Re: LANGUAGE LAWS

Tommie Powell wrote:
> I may or may not agree with you that there were "probably no grammatical
> relations like adpositions" during the primordial stage of language
> development.  I'm not sure what you mean by that.  You mention sign
> languages.  I'm somewhat familiar with American Sign Language, and it
> certainly uses devices which could be likened to adpositions -- at least for
> purposes of locating activities in time and space!  And it does seem to me
> that activities cannot sensibly be spoken of, without locating them in time
> and space.
I wasn't talking about ASL, or any other sign language, I was referring
to the crude pidgin-like systems that existed *before* sign language.
It used to be that deaf (and mute) people were more or less isolated
from each other (not that that doesn't happen now, but it's rare now for
people deaf from birth to go without sign language), since there were no
other deaf people around, no language evolved, but to communicate with
their hearing family (or whoever cared for them), they used a crude
system of signs to indicate objects and actions, with, of course, no
distinction between objects and actions.  Similar, in many ways, to
young children's speach.

--
"It's bad manners to talk about ropes in the house of a man whose father
was hanged." - Irish proverb
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