Re: NonVerbal Conlang?

On 6/27/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> Indeed it is - and it was, I agree, clear in the poster's mail that "a
> language without verbs" was not meant, which is why I thought it meant
> "a language without words." I thought 'Is such an animal possible? Are
> all these examples really wordless (I assumed some were)? Looks as tho
> this could be interesting.'
If one generalized 'word' to 'symbol' (to include signs or
ideographs), then isn't that tautologically "no", because part of the
usual definition of language (as given in Ling 101 texts at least)
that it must include a component of arbitrary symbols?

Of course, being me, that's not a good enough answer... but I've tried
to think about how one might (years ago) and haven't had any success.
The closest I can come is where you muddy the boudary of a symbol, as
in the 'fusional' version of my NLF2DWS ideas, but even with that you
could argue that there exist base forms that are words, and you're
just fusing them in weird ways.

 - Sai

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