Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Mon, 23 Nov 1992 10:51:24 EST
From:         "Bruce E. Nevin" <bnevin@CCB.BBN.COM>
Subject:      foundations of language

[From: Bruce Nevin (Mon 921123 09:58:11)]

No time to keep up, but as I sneaked a glance at the most recent
this AM this caught my eye:

(Bill Powers (921122.2000) ) --
/*****************************************************************************
*                                                                            *
* I think the deaf community would have a lot to teach about what happens    *
* when a group of people is brought together without any initial means of    *
* communicating. I claim that someone would ALWAYS invent a language,        *
* using whatever perceptions are easily manipulable as the tokens. In        *
* other words, I claim that it isn't language that's inherent, but           *
* ingenuity.                                                                 *
*****************************************************************************/

(I'm going to put quoted text in C-style comment boxes--my editor
has a filter to do this--assuming that reformatting that would
produce a bigger error for you than reformatting line-initial ">"
to the interior of the paragraph.)

When has a deaf community invented a language in the absence of
an environing community of people possessed of language who
intercommunicate with the deaf folks by whatever means they are
able?

You made a similar point, Penni. However, you went on to say:

Penni Sibun <sibun@PARC.XEROX.COM>
/*****************************************************************************
*                                                                            *
* communication is a terribly important part of what human beings (and       *
* all organisms!) do.  language may or may not involve symbol                *
* manipulation.  but language is fundamentally communcation.  wouldn't       *
* it be a good idea to start studying a language at its foundations?         *
*****************************************************************************/

I disagree that language "is fundamentally communication".  Even
more basically, people use language to create information that
could not exist without language and could not have existed prior
to language.

This is not to say that the perceptions ("meanings") with which
words are correlated could not have existed, though some
categories may well not be universal, but rather that
higher-level organizations of those perceptions (which are
themselves perceptions, of course) are not merely communicated by
means of language, but are consensually created by means of
language.

Nor is this to say that language is not used for communicating.
But language is not really very good for communication, as
witness your (Penni)  twitting me about the nature of flirting.
Of course talking about flirting is a far cry from doing it.  And
explaining a joke doesn't really "get" the humor of it, and so
on.  Just my point.  Communication is carried out at a more basic
level than language.  We can use language for communication, but
such use is no less semaphoric than the myriad other means we use
for communication, what a modern Alexandrian Greek poet calls
"the language of the turning eye".  The agreements we can reach
with language are more articulate than those typically reached by
nonverbal means, but that is a function of the information-
constituting capacity of language.  The actual seeking for and
communicating of agreement proceeds at a more primitive level
irrespective of the specific content of the eventual agreement.

So I am arguing that communication is not at the foundations of
language but rather antecedent to them.  To be sure,
communication has an important role in the story Harris proposes
about the evolutionary origins of language (in _Language and
Information_ and in _A Theory of Language and Information: a
mathematical approach_).  But to get at the foundations of
language you must study something that is unique to language.

Just to head off a red herring, note that Shannon/Weaver
communication theory is not about communicating in this sense
either, any more than its near synonym information theory is
about meaning in any general sense of the word.

Gotta run.

        Bruce
        bn@bbn.com
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