Re: NonVerbal Conlang?

On 26 June, R A Brown wrote:


<snip all the good stuff>

> Confused & seeking enlightenment.
I'm not sure whether I'll enlighten or
confuse further, but FWIW:

As a speech-language-pathologist, I would
use the term "verbal" to refer to language,
use of words. Verbal cognition can usually
be expressed (by people)
orally, gesturally, or graphically.
    The term "verbal language", to me, is a
tautology.
    The term "non-verbal" , to me, refers to "outside
of the use of words". It does not necessarily
mean lack of communication.
    I would not, in a technical sense, use
"verbalize" in place of the word "speech",
although I am aware that, informally, it has come to
mean this, at least in my dialect of English (midwest US).
    One does not "verbalize in Morse code", IMHO.
One verbalizes the thoughts and _expresses_ them
in code. And, BTW, only beginners divide up the
flow of dots and dashes into words. More advanced
coders can derive meaning directly from the rhythms.
The same way people generally don't speak in words.
The speech-flow, it is true, can be analyzed into "words",
as can the flow of Morse code. But words are not
usually what comes out of the mouth or out of the code key,
and they are not what usually enters the ears.
The internal, "verbal" encoding and decoding in both cases
is another matter!
(I once learned Morse, many years ago). For example:
officially, the request: "is anybody listening" is represented
by the dots and dashes that represent the letters
C and Q. But that is not what is sent, and that is certainly
not what is received: I don't remember a lot, but to this day,
if I hear the rhythm:

long-short-long-short-long-long-short-long

I will not think, "ah --- that's a C, uh, followed by
let's see, a Q. Oh, CQ. what does that mean?
Oh yeah, I remember now."
If I hear that sequence, I'll _know_ that someone
is searching for listeners. Just as automatically as
if they had used the words "Is anybody listening?"
The intent may be verbal, but the expression of the intent
and the comprehension of it isn't!

Among psychologists, the subtests of the Wechsler
test for IQ are often grouped into two sets:
the "verbal" set (testing language) and the other one.
No, it is not "non-verbal". For them,  the opposite of "verbal"
is "performance".

Anyhow, I hope that these thoughts help.

Dan Sulani
-------------------------------------------------------------
likehsna    rtem  zuv  tikuhnuh  auag  inuvuz  vaka'a.

A word is an awesome thing.

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