I attended the seminar on American Sign Language. I enjoyed learning the language itself, and I had the realization that language is more general a notion than one would typically imagine. I really like learning new languages, but when I think of language in that context I think of French, Japanese, Chinese, German–spoken languages with strong associated cultures and histories. Of course, ASL has its own culture and history, but I think it is very distinct from spoken language in an interesting way–partially because it is a language that evolved from, one might say, the lack of language, and also because it is “spoken” in a completely different way.

I think it is particularly interesting how some ASL words are formed by compounding certain hand shapes with different movements–for example, chemistry is a combination of the letter “C” with the hand movements of “science”. There are other modulations like this that made me think: how many fundamental elements do you need to generate an entire language? I’d imagine that the basic forms you need are descriptives, like nouns, and then modifiers that can relate the objects to other things, for example auxiliaries like “is” and “have”, and action words like verbs, but what different forms can these elements take? And how few do you need so that all other elements can be generated from that fundamental set? I guess these are the questions asked by linguistics majors and people who write programming languages.