Ur languages and sign language

From: Charles Stewart <cas_at_linearity.org>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 09:13:36 -0500 (EST)

Hi folks,

I'm sorry to participate in this Glorantha-irrelevant thread, but perhaps an injection of facts will assist a humane death. Linguists do believe that new languages come into being unrelated to any existing languages, and Nicaraguan sign language (NSL) is the best documented example. For some background, here's an NY times article:   http://www.indiana.edu/~langacq/E105/Nicaragua.html There's a very extensive linguistic literature on NSL, unfortunately not much of it is online.

General points:

1. For relatedness, the most important thing is the grammatical system, not words. Words jump between languages all the time, grammatical rules almost never do.
2. Sign languages are fully fledged languages that generally are unrelated to spoken languages, and don't share the same distribution patterns as spoken languages (eg. American sign language has some relatedness to French sign language, and both are unrelated to British Sign Language); they have different grammars that may in some cases have some superficial resemblance to spoken languages but can make use of novel grammatical constructs, for example sign languages generally make use of space to indicate pronouns, a rather efficient mechanism that speakers are deprived of.
3. Children deprived of useful linguistic stimulus will make up languages, and sometimes will invent languages of their own even when they can learn their parents languages (eg. "private" languages that it has often been observed that twins sometimes invent), though in these cases the languages are not unrelated, they will borrow from their parents language.
4. NSL came about despite efforts that were made to teach deaf Nicaraguan children languages spanish; these met with complete failure because of the inadequate teaching methods used. The deaf children who were put together in school invented NSF completely spontaneously.

Deafness is the most obvious way that children might not learn their parents language; could a spoken language arise without parents? The twin languages I mentioned are probably not truly parentless, and the children don't keep the languages until adulthood, but it isn't too difficult to imagine situations in which hearing children fail to learn their parents language and improvise a spoken language between themselves. Has this happened? Most linguists think it probably has not. My wife (who is the linguist, I am not), says she guesses about 2/3s of linguists believe there is a spoken Ur language, but very few believe the evidence for this is overwhelming. The main evidence is that it is hard to stop children acquiring grammatical rules that they are exposed to. If you want an as-near-as-definitive-as-you-will-get answer to this question, asking the linguist list is the right thing to do. If you do, make sure to spend some time researching the question first to avoid being seen as an idiot by the world linguistics community.

Gloranthan relevance: surely Glorantha has sign languages? And as surely glorantha has myths for them too. Are there any deaf/ sign language using folk there who could write one up?

Charles Stewart
Berlin

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