Sunday, February 10, 2013

Blissymbols & language hunting

I've been trying to sponge up as much language hunting/where Are your keys and its slow going but it feels good. The hardest part is that I've not yet been able to teach someone anything yet.

I'm trying to do esperanto first because its easy. The problem is, I don't know enough of the game to teach what I know in esperanto! The videos for irish Gaeilge and chinuk wawa take time to go thru and a lot of the WAYK wiki is either abstract, or links to dead videos. I bought the book for language hunting but that's slow go too. I've made my way thru 40/400 pages.

Meanwhile, other languages, like Elvish & Alashian are actually within my grasp, at least for first steps. So too is Esperanto, but there's a lot more game time mileage in learning quenyan "What is that?/make me say yes/make me say no". I might have to make up words for the other basic parts of the game for quenya, but maybe not.

One thing I've thought about is making Blissymbols to match up with the use of sign language as a bridge, but this time for the written page. Each Blissymbol could be a morpheme or lexeme and function as a kind of visual gloss, one per hand sign. Since it's Signed Assisted (insert X language here) it doesn't need the full grammar of sign language, its being used principally for the physical stimulation and iconicity...so using Blissymbols instead of signing symbols could make sense.  Unfortunately I haven't found explanations for all the Blissymbols but I have found a dictionary.  Some signs are more iconic than others.

One surprising thing I've realized about WAYK (actually it was a first impression) was that its a lot like a game that elementary girls play that goes something like this:
"What is that? -That is a stick. -A stick? -A stick. -Oh a stick!" There's a variation that involves a fuck instead. WAYK's big difference is that it uses sign language simultaneously, and goes into things a lot deeper. Yeah, pretty big differences. But I can see how it's called a game.

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