanced on your feet or chair."_

Does that information actually make it to the brain? I thought sending a
signal to the brain to process it there and then send back balancing signals
would take too much time to keep you on your feet (at around 100m/s, a nerve
signal would take about 1/50 of a second to move from legs to brain and back)

There also is evidence that your spine can do quite a bit of the muscle
control needed for balancing on its own. See _knee reflex_ and _spinal cat_
(completely cut the spinal cord of a cat in the neck; notice that cat is
paralyzed. Hang cat in harness, with feet on a treadmill. Turn on treadmill;
cat walks (possibly only after some training; I don't know the details). Known
since the 1950's. See [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-cats-
walk/](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spinal-cats-walk/)
(paywalled)).

~~~
ABCLAW
Not all of the information processed in the main spinal nerve bundles make it
to the brain. Note that I'm not replying to the 'reaches our brain' portion of
his statement with my counter-example. I think that's a very arbitrary place
to delimit the human information processing system.

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bcherny
Nothing on the size of ABSL's vocabulary. Is there a linguistics notion of
turing completeness? Ie. How do I know if a language is capable of expressing
any possible concept ("program")? Is this even a meaningful question?

Also note that ABSL is only around 100 years old, and see
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-
Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Langu...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-
Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language)

~~~
sametmax
You can't because we don't know any possible concept, nor do we know if we can
even conceive them, so we can't prove a language can express them.

Plus we already have concepts we can't express. We can't share what looks like
the resulting feeling in your mind of something the other never encounter,
like a color to a blind man or a sound to a deaf girl. There are many feeling
and sensations that you encounter in your life you can't define.

We can't define what we don't know either. E.G: we can't define whatever
happen after death because we don't know about it.

At last, some practices, like meditation, make you (quite surprisely)
discovers some very simple things, yet it seems quite impossible to share it
using words with another person. Here knowledge and complexity are not the
issue. It's just that labelling is not a silver bullet for communication.

~~~
custos
What you're referring to are known as Qualia.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia)

~~~
kbenson
Under the assumption that the whole "you need to be exposed to something X
times before you really remember it" thing is true, I love when I get
reintroduced to stuff like this that I've completely forgotten about since it
was last mentioned.

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anateus
Another sign language developed in isolation that linguists love to study is
Nicaraguan Sign Language:
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language)

The core claim of the title, that somehow non-decomposable sign language goes
counter to something doesn't match anything I've ever heard in linguistics.
Many signs in ASL are fairly representational as well.

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KeyboardFire
While not a natural language, aUI [1] is a conlang (constructed language) that
sort of tries to emulate the idea described in the article. Each sound
represents a very basic concept (they map to semantic primes [2]), and they're
combined to form more complex ideas.

Unfortunately, this leads to nonsensical literal translations like "ONE-
QUANTITY-ABOVE-LIFE-TOWARDS" for "banana," but it's still a neat/interesting
concept.

[1] [https://www.frathwiki.com/AUI](https://www.frathwiki.com/AUI)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_primes)

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falsedan
> _words in this language correspond to holistic gestures […] even though ABSL
> has a sizable vocabulary._

I don't follow: many ASL signs are completely distinct. There are some
incorporations, like classifier CL:3 (vehicle) includes a modified 'V' sign.

What exactly is the claim: that a language cannot have a 1:1 mapping of simple
representation and meaning i.e. is unambiguous and context-free?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
They are saying each word in ABSL is a unique sign without being composed from
other sign elements.

In BSL, for example, [as I learnt it some time ago, at a basic level] the
signs for class and group share the hand movement but use respectively the
hand-shapes for C and G; they're compound gestures. Or any easier one,
vehicles like car, bus, etc. are signed by miming use of a steering wheel and
saying/mouthing the word (eg
[http://www.signbsl.com/sign/truck](http://www.signbsl.com/sign/truck) \- see
the "SignStation" version of this and
[http://www.signbsl.com/sign/car);](http://www.signbsl.com/sign/car\);) again
compound.

ABSL presumably has words for car and truck but they don't share visual
elements?

To attempt to answer your question I think the idea is that it's surprising
that a language is not compounded from smaller elements, like verbs using
"ing" to denote action? Or like how Greek prefixes/suffixes are used in
English, xeno- say for foreign (eg in xenophobic: fear/hate for foreigners;
and xenolith: a rock type foreign to the surrounding rock) or -lith for rocks
(as before and megalith: a big rock). One expects to quickly run out of new
sounds (or signs) if you don't compound/combine them atomically.

~~~
falsedan
> _In BSL, for example, [as I learnt it some time ago, at a basic level] the
> signs for class and group share the hand movement but use respectively the
> hand-shapes for C and G; they 're compound gestures._

Same in ASL. But I wouldn't call it a compound sign, since it's not combining
the COLLECTIVE sign with TOPIC CLASSIFIER:INITIAL C/G IN ENGLISH sign.

Would you consider ASL HURRY as a compound sign, since it uses the H handshape
as a mnemonic in it? How about ELEVATOR and its C?

I would consider compound signs to be things like THROAT DOCTOR, PET STORE,
SKIRT LONG, where we use two signs with distinct meanings which are easily
comprehended in isolation, but when used together communicate a different
concept.

> _One expects to quickly run out of new sounds (or signs) if you don 't
> compound/combine them atomically._

I can see this with the limited options available in spoken languages: there
only a few hundred ways to combining vowel-consonant pairs, but a few thousand
ways to combine fingers+limb+facial expression+short movement (although the
challenge becomes how to reduce interpretation errors i.e. was that index
finger flicking down 3 times or thumb flicking up twice?).

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kelingua
As a linguist, I have to refute some of the claims made in this article. The
understanding for the past few decades is more in line with ABSL than
represented. The only hold-outs are hard and fast supporters of Universal
Grammar in the face of contradictory evidence. The only genetic factor
commonly recognized as important to language development is merely the ability
to learn language. Even recursion within language is in doubt due to the
language Pirahã. For the most part, UG is held up by die-hard defenders of
Chomsky, or is given as introductory education in Linguistics despite not
being the widely held view.

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twic
This seems like a dubious claim to me. If you want other examples of languages
where words aren't built from meaningless atoms, look at early writing - the
word for 'tree' is a crummy picture of a tree, etc.

Later on, writing developed into either using meaningless signs to represent
sounds, and stringing those together (as in the case of what you're reading
now), or using signs to represent fragments of meaning which are combined to
form complete concepts (at least, that's how i understand Han ideograms).
Rather like the business with the slide whistle.

~~~
nategri
You're confusing language with its representation (orthography)

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DenisM
This phenomenon is treated as an example of phonology in the process of
emergence in a very young language.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250231/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3250231/)

~~~
athom
I was just thinking that "...a new sign language emerging..." would more
likely consist of whole concepts embodied in independent expressions, which
later get broken down into some parts that are more easily recombined into new
words/concepts. Thanks for casting sharing this perspective!

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aftbit
Google cache mirror:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YofQSS...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YofQSSDfDd4J:nautil.us/blog/-the-
unusual-language-that-linguists-thought-couldnt-
exist+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

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legalamb
Interesting. This reminds me a lot of Nicaraguan Sign Language, which had a
very similar development from what I remember.

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rumcajz
Note that even genome hes this hierarchical structure. It's composed of genes,
which are composed of codons, which are composed of bases. It may be that the
property is not just a way human brain works. It may be that it just happens
to be a good technical solution of transferring information with high
fidelity.

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elijahparker
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