Language

Googling and wiki-ing along, I found this link http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19991024mag-sign-language.html about Nicaraguan sign language. This in combination with drinking a little bit too much coffee this morning, a lot of spare time at work and the Crucible of Consciousness book I am still struggling with and a couple of floating around ideas I’ve been mulling through recently resulted in me typing out the following like a madman.

I’ve since neatened it a bit and I dont pretend there’s anything new in what I’ve written except that it was fun thinking and linking spare bits of thought.

Anyway, in the article which I have had heard of in Psych year 1 or 2, deaf nicaraguan kids who had not been exposed to any real form of language, come up with their own sign or variant of a sign when they’re placed in a school with other kids. Each kid with his or her own rudimentary private store of signs finds himself in an environment where his signs have to compete with other signs for all of the to communicate. It’s like a war of standards in miniture.

So, I’d guess that depending on the popularity of a sign’s context, the innovation of the new variant plus presumably the popularity of the speaker, a new sign (or word) is taken up by the kid’s peers, his community. I’d also imagine that the length of time that a new sign is alive for will depend on its utility and the cultural context. Some words will stay for a little while then disappear as their cultural contexts vanish. The end of which will be that you have a standard stable lexicon for commonplace words and everchanging ever evolving lexicon for new things – joke words, use and discard words. Probably population size will influence the elasticity of a language’s lexicon, smaller population in similar cultural contexts will embrace word changes if not grammartical innovations quickly. But the larger your population is the harder it is for the latest word craze to spread although these days, we coin words pretty quickly anyway just because our global context is so linked. Cf http://www.wordspy.com/ – which is my homepage these days just because some of the words are so cool.

The other thing the article noted was the different in grammar or the underlying structural sophistication of their language between the different generations of kids. Due to the small population size and the absence of grammar teachers, the kids can manipulate the underlying structure of their language in the same way they coin words. However, I’d imagine that structural changes would take longer just because it takes longer to popularise. Also, if Chomsky’s approach seems to indicate that we have a short time during which we very quickly configure our grammar after which it solidifies. So if he is correct, only the younger ones will be more likely to present and learn innovations on the grammatical level especially in conversation with other young ones, building on the grammar they learnt from the older kids but before their grammar structures are fully solidified. After which, if you havent learnt it, it’ll take you a lot longer and you’re less likely to come up with natural feeling grammatical innovations.

Adding in the link between language development and thought would seem to signify that a more complex language enables a thinker to come up with more complex thought. Not really all that big a deal as it just means that the more you’re exposed to, the more you know and the more material you’ll have to make up new and interesting concepts with. However, a greater vocabulary which means more specialised words would also mean better chunking of concepts. Instead of using many words and corresponding precious human RAM space (which has pretty much a limit of between 5-9 concepts), we can think and communicate faster if we use more efficient words. Most specialist languages evolve this naturally if not elegantly, look at the huge number of IT acronyms out there. In fact, the mastering of specialist words and their regular use by a person does indicate a better working understanding of the subject. So, all those admonitions from teacher to always consult a dictionary makes sense. You will think faster, deeper, better even if you may end up being trapped by underlying ideological and cultural context of the language you master.

I can imagine the bemusement the older kids have when faced with the younger ones and their more sophisticated use of sign. It would seem similar to the way digital migrants view the younger digital natives. But the important thing here is that they still operate within the same *medium*. What happens when the medium itself is changing? How would it affect our language and our way of thinking? New mediums of communication along with the new cultural contexts that the Internet brings should bring out innovations in communications especially if we can simplify the interface equipment such that younger and younger kids are exposed to the medium before their language acquisition phase is over. Of course, to do that, we have to stand back, let kids work their language out for themselves and take the risk of looking on in bemusement as our children start to speak a different language, the sophistication and richness of which we can see but in which we will never be fluent.