Re: Multimodal language (was: Wordless language (was: NonVerbal Conlang?))

On 7/3/06, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:

>
> The only auxlang I know of that does this is Solresol. Indeed, it
> provides several other modes besides just oral and manual.

Thanks!  I hadn't known the Solresolists had worked out so many
implementations.  I had been thinking of many of the same problems -- how
would you communicate across a great distance?  in this circumstance?  in
that? -- except that as a modern auxlang the comparative benefits of cannon
implementations pale compared to, say, the internet.  (The baud rate of
cannons is downright awful!)


> [snip]
> > Oh, and on a final note, I rather like the term Synaesthetic Language
> > for something like the above.
>
> Doesn't "synaesthesia" refer a sensation produced at one point which is
> different from the point of stimulation? I'm told, for example, that
> some people see/hear music as colors. This, I think, is not the same
> things as 'multimodal'.

Oh, certainly not the same thing.  I was using it as a semi-facetious
alternate term, but one evocative of a sound mapping to a shape mapping to a
motion mapping to a color to a...

The name suggested itself to me when I was writing about mapping shapes to
sounds in #5 above... I recalled the Kiki vs. Booba experiment (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:BoobaKiki.png) and the suggestion that
even the ordinary act of writing -- associating a shape with a sound --
could be an everyday example of a little bit of synaesthesia in everyone.
I'm not a psycholinguist, so I couldn't tell you whether this idea is
reasonable or crackpot, but it's a little experiment that definitely sticks
in the mind.

-- Pat