Re: NonVerbal Conlang?

On 27 June, R A Brown wrote:

>>    One does not "verbalize in Morse code", IMHO.
>> One verbalizes the thoughts and _expresses_ them
>> in code.
>
> Doesn't that apply also to writing or any secondary medium of expressing
> language?
    I'm not sure that it's quite the same, Ray. In an alphabetic
orthography, (such as English), and even more so since we write in words, I
think that there is a very close connection between verbal analysis into
words and the graphic output.
    OTOH, in ancient langs where they didn't divide the text up into words,
maybe the connection would be weaker.
    Mathematics is a really interesting case, if one is talking about
bilinguals or multilinguals. If I, who am bilingual in English and Hebrew,
see a simple problem in arithmetic, I can't immediately solve it. First, I
must decide which lang I am parsing the numbers in. Once I decide which lang
I am using, only then can I proceed to solve the problem in that lang! The
number symbols themselves may be international, but there seems to be a
close connection to verbal processing when using them.
    OTOH, people who suffer from severe motoric dysfunction sometimes are
given a board with symbols on it. They can (laboriously) point to a symbol
to indicate common wants and needs to a caregiver (food, drink, medicine,
bathroom, etc.) The link between the intention and the pointing to a symbol
doesn't seem like it necessarily goes via verbalization. (But then again,
little kids, before they acquire language, do it all the time: intend and
point.)


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

A word is an awesome thing.