Re: Non-verbal writing.

Den 5. des. 2006 kl. 22.53 skrev Kate:

> What about non-physical, non-verbal communication, such as psychic
> communication? I'm in the first stage of sketching out a language with
> psychic (sort of) speakers, and I'm curious about how other conlangers
> might have dealt with it.
In fact I have dealt a lot with precisely this type of communication
this very night, because I have just finished playing through my
iTunes library. Music is what takes over where language does not reach.

More general, all this visual information that both humans and chimps
send to each other is mostly about informing of the sender's emotion,
and I think music largely is another facet of the same thing. And of
course the melody and tone of speech is related. For example, "I love
you" can be said in a millioni different ways. I think the problem
you are facing is the same as mine with my chimps, because I imagine
psychic communication also deals generally with pure emotion. How to
mark the feelings behind the words.

There are ways to mark tone in writing, like the Greek accents for
example. They can be elaborated widely. Symbols expressing a certain
emotion, even crude ones like familiar emoticons, are augmented by
the context of the written words, and they can be refined.

One interesting feature about chimp speech is that "ua" means "bad"
and "au" means "good". Very logical. But it's not as simple as that.
When they approve, they just repeat "au" a few times, and with a low
and unvaried tone. But when they disapprove, they scream "ua" many
times, with the pitch generally high but varying much more. Like us,
they make much more fuss about bad things than the good ones. Watch
any news channel. So it's not enough to say that "au" means good and
"ua" means bad. One could perhaps write something like "aû+" and
"uá*!", with + for few repetitions, * for many repetitions and ! for
emphatic, with the ^ and the ´ marking pitch. Or use a more symbolic
and less analytic writing, pictograms, relational graphs, whatever.

I better quit here before I yawn my jaw off, or my brain stops
working completely. Good night!

LEF

Reply