Pirahã, Simplicity, & ASL

  Article about ditching recursion in clause subordination for "ontological promiscuity" aka storytelling.
  My head hurts. I've just basically learned that storytelling, rhetoric, and metaphor are all interchangeable tools, and I've been trying to learn language (specifically Gaeilge) with Where Are Your Keys? and I know I'm not getting it. It's just that when I look at the set-up I see all kinds of different things being brought to bear on what should be a simple situation but which isn't. Even the use of demonstratives i.e. 'this' and 'that', are not simple. Why don't we just use 'it'? What's the point of the game? The most difficult part is that it switches between role-playing, where you have to give a response, and copy-catting, where you're passively learning. I still don't get the hang of transitions. It's probably because I've never really actually played with another good player. It's just not viral. What's the point? I'm talking about coffee? And then it hits you, "Yeah, I'm talking about coffee in another language and by playing along other people can too!" That is the craziest feeling ever, but it entails a loss of will you don't really feel unless you're already an author, I think. It's very hard for poets to do that, because it means sinking into a language rather than carving it out like poets do, creating an antilanguage. You don't have to understand exactly what's going on, or that there are several options available to you (I think those come up later, in more fluent speech, and aren't too tricky? But maybe I'm wrong. I found variations in the use of this/that based on empathy and perspective in English; crazy but cool! And they're just a casual everyday part of the language!)
  This is why I wanted to dig around for a language that truly needs no more distinctions than just pointing, naming, and describing. I'm talking about ASL. Why not create a language that does for ASL what ASL did for English when they made Exact Signed English? Basically, bend English to ASL's rules like when they bent ASL to English's!
  ASL has no words for articles, like Latin. Unlike Latin, and like Chinese, it has classifiers, and a whole host of other exotic phenomena. Notably, it tends to drop the inanimate pronoun (relying on context) and of course, deixis and pronouns are merged under ostension (aka pointing at stuff) so there's only pointing at yourself or other people. English is a German language, which has the least dropping of any language family, but that is changing somewhat in America (where pronouns tend to be left off the beginning of sentences sometimes); other languages like Japanese and Piraha tend to not need pronouns at all except as almost like nonce titles (like 'I' actually meaning 'yours truly', etc.) On the other hand, Japanese has a very complicated animacy hierarchy which does a lot of work circumscribing what cannot go into a sentence's interpretation. These languages which do not need pronouns are in the minority.
  The ASL situation actually reminds me of the deixis in some languages, which marks for near, far and out of sight; similarly, we have me, you or him or her, and the people I can't gesture at. The latter are particularly interesting, because they are the language's other innovation: signing space. Basically, this little piggy goes to market, and this little piggy...The storyteller points to spaces he has established as being occupied by imaginary entities, of which there can be at most 8.
  This trick takes advantage of natural tendencies of the human mind, e.g. the Roman memory trick. It also breaks down very difficult recursive sentence structures and turns them into stories. Pirahã does it super-effectively to get around using clauses in any sort of difficult fashion. It seems like the stories unfold in a way that makes it easy to keep track of the referents, but not that easy. In fact, this shows why clauses exist at all, to make telling the order of events in the way you want, easier. On the other hand, subordinating parts of sentences means that some phrases and clauses are not going to have the same bearing as other sentences, they're going to serve other sentences. This has an effect on the breaks, or cesura, between clauses. To the Pirahã, this is perhaps unacceptable. The Pirahã don't just speak their language like other peoples—they mumble it, they whistle it, etc. There's even an effect whereby the few consonants in the language can swap out for each other at different times. You cannot make this up; its called the 'Sloppy Phoneme Effect', whereby what matters to the speakers is the syllable structure in terms of tone (Pirahã is a  tone language like Chinese), stress, length of vowels and length of consonants. The language is highly musical as Keren Everett says.
  What this means, and I'm just guessing here, is that Pirahã prosody is a pain. It's fully loaded with all the distinctions the language makes already, so it cannot carry the additional burden of, like English, telling speakers what sentence focus and informations structure is—so they resort to a highly conscripted definition of a clause and a sentence, and don't differentiate between different levels. Perhaps it's not so much that they cannot speak, but that all the prosody that can be carried over into whistling, etc. determines the baseline speech. In other words, the whistled speech could be the bottleneck for the spoken speech—which is unprecedented. It's like if texting determined speech, and everybody stopped talking on their phones and just—oh wait. But in truth, the written word has functioned over the years...much the same way. How much gets left out from the written word, when compared to speech? Yet we use it, in the past to write letters. Our words carried over long distances to reach others' ears. How is a whistle any different?
  This post is still about ASL, the only language that is still more easy to understand orally/visually than in any form of writing. It is also, perhaps, the one language I still really care about, because you can talk about things you see and experience. It seems like the purview of all language nowadays is writing, and fiction at that.
  I thought it would also be cool if a sign language became oral like is suggested as the source of all languages by some researchers. That could mean that a conlang could really take off the ground, and that there may be many origins of language!