Re: theory (was: Re: Greenberg's Word Order Universals)

Heres an idea, use signs to take the place of the various cases and aspects.  For
example, if you wanted to say "John discovered lead" it might go something like
this, spoken roots "john  to know  lead"  the gestures would be in conjunction with
'to know', with the left hand palm face up with fingures facing away, with the
right hand index fingure pointing down over the left hand.as if your pointing at
you palm.  the left hand represents an inceptive aspect changing 'to know' to
'discover' and the right hand indicates the past tense '-ed'.  Now this is just off
the top of my head, but I also think that it would make an interesting conlang.

Mario

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:

> On Mon, 18 Sep 2000, Jonathan Chang wrote:
>
> >     I have yet to see good info on Lisu, a Sino-Tibetan language
> > (Lolo-Burmese, actually) that reportedly is free word order AND isolating AND
> > has no morphological cases to  mark Subject or Object!
> >     Now that - if this is in fact true - Lisu violates a good number of
> > theories of implicational universals.
> >     According to what I have read Lisu-speakers get by on context,
> > alternative grammatical structures and common sense alone (I imagine they are
> > a very gestural people as well... that body language has a lot to do with
> > their language).
>
> Gosh, I'd love to learn that.  It seems to me you could do away with an
> awful lot of things with context and gestures (gestures are the only
> reason half the class understands our German instructor sometimes, when
> she's introducing new vocabulary/expressions--all in German).
>
> I would love to develop a con-sign language, BTW, but unfortunately
> haven't had the opportunity to learn any natsignlang.  It would be really
> neat to see if you could de-linearize things and speak more radially,
> concurrently, develop ideas in parallel...I'm sure there are wonderful
> things sign-speakers use.  I just want to wait until I can take some
> basic Ameslan-or-other-sign language course before attempting such a
> thing, and transcription would be a pain (I can do fantasy arts but my
> diagrams are horrible).
>
> Has anyone out there done a consignlang?  How's it work?  Website?
> That's something I'd *make* time to learn, just to see how it did things.
>
> YHL