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. :)

[Aaryk Noctivagus]

It wasn't until after my 5th Birthday that I could speak intelligably (sp - I'm tired). It was my first school teacher who made the breakthrough and started me talking... yeps, she's to blame - lol :o) Miss Stock.

My Son is 4 at the moment and only recently started using words people other than his parents can understand... my daughter was also late stringing words together (other than echolalia), but she could say single words with beautiful clarity from an average age (but that isn't speach, that's words). We believe Rachael (my daughter) was somewhat hyperlexic and could read from a very early age, as could I - but not with understanding necessarilly.

This is why we're a bunch of HFAs rather than Aspies :o)

[Grieg Pedersen]

First train of thought:

I've heard that Swahili has a lot of rules and no exceptions. That actually makes it possible to make up words pretty much at will - according to a set of rules - and insert them into sentences and actually be understood. That is based on my memory of an interview with a linguist from 30 years ago. I could be wrong.

The original English language had 600 inflected words. After centuries of war caused by the ambiguities of an inflected language shattered into dozens of accents and dialects, the English got together and decided that it would be better if we did away with inflection. To replace it they introduced two really cool ideas: suffixes for pluralization word order for subject-object context. That pretty much solved the internal warfare problem just in time for a series of invasions to bring several words for everything into the newly-invented grammar. ("The Story of English," PBS, 1986)

I agree with Angela on the matter of Japanese: it's so culturally loaded that, as I understand, it actually holds back changes in their culture. Sure, they're changing, but it's going along with the adoption of another language (amid other influences). English is extremely hard to learn, but it's so flexible and adaptive that it's not ever going away. It'll just continue to evolve. I had the good fortune in grade school to have teachers who had lived abroad - each in a different country - so I got a little better education than "here's the English rule and here are 100 exceptions." I got "here's the German rule that governs words that look like this or sound like this," and the French, Spanish and some others as well. Everyone should be so fortunate. I really think the problem isn't as much the English language as the faulty way it's taught. People really need to be taught how to recognize the language of origin of words so they can get cues to both meaning and spelling.

Second train of thought:

When I was in college learning computer programming I used to think that I thought in whatever language I programmed in. It took me a long time to realize that I don't think in *any* verbal language and I have to translate everything equally, whether it's C++, Progress, or any of the English dialects like techie and business-manager. I'm a lousy ad-hoc debater, in part because if that delay.

When I was less experienced and my designs less complex, I wrote code in a way that one person said "borders on mysticism." A bunch of colors swirl around. The colors eventually solidify into shapes. When the shapes lock together, they turn into words. I type the words into the computer and the program runs. It's not quite like that any more, but designing software is still a spiritual experience devoid of language until the very last stages.

I occasionally invent words to describe the things I've invented, but mostly I find there's enough that's been said that I don't have to - I either string a few choice words together to create a new "term" or borrow something from mythology. What they now call the "business logic tier" in computer architecture I called a "Janus layer" (after the mythical two-faced guard who could look in opposite directions at once) back in 1992. When I run out of words and myths to describe things, I give up and draw diagrams. Sometimes I find or create the words long after the drawings are done. That's what I think lots of cave paintings really were - a bridge into language.

Conclusion:

In short, I think that there can be no language that could possibly communicate the richness of my thought experience, so everything is a compromise. All languages are arbitrary symbolic inventions (after all, the word "dog" never bit anyone) created by groups of people over time to express the way they already think and the conditions in which they exist, so I think that the way individuals think and their environment would strongly affect which languages they are comfortable with. (I'll comment on lojban later)

[Angela]

What little of Swahili I've studied seems to support that -- it's about as easy and regular a natural language as I've ever encountered. The bit about making up words is interesting, because I had an English teacher (native French speaker from Vanuatu who spoke about six languages fluently and English so well that she was head of the school's English department(!)) affirm that English was pretty much the only major language that made a regular habit of spontaneously generating new words. I'm kind of surprised that she was unaware of that. Hm.

I disagree that the problem isn't the English language, though the way it's taught certainly doesn't help. English is so needlessly complex and inconsistent that even reasonably intelligent native speakers have a great deal of trouble with it. It's also not very easy for much of the world's population to pronounce. Don't get me wrong -- I love my language -- but if we were to decide as a world population that we were going to establish a world language tomorrow, my vote would not be for English.

I think you (and many of us on the spectrum) are gifted in a way that most people aren't in that you think outside of the bounds of language, so perhaps its limitations are less problematic because you're already always translating. There has been a lot of conjecture, though, that the average person's thoughts are limited by his language, particularly if he's monolingual. If you think in words, you can really only conceive of what you already have words for. Which could get me onto a whole other tangent about the role autistic people might have played in the development of human language, but I'll leave that for another time. :)

[Grieg Pedersen]

Actually you're on a track that's near and dear to my heart. I do believe that most NT's (they're on a spectrum, too) cannot with any ease or regularity think outside of their language because they think IN language. How, then, did language get started? As Lorien said in Babylon 5, "You cannot form a language without ideas, yet you cannot have an idea without language." That's when I got to thinking about it because I totally disagreed with it. When I got my Dx in 2001, I finally understood: the Neurotypical Spectrum (call it NSD) is due entirely to development of complex language. Language, in turn, had to be developed by people who could already think but needed to share more complex ideas than simple languages without grammar could express. Autistics invented language, and in so doing unintentionally enabled the evolution of NSD.

[Angela]

*nods* I do really believe that a good deal of the innovation that's cropped up through human history has come from the neurological minorities that cannot, for whatever reason, confine their thoughts in the little box culture and language make -- whether that's because of autism, schizophrenia, or other differences. For all that we have problems with change, we can sure create a lot of it by asking all the wrong right questions. :)

[Grieg Pedersen]

I had thought so, too. I have learned about two dozen computer languages and after a while you discover that the grammars themselves have a grammar. Once you see that metagrammar, all the languages become interchangeable. Except to the computer, of course. :)

George Lucas wrote about language mixing in Star Wars (the novel) - Jawas spoke many languages mixed up like you do. I would have thought that all polylingual people would do that, but maybe it's the cultural rift between the languages that's hard for them to bridge. I dunno.

[aspietalk]

i tend towards hyperlexia as well (refering a commenter above), and have always had a fascination with words and language, but not to the extent of creating my own. if i were to create my own language, it wouldn't be word-based--instead it'd be a language based on art or motion. i'm about ready to take my 3rd semester of ASL, and sign language is the language that feels the most right, the way my mind wants to talk. spoken language feels like lies, written language is confusing but easier, and motion language is the best.

what fascinates me about written languages, any written language, is how spontaneous and then rigid and mutable and opinionated they can be. they're obviously objects of creation, over spans of time, agreed upon syntax between members of a society so that those members of the specific society can open their mouths and scribble with sticks on paper and the sounds their throats make and the marks they make on paper is similar so other limbed creatures can understand. utterly fascinating.

on one hand i am one of those people who gets all frustrated when i see store signs like crunchy muffins - their the best. but i also like to make up my own words, and i don't apologize when i do. i heavily identified with "a portrait of the artist as a young man" by joyce and also e.e. cummings as a kid, and to create words that are all about feeling, you speak or write a collection of letters and you can't help but SEE bright blue sheep tumbling down a grassy hill (for instance), and that's an awesome, eerie thing. writing words that can do this is like those scent-scientists who stand in laboratories and arrange chemicals together to make us think there are roses in the room when there aren't.

[Chris mcmorris]

can i haz word koqi