Oh Time Thy Pyramids

Background:

I’m interested in the topic of indigenous sign languages. They differ from national sign languages such as ASL in at least two respects: They are typically spoken by many more hearing individuals than deaf individuals, and are commonly quite old. We are far from a full understanding of the typology of sign languages; indigenous signs, however, have tended to stretch our understanding of sign universals. Many have unexpected phonologies, utilizing highly marked handshapes or high proportions of full body signs. Some barely seem to take advantage of the potential for iconicity in sign languages, in particular with differences in classifier (“productive”) predicates.

For these reasons, an indigenous sign makes sense as a medium for better exploring the linguistic capabilities of the visual-spatial medium in a conlang. I intend to spend this semester developing a consign used by a fictional culture (outlined below). In particular, I’m interested in exploring use of register in sign languages, and also in pushing the boundaries of sign language morphology. Some of my ideas in this regard will be outlined below. It should be said, however, than on the engelang-artlang spectrum, I fall more towards the art: While engelanging is important to making a conlang interesting, I’m mostly interested in the total aesthetic effect of language and culture.

A brief concultural/historical sketch:

A small village in a mountainous region, off of any major trade routes, generally isolated. An indigenous sign has existed for at least ten generations. For various religious reasons, deaf individuals become high-status in the community, and the sign language gets codified as the primary language of worship, with a particular (highly formalized) body of stories as a sort of religious “text”. Several generations later, the regional culture undergoes a significant economic shift (i.e. to bronze, or to a different crop due to plague), leaving the village at an unexpected advantage.The village becomes prosperous, and begins to expand and to export its religion over the region. By this point, the sign language is intimately associated with that religion, and deaf people of an inherently higher caste. The language, then, becomes spoken by an even higher proportion of hearing individuals than the average indigenous sign, but also begins to show a sort of diglossia between the highly formalized version used in the religious texts, and the kind used as a high-status language between individuals (whether hearing or deaf).

Some aspects of the language I would like to play with:

Register and social deixis are most important. The language will probably display three distinct registers: A highly formal register used for religious texts only; a middle register used in cases of public discourse, or for speaking to individuals of a significantly higher social status (i.e., from a hearing person to a deaf person); and a low register including slang and significantly simplified grammar (mostly used between deaf people, occasionally between hearing people). Differences between the registers will include degree of iconicity and use of productive vocabulary (both greater in lower registers).

On a morphophonological level, I’m interested in systematic word-internal mutation as a possible inflectional process in sign language. For instance, perhaps degrees of deference in verbs might be signaled by systematic changes of handshape; secondary motion could be used to productively indicate aspect. Natsigns do this, but typically highly irregularly; the formal nature of this sign language provides potential reason for regularization. I’d also be interested in encoding morphological categories typically ignored by sign languages, such as case. How far consigns can be pushed before losing a sense of naturalism is an open question, and one that I hope to have some answers to by the end of the semester.