GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: John the Saxecutioner on January 04, 2005, 01:28:23 PM
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My sister-in-law is really into sign language right now, so I was doing some reading about it over the holidays. One web site I found (this one (http://www.deaflibrary.org/asl.html)) says that American Sign Language "is a linguistically complete, natural language" and "should not be considered in any way to be a broken, mimed, or gestural form of English." I get the second assertion, especially since considering it a broken form of English is probably pretty offensive to deaf people. But I'm wondering what it takes to be a "linguistically complete" language. One thing that I found odd about ASL is that it doesn't seem to use the verb "to be." I've never heard of another language that doesn't have some form of "to be."
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I've heard of other languages without "to be", but I can't recall which ones.
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There are actually lots of languages without a word like "to be." I don't know how common they are, though, and I don't know any offhand.
I'd guess that by "linguistically complete," they mean it has a full vocabulary (instead of a specialized or limited vocabulary, like a code language), syntax, and semantics. A true pidgin language (which is really only a handful of vocabulary and semantics, but no syntax) is not linguistically complete.
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I don't know enough to answer that, but on a related note:
A friend of mine is a sign language translator, and she was telling me about the newest thing she's been learning, which is called cueing. (how do you spell the present participle of "to cue" anyway?) In this method, the signs are all small and near the face and it's a direct transliteration of what's being spoken. Cueing reproduces the sounds of spoken English and even reproduces ambient sounds (such as a cough or an onomatopaea) and so deaf people process it the same way they process written English. It made me realize that the deaf who speak ASL are for all intents and purposes bilingual. Pretty interesting.
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"Cuing" or "cueing." I think I like it better with the e, because then it's clearer that it's two syllables.
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Tagalog also doesn't have a "to be" verb. Just FYI
Of course, Porter mocks it as not being a "real language" either....
Edit: I think it is "linguistically complete" in the sense that it has complex enough grammer to effectively communicate as does any other true human language. ASL being guesture-based has many advantages over spoken language. For instance, nearly all verbs can be given direction. You can tell by the direction of the movement who is doing what to whom.
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Um, yeah. Sign being a complete language is one of the tenets you must swear to for acceptance into the secret brotherhood of linguists. Oops. I had a roommate in college who served a mission to the deaf and we talked about it a lot.
So when we are talking of a pidgin, this means a language learned by an adult to get along just as well as they need to with another population that speaks a different language. Then creolization generally occurs with the next generation, and describes the languages of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. I suppose this may have been an issue Card had to address books 5 and 6 of the Alvin Maker series. Rien would have been a pidgin speaker while Marie would have been more of a creole speaker. I have no idea whether he got it right.
It also explains the manner in which Black English, while seemingling grammatically poor, is actually linguistically complete. There are grammatical rules to the ways in which it diverges from "standard" English. While I recognize this, I don't think it helps kids to conduct their education in that language with the possible exception of learning math.
I think Sign is essentially a creolization as well. It began as a translation of whatever language, but whenever kids learn a language their brains fill in grammatical elements that were missing if the language being taught them is not "linguistically complete". At least, this is what they were teaching when I was in college.
Some deafness occurs along with other mental disabilities, which is why deaf people are so sensitive about the issue.
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I don't think I ever mock Tagalog as not being a "real" language.
But maybe I'm wrong.
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Um, yeah. Sign being a complete language is one of the tenets you must swear to for acceptance into the secret brotherhood of linguists.
:lol: :devil:
I find that far more funny than I ought to. Probably has something to do with also having an education in language.
Trisha, everything you've said there agrees with what they taught me in college.
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Well, we haven't asked an actual Russian person about this, but 90% of my collegues here at work learned Russian at school, and say it doesn't have "to be".
At least in a way you'd use when saying "I am here", or "I am pretty".
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From what I understand, it does, but only for certain things. For instance, you would say something like "I here" or "I pretty," but there are other constructions where the "to be" verb is used.
Linky (http://masterrussian.com/aa120199a.shtml)
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I PRETTY :D
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:lol:
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But isn't that all that lacking a verb for "to be" means? If it means that there is no verb for "to exist", then how could the language possibly be "complete" in any meaningful sense?
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I don't know these languages, but let me guess:
While there isn't any "to be", there is a "to exist". But that doesn't mean the same thing. You wouldn't say "I exist pretty".
As shown with the "I Pretty" example, you can communicate things just fine without "to be". It's just not needed in some languages.
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But "to be" doesn't just mean "to exist." And anyway, just because a language doesn't have something that we find meaningful doesn't mean it's not complete. Some languages don't distinguish between "he" and "she." Some languages only distinguish between two or three colors. Some languages don't inflect nouns for number. None of this makes them incomplete.
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Exactly. They can still express the same ideas, but you have to do it in different ways.
It's like wondering how English can be linguistically complete because we don't distinguish between inclusive and exclusive first person plural.
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Arabic just combines the to be with a pronoun. How often do you need a pronoun without a "be" verb?
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It not needed.
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Arabic just combines the to be with a pronoun. How often do you need a pronoun without a "be" verb?
Quite often, especially if you're not limiting it to personal pronouns.
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I don't see it. Please give me examples.
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"I don't see it."
Two pronouns, no "to be" verb.
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I mis-read Trisha's post. My mistake.
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Well, I forget why it is but for some reason the Arabic situation isn't just that there isn't a "to be" verb. It's that the pronoun word for third person singular means more than just a pronoun. The first person pronoun is marked for gender. Everything is marked for gender.
Maybe it's that the pronoun is used even if the noun is already in the sentence. Perhaps something like:
Methuselah he mighty old.
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Well, I don't see why anyone would even blink at the lack of a word for "to be" except that it implies that the language lacks a word meaning "to exist".
After all, "to exist" is the only substantive meaning of "to be" used as a verb by itself. All the other meanings of "to be" are actually supplied by other words, in those cases "to be" is mainly serving as an odd grammatical stop-gap so that we can say that something is described by some adjective or that the action was performed on the grammatical subject rather than by it, or that it took place at some prior point in time, or so forth.
Saying that another language has no equivalent to "to be" in these senses is about a meaningful as saying that it has no exact equivalent to "second", a word that both means the instance coming immediately after the first and means a period of time sufficient for an object to fall 16 feet after being dropped from a position of rest. In some languages, you have a word that carries both these meanings, but in many, you don't.
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In Tagalog, there is a word that means "to become", but I don't think there is a word that means "to exist". At least, if there is, I don't know what it is.
In the scriptures the phrase "I AM" used by or to describe Jehovah is translated, "Ako Nga" which literally means "I" (emphasized). But my understanding of Tagalog is far from complete, and there aren't a lot of good resources to learn more from.
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"To exist" is not some sort of central idea in language. Existence can be expressed in ways other than verbs.
Sorry, but I honestly don't know what you meant by that third paragraph.
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Okay, consider "to cleave", which can mean "to split apart" or "to stick together". How many languages have a word that means both? But that doesn't imply that those languages lack ways to express such basic concepts as splitting or not splitting, just because the language lacks any particular word that means both.
I think that it is perfectly plausible that you could have a language without any strict distinctions between verbs and nouns and adjectives. If you look at a lot of "primitive" English words, that distinction isn't present in the word itself. Other languages like Korean use modifiers to dictate what part of speech a word is being used as in a particular sentence, so most nouns can be turned into verbs or vice versa.
Noting that there is no precise equivalent for any given word from one language in some unrelated language is therefore not very significant. For a verb like "to be", which has many different meanings depending on how it is used (many of those meanings being purely grammatical, such as meaning that the following adjective is being used as a verb), it is so unlikely that another language would have some word with all the exact same uses that it would be far more relevent to point out another language that did have an exact equivalent.
"to become" means "to come into existence", and can probably be modified using tense to express existence. Here we run into the reverse side of the coin I mention above, refusing to translate a term from another language in context and insisting that there is a precise equivalent in English to any particular word from another language. Very often, a given word in another language could be justifiably translated as any one of several English words (or terms), depending on its usage. If we take the stance that "because this word can't always be translated as X, it should never be translated as X" then translation becomes very difficult, particularly for the core vocabularies of languages that aren't closely related.
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Is it me, or is everybody arguing the same thing at everybody else?
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It's you.
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OK.