An Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

This clears up a lot. The whole article felt dubious from the start since it was lacking any examples of the language or an explanation of how functional the language is. The paper makes it clear: the language is young and regularities already emerge and it is interesting because the phenomena has not been studied "live" yet.

Even after reading the paper, I'm not convinced of their hypothesis that the "phonological level of structure has not yet emerged", though the language surely sounds unusual and interesting. They concentrate on variation within words having the same meaning, rather than on differences in form between words with different meanings. They claim that no minimal pairs can be found; but how could there be no closeness in form between any words, when you have a rich vocabulary with words like "lemon" and "scorpion" as they mention? Some word pairs must be closer than others, and so how are they distinguished? Maybe the problem is that they only studied 150 words?

They note that "the three sign languages whose phonologies have been most extensively studied (ASL, ISL, and SLN—Sign Language of the Netherlands) all have minimal pairs distinguished by features belonging to these categories [hand configuration, location, and movement]," and these generalizations seem to shape much of their analysis. I know they have to start from somewhere, but is this the right way for non-native users to study a new language with a potentially unusual phonology? A sample of three well-studied languages, two of which are presumably very familiar to or native languages of the investigators, seems insufficient for generalizing about potential variation. What does the phonology of other "young" sign languages look like? Were any native ABSL users enlisted in searching for contrasting features and minimal pairs?

I'm still very curious about their question of how phonological structure arises in new languages. I don't doubt that ABSL's phonological structure may be increasing in complexity and regularity, but I'm not convinced that it has no phonology at all.

The classification of the less-divisible "free-form" signs (especially those seen in narrative and spatial arrangements) is definitely a challenge to linguists, but that doesn't mean that they don't consider them to be constructed out of semantic or phonetic units at all. For example, different objects and methods of description are frequently represented using the same classifier handshapes, despite how varied their placement and combination can be.

On a similar note, the linguistic meaning of "word" is much, much fuzzier than native English speakers expect (letters surrounded by spaces). Trying to pin a particular level of structures across language categories becomes very difficult due to morphemic, phonetic, and syntactic processes that can break down word boundaries. (Even consider contractions in English for that matter. What makes don't one word when do not is two?) So the issue is, frankly, a mess, and many linguists tend to avoid using the term "word" cross-linguistically.

Second this request. I get the feeling that this result is just an artifact of not treating hand signs as "subdividable into components" the same way words are.

That is, even if ABSL is unquie in having lots of holistic gestures that don't combine, those gestures themselves are still expressible as the combination of meaningless atomic components, eg "flat hand + lower half circle motion + doing it quickly". And just like with the sounds of other languages, those meaningless components will appear in other gestures that mean different things.

Sign languages can spring up when you put a bunch of deaf kids together without any adults who know how to sign. This happens much more often than the analogous situation for spoken language.

I wouldn't call myself a linguist, but I've spent 3 or so years studying it at a university -- here's my take (after a relatively quick skim of the article and video):

The language hasn't evolved enough to have smaller divisible units. The use of the language, IMO, seems to be simplistic enough so that complex grammatical particles are needed. They probably have particles for simple particles like "that", "and", "the" or "this". A decent test would be to ask the ABSL speakers to create sentences in complex time-space situations.

> Is there a corresponding concept of "phonemes" into which words in other sign languages can be decomposed into?

From my limited experience, I don't think signs can be divisible like phonemes. There are definitely morphemes[1], however.

> And is ABSL already "mature" i.e. native language of some babies, or is it still in some sort of "pidgin" stage? Maybe it will become more "normalised" as time goes by.

It depends on what "mature" means -- and I also wouldn't consider it a pidgin. It's likely it's own language. If by "mature" one means that it's ready for both simplified transactions (i.e. S1: I want that apple. S2: Apple for a carrot? S1: OK) and relatively complex interactions (see the first interaction in the video of the OP), the language already accomplishes that. I would say that it's already mature.

The language will surely evolve as time goes on, especially once the "speakers" of the language get more connected. One big reason for ABSL's lack of "standardization" is probably due to the lack of interaction with different types of speakers -- I assume this is the case with rural areas such as theirs. Only then would speakers really analyze their speaking patterns and mold it into a way where they all understand each other.

I'm just typing this quickly at work, so any corrections are welcome.

[1] http://www.handspeak.com/study/library/?byte=m&ID=119

Sign languages emerge when deaf kids (who aren't receiving other signed input) are together. To get the equivalent with spoken language, you'd have to put a bunch of (hearing) kids together on a desert island with no adult supervision. Deeply unethical, but that hasn't prevented people from proposing it.

I'd argue that this isn't a pidgin or creole. Unless the language has had changes due to contact with other sign languages, it stands as its own language.

I'm actually curious if you could help explain the difference between this and Chinese (not sure if characters or radicals are the appropriate metaphor)? I feel that Chinese has a turtles-most-of-the-way-down writing system.

IIRC you tend to understand research finding quite well and can speak/read Chinese.

I'm a native English speaker who learned Bahasa Indonesia in 1984 from adults whose native language was Javanese or Sundanese. Bahasa Indonesia was based on Court Malay or Trading Malay as the language of Indonesia after independence from the Netherlands after 1945. Bahasa Indonesia spoken by people over 21 in 1984 had no distinction between nouns and verbs, and was (for a beginner) admirably short of pesky grammatical rules. But my 18 year old Indonesian contemporaries who had spoken Bahasa Indonesia together at school since age 5 used a much more complex vocabulary and grammar. So I can vouch from experience that grammar and vocabulary of new languages change rapidly with time. As a previous poster said, sign languages for the deaf often evolve as new languages (pidgins/creoles). I think it's fascinating seeing how those new languages diverge and converge to 'expected' language behaviour.

In fairness, both of them do have composed symbols; ⍟ is ○ + *, 走 is 土 + 正, and so forth. But since the compositions aren't really meaningful, I take your point.

See

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353518

my reply to another participant in this thread. Chinese characters (called "Kanji" in Japanese) are very much writing out of spoken words, and not at all what was described in the article kindly submitted to open this thread. Another participant provided the definitive answer about what is going on in the report submitted here. In all human communication systems, there is recombination of basic symbols, because there has to be.

I'd bet that it's just highly contextual. If you point to a bowl of lemons next to a pitcher, and sign "lemons", it would probably signify that the speaker wants you to squeeze those lemons into the pitcher.

I wonder what the sign for lemon juice is.

Compare the article with any of the papers it references. This is pure fiction. All papers clearly state the sign language in question shows emergent regularities which clearly means that it is on its way towards duality of patterning. It is special since it is a great opportunity to study the phenomenon as it happens.