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

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