Book of the Week: Gestuno

Resuming this series of posts now in which I give you a tour of my book collection. Here we have:

Gestuno
International Sign Language of the Deaf
Langage Gestuel International des Sourds
The revised an enlarged book of signs agreed and adopted by the Unification of Signs Commission of the World Federation of the Deaf

Published on behalf of the World Federation of the Deaf by the British Deaf Association. Copyright 1975. ISBN 0-9504187-0-6.



(Click on thumbnail for larger view.)

The copy in my collection is ex-library. I found it on eBay and paid about $50 for it. It's interesting in an abstract way; sometimes I leaf through it while sitting in bed trying to get to sleep.

To what degree can any given sign language be considered an intentional or constructed language? This question can be controversial. There is no room for argument with regard to Gestuno - its vocabulary was unquestionably intentionally selected from existing sign languages by a committee. (But the book doesn't say a word about syntax/grammar.) So to some degree Gestuno is a constructed language.

If you want to learn more about this language, please do a Google search and read a variety of viewpoints. Remember, if you limit your reading to Wikipedia, you will be limiting your knowledge to that which the biggest bullies and the people with the worst cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder think you should have. (“Consensus reality” is an oxymoron.)

OMG I'm obsessed LOL

My brain won't let me read or write about anything other than Papiamentu. It happens sometimes; my brain locks up like a Windows computer. Just have to let it run its course.

Codex Seraphinianus

If you're not familiar with the Codex Seraphinianus, you might enjoy learning about it. There's a blog entry with some sample pages here, starting about two-thirds down the page.

burning the relative clauses candle at both ends

I think it's fun to mark both the beginning and end of relative clauses in a conlang. Vorlin did it, and someday some other lang o' mine will do it. There's a nifty post about natlangs that do it on the Far Outliers blog.

cross-pollination my ass

Several months ago, a certain organization suggested that it would be wonderful if most of the active online forums about conlanging moved onto servers controlled by that group. Supposed benefits would be convenience and cross-pollination.

This idea was, for me personally, the most annoying thing I have ever seen in a forum about language creation. Whenever I have trouble waking up in the morning I just recall this proposal and then wham I'm wide awake with elevated blood pressure and heart-rate.

Convenient it would be, certainly. Instead of having one login to view and post in Conlang-L, and another for ZBB, and other sets of IDs and passwords for whatever else, with one login you'd be aboard several forums.

But think of the consequences. This would make it even easier for the most socially aggressive 15 or 20 people to dominate every conlanging forum on earth. There would be no sanctuary, no refuge, no escape. Quiet little estuaries where you can get away from the extroverts are precious, and any proposal that would reduce the viability or individuality of lesser forums should be resisted IMHO.

The other consequence not mentioned in the proposal is that forums which used to be hosted independently would suddenly be dependent on the organization. Dependent people are more likely to donate money and follow orders. That's good for the organization; not so good for the people.

As for cross-pollination, well, nobody gets more cross-pollination than a drone in a Borg cube. Have you ever noticed that nobody in Star Fleet ever yells "Beam me over to that Borg cube right now so that I can get assimilated and join the collective!" It just doesn't happen. Maybe there's a reason for that.

Well, I just had to get that off my chest. Thanks for reading :-)

one folktale in a zillion languages

Just stumbled across this Low Saxon folktale translated into many languages. Several constructed languages and some of my favorite pidgins and creoles are included. This might be a useful resource for people looking for a short text to use for comparing and showcasing languages.

added a couple o' links

Over there on the left you'll see a list of "informative blogs." Just added The Ideophone and Ryan's Linguistics Blog.

I know about the famous blogs like Language Hat but there's no point in me linking to them; everybody else under the sun links to them.

Dengo update

Dengo (formerly called Zengo, and before that, Penta) is my conlang made mostly of 5-letter words. Just an idea that keeps bubbling on the back burner of my brain. I have made surprisingly little progress considering how long I've been thinking about it.

But I have made one decision. I will go ahead with the idea of changing most unvoiced consonants to their voiced counterparts when importing words. So pizza becomes bidza and Finnish lintu (bird) becomes lindu.

I still have no idea what the grammar will be like. Obviously most words will have to be isolating and uninflected to preserve the 5-letter aesthetic of the language. Beyond that, the muses have revealed nothing yet.

Got time on your hands? Check out the top 20 Google search results for quinquiliteral and quinqueliteral. The former produces some interesting language desriptions while the latter produces mostly definitions of the word.

no resonances in newly-made languages? huh what?

In a blog called Shop Talk, cantueso expresses an old prejudice against constructed languages: "In a natural language almost all words carry a kind of ballast as if they were tied to each other from way back. Almost none are neutral, but some are more classy, others a bit old, others slangy or technical or only used by kids or typical of old men... And that is why a real language is not comparable to any artificial construct."

Cantueso is beating up on Esperanto, inaccurately, because Esperanto does have archaic words, new words, words that are no longer used due to political correctness e.g. lunatiko, swear words, idioms that some people use and others avoid– the whole nine yards.

But I would argue that even richer resonances exist within any artlang that one person has made solely for his/her own pleasure. In a personal language where each word has been handcrafted and carefully tuned so that it will sound right in a sentence, aesthetic resonances abound. Not the kind of resonance that makes you hate a word because your Phys Ed instructor in high school mispronounced it or because your least favorite politician overused it, granted, but internally generated resonances rather than extraneous ones.

Wouldn't you agree that the voluntary resonances built into an conlang by choice are to be preferred over those imposed upon our natlangs by vile people that we were forced to associate with?

language archives on glass disks

Recently several constructed language forums have had messages from conlangers who lost precious data due to drive crashes or corrupted files, and discussions of how rapidly digital storage media become obsolete. If your mother stored her conlang on 8-inch floppies back in the 1970s you would have to find someone who collects and maintains obsolete equipment to read the data now, if the disks are still readable.

Hard drives, burn-em-yourself CD-R disks, flash memory – all these media have limited lifespans.

SFGate has a news item regarding the Rosetta Project's efforts to save data about the world's languages, most of which are endangered. They are using glass disks with data micro-etched on them.

"The groups say the Earth's languages are rapidly disappearing and they are concerned with the fragility of historical recordkeeping in a digital age."

Interesting and inspiring.

Latin's day in the sun

The 3sat television network has produced a 37-minute feature in Latin (with German subtitles). You can see it here. This is probably the biggest thing that will happen to Latin this year.

When I was 11 or 12 years old I went through a phase of thinking Latin should be the global auxiliary language. There are a few people scattered around the world who feel that way, and others who are keeping the language alive just because they find it aesthetically appealing. There is a new Yahoo group for Latino sine Flexione and there are also several groups for students of traditional Latin.

alt.binaries.world-languages

If you don't know (or care) about the binaries groups on Usenet, you can skip this message.

Over on alt.binaries.world-languages the 2nd annual "Festival of Seldom Posted Languages" will be held August 29-31. There might (or might not) be a variety of interesting books and audio courses. Participation in the newsgroup has been fizzling out so I'm not super-optimistic, but if you watch the binaries groups anyway, it might be worth adding alt.binaries.world-languages to your subscriptions.