Re: CHAT: Parallelism

Well, our *conscious* minds are limited to pretty much one thing at a
time (seven plus or minus two items of information), but our
unconscious minds are processing lots and lots of things in parallel.
For example, you are unconsciously monitoring a lot of the
conversation you don't consciously hear at a party; simple unconscious
mechanisms are listening to it and throwing it all away, unless
somebody mentions your name, in which case those unconscious
mechanisms suddenly grab your attention!

So you could say, "great, I'll design a language which communicates
simultaneously conscious and unconscious thoughts!"  Too late, we
already have one!  All spoken language includes massive amounts of
parallel communication via intonation, pace, gesture, and expression.
Experiments suggest that the vast *majority* of information is carried
this way, parallel to and separate from the information carried by
"language" as linguists usually think of it.  (e.g. people were given
a video of a conversation, an audiotape of a conversation, and a
written transcript of that conversation, and asked a bunch of
questions about the content and meaning of what was said.  Researchers
were surpised to discover what huge amounts of information were lost
when you took away the paralinguistic channels of communication.)

No wonder some of us find ourselves throwing smileys in everywhere in
a desperate attempt to make up what is lost!

Massively parallel channels of communication already exist in humans.
 But as Carlos said, parallel *conscious* *linguistic* would sure be
unusual.  Go for it! :)

Ed

Ed Heil ------ edheil@postmark.net
--- http://purl.org/net/edheil ---

Carlos Thompson wrote:

> Well, I think that the problem is that our minds are a combination of
serial
> or spacial thoughts, not parallel.  This way we represent the world in
> serial utterances: spoken or written languages, or in spacial ways: signed
> languages and drawings.  But we could design alien speacies with parallel
> thinking... and describe their language.
>

> Have you ever tried to write and speak about unrelated thinks
> simultanoeusly... not that is imposible but is difficult.  I've tried to
> sign and talk but doesn't seam too easy either unless signs follow words or
> words follow signs, but I think an approach of oral+signed language is
> better than one of two language articulating simultaneously in the mouth.
>
> -- Carlos Th
>