Query Details
| Query Subject: |
Kinesthetic-based Human Languages?
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| Author: | Dan Moonhawk Alford |
| Submitter Email: | click here to access email |
| Query: |
Dear Linguists, After 30 years of investigating Algonkian languages and listening to the insights of their speakers, I have some preliminary observations, a daring - if not completely unprecedented -- hypothesis, and a request. The original NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, co-developed by former TG syntactician John Grinder, demonstrates how humans are primarily V(isual), A(uditory), or K(inesthetic) in their sensory processing preferences; by extension, groups and societies can enculturate their young into preferred sensory modes, and ours is V-primary: words evoke pictures in the head for those who are V-primary, though not me so much -- being K-primary, I¹ve always been feeling the beat of a different drum. Sign language is also K-primary, with its 'speakers' thinking in gesture. Imagine my surprise, then, on hearing a Canadian Blackfoot woman (Amethys First Rider, creator of Calgary¹s Trickster Theatre) tell Bohmian Science Dialogue participants in Albuquerque two summers ago and again last summer that when she says even the simplest things in English, like "The man is riding a horse," pictures come up in her head; but when she says the equivalent in Blackfoot, no pictures -- just [kinesthetic] feelings of riding. This adds to what her husband (Leroy Little Bear, a Constitutional lawyer) says about Blackfoot: that it is made of about 80 roots which are combined and recombined to make words/sentences. As I found for Cheyenne, these roots often point to abstracted dynamic (kinesthetic) primes, allowing {duck} (Se?Se) and {rattlesnake} (Se?se-novotse 2nd morpheme = {goes down a hole}) to share the morphologically important first slot in Algonkian languages. Note our semantic bogglement in trying at first to figure out visually what the picture/object {duck} has to do with the picture/object {rattlesnake}. Bu for Cheyenne, where animal names describe their unique traits, the firs (reduplicated) morpheme describes, for both, the zigzag motion and the sh-sh rattle sound accompanying their movements as they¹re going away from you. So I believe we are, because of university educated Natives who can describe their languages from the inside in English, just now -- after 500 years of viewing these languages through our habitual Visual-primary lens -- arriving at a new threshold of understanding. Thus I now hypothesize that *Algonkian and other Native American languages to be determined are of a type previously undescribed in linguistics, based primarily on a kinesthetic rather than visual processing of spoken sounds.* This is a kinesthetic- to-sound (& vice-versa) base rather than the (related?) kinesthetic-to- visual base of Sign; and this is curious given the prevalence of Plains Sign among Algonkians who were living in the Plains and western mountains (for intratribal, as in simultaneously with speech for deaf elders, as well as intertribal talk). To the question: does anyone out there know of any linguistic or ethnographic works (besides Whorf on Hopi aspects) where any such observations or hints of such have been made before, perhaps tucked away in a footnote, a musing, a dictionary definition ... or anything? (I know Ives Goddard is sitting on an Algonkian-language goldmine for a Q like this, bu it¹s a tough sort to get at this kind of language-and-cognition info.) Navajo¹s 352,000 or so sounds for {go}, according to Gary Witherspoon, probably fit the kinesthetic-to-sound mode of human speech I¹m proposing. I would especially appreciate replies from Native American linguists, anthropologists, teachers or students who speak their tribal languages, as well as anyone else with citations or comments. I'll summarize if there are enough responses. |
