Re: Octupus and Sentients

At 17:11 -0600 26.12.1999, Nik Taylor wrote:
>
>The point wasn't speech, but rather LANGUAGE, which can take many forms,
>even in humans, there are at least three major forms that language takes
>- audial (speech), gestural (sign language) and various forms of marks
>on certain substances (writing).  I suppose you could include tactile
>(Braille) - so, three senses used by Humans - sight, hearing, and touch.
Actually there are hand-touch signs used by those who are both deaf and blind!

I certainly agree that Braille is tactile communication, though.  There are
even machines that can scan ordinary text and translate it to Braille
nowadays.  The display is a dot-matrix that instead of points of light uses
raised or lowered plastic needles.  You can read directly on the
needle-board, or you can insert a paper which is then punched by the
needles.  The definite edge of Braille over speech synthesis is the same as
of an ordinary printed book over an audio-book: it is easier to skip back
and ahead in the text!

BTW I've read about blind people with such an acute sense of touch that
they could touch-read ordinary lead-print, the small depression the types
made in the paper and the different feel of the inked part being enough to
distinguish the letters.

There was also an Italian man in the 18th century who was mute, but could
"speak" to his brothers by using the keys of a piano or other keyboard
instrument.  Apparently it was not an alphabetic code, but arbitrary signs
they had been developing since their childhood.  I could give a lot for
information about the "morphology" of that lang.  Supposing that single
keys corresponded to the phonemes of spoken language, I wonder if "speech"
could be speeded up by pressing several keys at a time as a chord.  I sure
wd like to be able to do that when typing! :-)



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>
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