Re: NonVerbal Conlang?

On 6/24/06, Chris Peters <beta_leonis@...> wrote:
> >From: Scotto Hlad
> >
> >I'd be though in time you could have.
> >Are there any instances of languages that combine spoken word and gestures?
> >Scott
>
> David Weber's "Honor Harrington" series features a (minor player) alien
> race, called the Medusans, that does just that.  In one of the later books,
> a human character is describing the difficult process of learning to
> communicating with them.
>
> Their language is actually comprised of three components:  sound, gesture,
> and scent emissions.  The sound portion was rather difficult to deal with,
> since these aliens could speak and hear in frequencies outside of the normal
> human range.  Gesture was even more problematic, because that race happened
> to have three arms ...  then of course smell couldn't really be dealt with
> at all for any human speakers, but the aliens used it for emphasis only.
That reminds me of the Yilanè in Harry Harrison's _Eden_ series of
books -- a kind of giant sentient lizards (dinosaurs?). Their language
also combines gestures/posture and spoken language.

I seem to recall reading about a human who tried to learn the language
but only learned the spoken component, representing the posture
component only extremely rudimentarily; apparently, her speech was
nearly impossible to understand for the Yilanè except for very basic
statements. (Perhaps a bit like someone speaking Chinese with complete
disregard for tones? Where statements that are obvious from context
such as "this - how much?" might be understood but anything more
complex than that drowns in homophones?)

On the other hand, there was a human who had learned the language
better (I think he was both younger when he encountered them, and had
a more co-operative mindset); later in the story, when he's back among
humans, he quotes another woman and unconsciously "quotes" the posture
and facial expressions that woman used when speaking as well
(cowering/hunching in fear).

(I only read the second book of the series.)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>