<div dir="ltr"><div>Dear Ian, dear all,</div><div><br></div><div>I confess I had never thought about this before, but how about a taxonomy of modalities such as the following:</div><div><br></div>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span lang="EN-GB">↓</span><span lang="EN-GB">Sensory channel / Mode</span></i><i><span lang="EN-GB">→</span><span lang="EN-GB"><span></span></span></i></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Verbal<span></span></span></i></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Graphic<span></span></span></i></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Acoustic<span></span></span></i></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Speaking, Whistling, others?<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">―</span><span lang="EN-GB"><span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Visual<span></span></span></i></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Signing<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Writing, Drawings<span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><i><span lang="EN-GB">Tactile<span></span></span></i></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Tactile signing<br><span></span></span></p>
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<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin:0cm;line-height:normal;font-size:11pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif"><span lang="EN-GB">Braille<span></span></span></p>
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<div><br></div><div>As many of you probably know, there have been various attempts to work out a graphic system for the representation of signed languages of the type I -- somewhat sloppily -- refer to as 'drawings', but I am not aware of any really established convention (probably my ignorance). 'Verbal' is also a very tentative, and perhaps inaccurate term, but off the top of my head I cannot think of a better definition. Finally, the 'others?' in the acoustic/verbal cell refers to Daniel Everett's work on Pirahã, a language for which the author has documented three other modes besides speaking and whistling (namely yelling, humming and singing), each with its own, distinct phonetics.</div><div><br></div><div>
Everett, Daniel. 1985. Syllable weight, sloppy phonemes, and channels in Pirahã discourse. In Mary Niepokuj, Deborah Feder, Vassiliki Nikiforidou, and Mary Van Clay (eds.), <i>Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society</i>,
408-416. California: Berkeley Linguistics Society.</div><div>O'Neill, Gareth. 2014. <span class="gmail-NLM_article-title">Humming, whistling, singing, and yelling in Pirahã: Context and channels of communication in FDG</span>. In <span class="gmail-NLM_string-name"><span class="gmail-NLM_given-names">Núria</span> Alturo</span>, <span class="gmail-NLM_string-name"><span class="gmail-NLM_given-names">Evelien</span> Keizer</span> & <span class="gmail-NLM_string-name"><span class="gmail-NLM_given-names">Llúis</span> Payrató</span> (eds.), <i>The interaction between context and grammar in Functional Discourse Grammar. </i>Special issue of <i>Pragmatics</i> 24(2): <span class="gmail-NLM_fpage">349</span>–<span class="gmail-NLM_lpage">375</span>. <br></div><div><br></div><div>Best,</div><div>Riccardo<br>
</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">Harald Hammarström <<a href="mailto:harald@bombo.se">harald@bombo.se</a>> escreveu no dia sexta, 28/01/2022 à(s) 01:54:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div>Hi Ian! There may be a third modality, tactile, attested on the Bay<br></div><div>Islands off the Honduran coast where a critical mass of deaf-blind</div><div>people existed for perhaps three generations. If I understood it correctly,</div><div>there's a hereditary disease which causes deafness at birth and (gradually)</div><div>blindness later in life. So this group developed their own rural sign</div><div>language (Bay Islands Sign Language aka French Harbour Sign Language)</div><div>which was continued in a tactile modality for those of age. While there</div><div>is little to no documentation on the actual signs in sign or tactile</div><div>modality, it seems clear that it is a sign language turned tactile, not</div><div>a tactile language developed independently of the other modalities. As such</div><div>it is perhaps not very different from most (all?) sign languages which can</div><div>be used in a tactile way optionally (e.g., in the dark), without losing too</div><div>much efficiency. The only difference is that this was possibly used by</div><div>a community (albeit small) as their main and only means of communication,</div><div>and as far as I know such a congregation of deaf-blind people is attested</div><div>nowhere else, and might never happen again. The little information</div><div>available on the tactile language is due to Ali & Braithwaite (2021) but</div><div>I understand the genetic background to the disease has been researched</div><div>for much longer.</div><div><br></div><div>Of course, I would speculate that if there were a community of humans</div><div>who, for some reasons, could not use speech/sign/touch they would develop</div><div>a smell language or a taste language (assuming they could physically</div><div>produce the required amount of signals at will), so there could be all</div><div>five modalities corresponding to our senses.</div><div><br></div><div>all the best, H</div><div><br></div><div>Ali, Kristian & Ben Braithwaite. (2021) Bay Islands Sign Language: A</div><div>Sociolinguistic Sketch. In Olivier Le Guen, Josefina Safar & Marie</div><div>Coppola (eds.), Emerging Sign Languages of the Americas (Sign Language</div><div>Typology [SLT] 9), 435-438. Berlin: DeGruyter Mouton.</div><div><br></div></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">Pada tanggal Jum, 28 Jan 2022 pukul 00.15 JOO, Ian [Student] <<a href="mailto:ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk" target="_blank">ian.joo@connect.polyu.hk</a>> menulis:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
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<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Dear typologists,</span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">about a year ago, there was a discussion on whether writing is a linguistic modality of its own right, like spoken or signed modalities.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Although the majority opinion is that writing is simply a reflection of the spoken modality and not a modality by itself, I argued that written modality can be independent, based on several factors:</span></div>
<ul>
<li><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The deaf people can learn and write written languages without exposure to its spoken form;</span></li><li><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Some parts of the written modality are untranslatable to speech (such as the bullets I am using here);</span></li><li><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">There are languages that have been used almost exclusively in written form, such as Classical Chinese, which is incomprehensible when read aloud in any spoken language (other than perhaps Old Chinese).</span></li></ul>
<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">David Gil disagreed and argued that even if deaf person writes a written language, they are still in some sense communicating in a spoken language, just in its written form.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">For now, let's leave that discussion aside, and say that written modality is not an independent modality.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">The question I would like to ask is: Are there any other linguistic modalities? Or do we have only two - signed and spoken?</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">If we have only two modalities, then is it hypothetically possible to have other modalities?</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Or are the two modalities biologically ingrained in our brains, and we can only truly acquire a language in either signed or spoken form?</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">To me this seems to be a critical question regarding how we understand human language, yet to my knowledge, it has been seldom discussed. So I would appreciate your opinion on this issue.</span></div>
</div>
<div name="messageSignatureSection"><br>
>From Uppsala,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
</div>
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