language

[Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly]

I know the subtitle of this website, "meet people who speak your own language," is a metaphor :), but I am very interested personally in exploring language & creating language. I have noticed a bit of slang & jargon around: spectrum, aspie, autie, AS, neurotypical, NT, etc. I wonder what other distinctions are more relevant to our community than to the general population? If we did speak a different language, or a really distinct dialect, what would it be like?

One word that I invented in my childhood was "koqi" (pronounced "ko-CHEE"), which meant my current focus, my current obsession. Your koqi is like the resting state of your mind, what your mind gets drawn back to if it's not busy with something else. I see the word "obsession" used in this sense a lot in our community. :)

[Angela]

There's "perseveration", too. xD I saw that somewhere and liked it, so that's the term I usually use.

There actually are a group of people that were trying to create an autistic language recently on the theory that if they could construct a language that avoids a lot of English's ambiguities and inconsistencies, it'd be easier for autistic people to learn, but I'm not sure how far they got with it. Personally, I don't know that a language that was as concrete as they were aiming for would work well for me, but I suspect some of us might find it preferable.

What I'm curious about is how many of us have developed words, languages, or writing systems of our own at some point.

[Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly]

Thanks for pointing me to "autlang"! I'm not sure how it was supposed to be better for autistic people, really-- it just looks like a cute little conlang-- but I like it anyway. :)

I've experimented with numerous languages on my own. Most of my experiments are just strange ideas that I'd like to see if they're possible at all: A language that's only typed not spoken, a language that's written nonlinearly in two dimensions, a language with only three phonemes (called "Aiu"), etc. My latest idea (which I'm not sure how far I'll be taking it) is a language which combines speech & large movements-- whereas most languages are very efficient, using a minimal amount of energy, this language would use a MAXIMUM amount of energy! You have to leap up and down and wave your arms madly while making loud weird noises. It'd be good exercise to speak!

[Star]

Well if there is a language that could fit with the way that the autistic mind works that I feel would be Japanese as the way the sentences are built has the same kind of feeling as an equation is built in math. The words have a specific value that does not change as words in many languages to. To show the change another (sub)word is added like wa, ka, ga, go, etc. Also the possition of the words in a sentence are like the position of numbers in an equation if you change the sequence the value changes for example: 4 x 2 + 5 is not the same as 2 x 5 + 4. I am not sure how else to explain it.

What makes me sad is the notion that exists in the USA in particular as if the English language is the only one that exists. Yes, it is a language that many people speak, but there are even more people who do not speak it and if someone makes a language for autistics why do they assume that taking the American English as a basis is the best way to go about it?

I mean there are many languages around the world that are by far more suitable for this purpose, but then again there are millions of Americans who only speak English and think they are the center of the world...

I am sorry if you feel offended because of what I said about American English but Greek for example is far older and richer than English, and as there are many more languages such as Chinese, Japanese, Hindu who could also qualify, I am a bit annoyed that the first choice is always English.

Star

[Angela]

I agree and disagree on Japanese because there are so many facets to it. On the surface it would appear to be a language that would fit autistics, and a basic conversational adaptation could probably be used in this way, but such a huge, huge part of speaking Japanese properly is social interpretation that it would seem to me to make it about the worst language on Earth for us. Figuratively speaking, they have a verb form for everything from ordering a cheeseburger to addressing the ghost of a dead emperor (knowing which to use is a nightmare, particularly since many of us even have trouble with English's comparatively few levels of formality), and in practice half of what people say is implied rather than stated. It's a beautiful, elegant language, but maybe there is another agglutinative language that is simpler in actual use.

As for autlang, they weren't basing it on American English, I don't think. The woman who started it speaks Welsh and British English and thus probably has some feelings on the politics of language, and I recall that a number of the people involved were language enthusiasts. Personally, I like English because I like its flexibility and the combination of sounds (the only language I really have an antipathy to based on how it sounds is Spanish, oddly enough) and because as a native speaker I am biased, but I strongly feel we need a better -- and certainly simpler -- lingua franca. I think this not only because of the practical problems involved with everyone learning a language like English, but because having a neutral universal language would remove much of the pressure that causes languages to be lost in the modern world, and language is an inherent part of culture that is valuable and worth preserving.

The monolingual (or less, in some cases, as so few Americans really have much of a grasp of even American English these days) attitude of my country really irritates me as well. It's sheer laziness that's reinforced in our schools, at least unless you live in a really privileged area. In my school system, you didn't even have the option of taking a language until high school, at which point you got to choose from French and Spanish, neither taught by a native speaker (since I left it got worse -- my sister has the option of those two languages, taught by the same person who doesn't speak either at a fluent level!). My husband, on the other hand, was able to take Spanish in elementary school and had his choice of about fifteen languages at the high school level, and as a result has a much better attitude toward languages than the average American.

[Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly]

I speak a fair amount of Esperanto, and I think it would be just fine for a lingua franca. It really is very easy to learn. The US has this idea, as you mention, that what you do with language in school is just take a few classes from someone who's not even necessarily a native speaker. That doesn't work at all in teaching you to speak a natural language, but it'd be enough to teach you Esperanto. If the US could manage to teach people to be bilingual in Spanish or French that might be good, but if they're only willing to put in the amount of effort they're putting in now, I think Esperanto would work better.

[Angela]

Esperanto wouldn't be bad, particularly now that we have the internet. And if a government supported the teaching of Esperanto on a widespread basis, I think it would really take off (considering how well it's hung on in the past).

[Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly]

I speak a language where sentences are even more like equations than Japanese: Lojban, the Logical Language. Lojban has a completely unambiguous grammar, so you can make sentences infinitely complex without losing any precision in how they relate to themselves. You can relate things on several levels in terms of predicate logic. Many aspects of language which in other languages are tangled up with everything are separated out into specific, distinguishable tools: The "tone" and intent of a sentence is expressed using "attitudinals," little words that show how you feel about things, for instance whereas your relative rank with others has to be expressed in complex implicit ways in Japanese, in Lojban it can be simply stated on a scale which runs from "ga'icai", much higher rank, to "ga'inaicai", much lower rank. Like Laadan & some native american languages, Lojban has a system of "evidentials" which express how you came to know what you're saying-- whether through a dream, a myth, hearsay, direct observation, etc.

Lojban is a very interesting language for anyone who likes to think clearly. Its main disadvantage is that it's only spoken by a few people, so it's an awful lot of work to learn just to speak to the few Lojbanists. :) I've been trying to fix that, lately, by making a shallow end of the Lojban pool for people to dip their toes in, called Cniglic. Cniglic is sort of based on English-- it uses English as a starting point and decorates it with some of the words of Lojban-- but that's simply because English is the only natural language I'm fluent in. :) It could just as easily be applied to Japanese or Greek, I'm sure. Cniglic takes just the attitudinals & evidentials of Lojban and uses them in English sentences, so you can show how you learned things & how you feel about them. I'm hoping to gradually create an easy entrance to Lojban, so it can overcome the catch-22 of not being worth learning because not many people have learned it yet.

[Star]

You know, by saying this about the Lojban language you somehow related back to me something that I had always thought that native indians like many other native tribes around the world had what I call the "original mind" this original mind is coming back now in what we experience as autism.

This means that the language they used was created by the original mind and it took into consideration the way the original mind worked and how it was able to connect on many levels with the world around it. dreams, myths, the supernatural and all that is today thought as paranormal because it falls beyond the grasp of the empirical based science, has many similarities with how the 'autistic' mind works and our sensitivity to things beyond our 5 senses, almost to the point of having a sixth sense a telepathic ability, that guids us if we trust it.

I am sure these people with the original mind, thought and operated in a way that is expressed in the way their language is made. Oh, I would love to see if Lojban bares any similarities to other 'old' languages as Greek and Hebrew.

Star

[Pope Salmon the Lesser Mungojelly]

My husband is Potawatomi and we've just started learning the Potawatomi language. Maybe someday soon I could tell you what the grammar and spirit of the language is, but right now all I can say is that it sounds very pretty. :)

I'm sure all of the old languages were better at helping us connect with spirit. Our brains haven't gotten any bigger, and now they're full of words for talking about the internet & what's on TV. :) It's just as possible to reach the same spiritual places as ever, but it's harder to be taught about them in our words, because the words are made for describing things very concretely. If you talk about dream worlds or spirit worlds in modern English you sound like you're speaking in absurdities, so it's no wonder that so many people who speak English now don't believe that those things are even real.

Lojban is a beautiful idea of a language, but it's still missing the soul of a language. They thought up a groovy grammar & some meanings, but I'm not sure they grok that there's more to language than that! They haven't yet made a culture, a pedagogy, a literature. So I'm trying to help Lojban take the next step. If I have anything to say about it, it's going to fill right up with spirit and otherworldyness. :)

[Grieg Pedersen]

You know, I was going to suggest that it seemed to lack the ability to step outside of logic.

The real problem with it or Esperanto, of course, is getting people to take the time and effort to learn it. What's the motivation? Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn; yet more people speak Klingon, a language specifically designed to be hard to learn. The fact that you refer to two separate, specifically-designed languages shows the problem.

I'm part Lakota, but my cultural identity is more with the Odawa I grew up near, so I'm learning Anishinaabemowin (the root of the Algonquian languages including Ojibwe and Odawa). It too sounds beautiful, but its grammar is VERY different from anything I've seen before. Every noun is also a verb. There are animate and inanimate nouns. It's very strange and interesting.

[Angela]

The sad thing about getting people to take the time and effort to learn Esperanto is how little it actually requires. Yet even some of the more educated people I see on a daily basis have the misconception that it's this wildly difficult and incomprehensible foreign tongue. I'm not sure where they got that notion, but I'm sure it doesn't help.

On a different note, one of the two language options at my college was Ojibwe. I was only there for three years so I didn't have a chance to take classes and learn to speak it, but from what I heard from friends who did, it sounded fascinating. Pity it's so tough to find language classes for Native American languages.

[Grieg Pedersen]

Where'd they get that notion? They speak English as a first and possibly only language. The cost of learning a new language, particularly to people whose only language is one of the hardest on Earth, will be perceived as prohibitive. They'll have a hard time thinking that learning a new language can be an easy experience, or anything short of traumatic. You have to create the desire for the benefit before you introduce the cost. The problem with creating new languages is that there's no one to speak them with - you might be better off to pitch it as a secret code a family or couple could use in public because almost no one else is going to be able to understand them.

I remember meeting someone who wore a button that said, "I speak Esperanto like a native." I inferred form that, that he did not speak it at all. After all, I've never met an Esperantan or been to Esperantonia. Turns out he speaks it very well. I asked why, and the answer was philosophical. I saw no practical reason to take it up.

As for Anishinaabemowin, I'm taking a computer course as soon as I'm working again and can find the thing on the web. I've started with on-line studies, but I really want to hear it spoken again.