Re: Non-human languages

On Saturday, November 1, 2003, at 07:21 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> Ray Brown scripsit:
>
>> 'Tis true, Dante has the odd demon actually speak in the Divine
>> Commedy; but the odd scraps of 'demon-talk' are sort of
>> "not-quite-human", as Umberto says, e.g. "papé Satàn, papé Satàn
>> aleppe".
>
> That's Plutus, who is more a monster than a demon; one of the (Greek)
> Giants also babbles in this way.
Right - I was relying on Umberto.  it's a while since I read the Inferno.
At one time Plutus would, I guess, have spoken Greek  :)

> But Minos, the Centaurs, the devils
> of the Fifth Bowge,
Minos and the Centaurs would have spoken ordinary natlangs in this world
before being consigned to Hell. As we still do not know what the Minoan
language was, Dante could hardly have had him speak good Italian.  Maybe
Vergil taught them good Italian   :)

But the demons are more relevant.  According to Dante's theorizing, it
shouldn't have been _good_ Italian.

> and many others of Hell's non-human denizens do
> speak, naturally in good Italian.  Dante also describes the various
> angels of Purgatory speaking to him, with little or no suggestion that
> they are projecting thoughts into his brain (though they are able to
> read his mind, it's true).
There seem to me two possibilities:
- It may be that Dante perceived their thoughts as words and, therefore,
reported it just as speech.
- while angels communicate among themselves by "pure thought" they are
able to externalize such thoughts as spoken words when communicating
with humans.

> So Dante's theory did not (excusably)
> quite match his practice.
Poetic license.

>> In a word, has any conlanger considered devising a language for
>> beings who communicate either by "pure thought" or in some other
>> non-spoken way - in some way quite different from human language?
>
> I'm not clear on what it would even mean to have a language if one
> communicates by pure thought.
I suppose telepathy is meant to be communication by thought. Srikanth's
Lin was supposed to be such a telepathic language, hence his attempt to
produce compact written representation. The phoneticization he have was
for humans to be able to communicate in the language.

I wondered if anyone else had thought of beings who communicate tele-
pathically and how they would represent such a 'language'.

>  We do have constructed sign languages
> and pasigraphies, of course.
We do. Pasigraphies are, if I've understood them, meant to be universal
written systems which can be read as any natlang.  Sign languages are,
of course, possible starting off point for alien communication.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com    (home)
raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk   (work)
===============================================