Today's article on the popular “Damn Interesting” blog – nomen est omen – by Marisa Brook is about a phenomenon that is of particular interest to linguists. Marisa writes about the spontaneous creation of a highly complex sign language by deaf, illiterate children without any appropriate training in Nicaragua. To learn more about this exciting story, you may want to read Marisa's article.
What I found most interesting was one particular aspect:
The younger speakers of ISN included many more subtleties - for example, verb agreement, in which the number, gender, and/or location of the subject(s) is indicated with verb inflection.
I keep being intrigued by the fact that sign languages share so many grammatical phenomena with spoken language. More importantly, I see this as another piece of evidence that feeling and logic – or in linguistics, grammatical complexity and simplicity – are not antipodes. In language teaching, I am often appalled by grammar books that try to “simplify” grammatical concepts to make them easier to grasp for children or teenagers. As an avid admirer of the Latin language, I also abhor the often-heard statement that you “have to look at Latin like maths; you cannot feel it, you have to construct and de-construct it”. In my opinion, that's even the wrong approach to maths, for that matter; as always, true understanding stems from a convergence of mind and soul.
The story of the Nicaraguan Sign Language goes to show that linguistic and logical complexity is not some kind of overly complicated luxury that is reserved to rationally thinking adults. On the contrary, strategies such as inflection or seemingly “complex” syntactical constructions are incredibly efficient means of condensing information and expressing it with a minimal number of words and rules. At the end of the day, it's a trade-off between storage and computing power in the human brain, and we appear to have an innate urge to save on storage when developping our linguistic means of expression.
This could also be an interesting starting point to a discussion about programming languages, but that would probably take us too far afield…
Retour au début de la pageCatégories: Language and Translation
Mots clés/tags: language ISN nicaraguan sign language latin grammar sign language
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