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Re: NonVerbal Conlang?

From:Sai Emrys <sai@...>
Date:Thursday, June 29, 2006, 4:30
On 6/28/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> 'Word' itself is not as easy to define as is often thought. I would > hesitate, tho, to include ideographs (at least in the strict sense of > the term).
Why? And please make explicit what you mean by the 'strict sense'.
> > The closest I can come is where you muddy the boudary of a symbol, as > > in the 'fusional' version of my NLF2DWS ideas, > > Exactly - I wondered if Mike had in mind conlangs in which the author > has attempted to convey whole concepts as units by multi-channel > communication.
That reminds me of another version: if you have a robust ontology behind it - one that could make any given 'word' at least partially categorizable, perhaps along several different axes - then you could a) put different 'parts' of the 'word' in different modes, or possibly even have them be asynchronous or grammatically indicated in some way; b) drop parts - what remained would be, maybe, a word (I'd be rather hard pressed to say), but its meaning would be ambiguous (albeit its 'degredation' of meaning / specificty would be predictable, depending on the system); c) chunk the 'word' into parts that are then used as... "words"? in their own right. This last though would be hard to distinguish from merely ad*s/nouns/verbs though; perhaps once you hit some level, reducing it further would create a composition of non-words...
> Interesting. I am told that some mathematicians can look at mathematical > formulae and do the math(s) without the need for any mental verbalizing. > I don't know how true that is. Certainly, I would need to process them > verbally.
I do to a certain extent. I think it is much like how one learns to "think in" any new system (music, math, Arabic, morse code, whatever); it takes a while to be able to "natively" process the stuff, rather than doing what amounts to a quick translation.
>> (But then again, little kids, before they acquire language, do it
all the time: intend and point.)
> They do, don't they? Some people seem to carry the intend-and-point > habit over in certain situations long after they have acquired language.
One way I've heard of defining a 'word' (or even the core of 'language') is what happens when you change that pointing into a symbol, so you no longer need the pointee to be at the end of it. :-) - Sai

Replies

Sai Emrys <sai@...>
R A Brown <ray@...>Wordless language (WAS: NonVerbal Conlang?)