Whoah. OP is one of today’s lucky 10.000 (ht XKCD). Let us introduce you to sign languages: natural languages evolved without a single sound. There are hundreds of these around the world, in daily use by many deaf communities and studied by academic researchers, many of them from these same communities or closely allied to them. Lovely convergence of ideas: these languages indeed involve ample use of the 3D affordances of the visual spatial modality. And they use these affordances in exactly the kind of flexible ways you would expect from a complex linguistic communication system culturally evolved in the visual-spatial modality. For instance, they use something linguists call buoys, where one sign is held with the non-dominant hand while the dominant hand produces a further sequence of signs (hard to do in speech!). They use complex ways of modifying spatial verbs to precisely indicate location in space. And they make ample use of indexical forms (like pointing gestures, except more grammaticalized) to achieve person reference. There is loads more, but we’d soon get into very technical issues, reflecting the technical and bodily complexity these linguistic systems have achieved, which is considered on a par with the most complex grammatical systems of spoken+gestured languages. In short, great question, and it happens to have an actual answer from which we can learn deep things about the nature of language and the degree to which it depends (or does not depend) on communicative modalities. Check out this work by Prof. Carol Padden and colleagues, for instance:
Padden, Carol & Meir, Irit & Aronoff, Mark & Sandler, Wendy. 2010. The grammar of space in two new sign languages. Sign Languages: A Cambridge Survey, 570–592. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Whoah. OP is one of today’s lucky 10.000 (ht XKCD). Let us introduce you to sign languages: natural languages evolved without a single sound. There are hundreds of these around the world, in daily use by many deaf communities and studied by academic researchers, many of them from these same communities or closely allied to them. Lovely convergence of ideas: these languages indeed involve ample use of the 3D affordances of the visual spatial modality. And they use these affordances in exactly the kind of flexible ways you would expect from a complex linguistic communication system culturally evolved in the visual-spatial modality. For instance, they use something linguists call buoys, where one sign is held with the non-dominant hand while the dominant hand produces a further sequence of signs (hard to do in speech!). They use complex ways of modifying spatial verbs to precisely indicate location in space. And they make ample use of indexical forms (like pointing gestures, except more grammaticalized) to achieve person reference. There is loads more, but we’d soon get into very technical issues, reflecting the technical and bodily complexity these linguistic systems have achieved, which is considered on a par with the most complex grammatical systems of spoken+gestured languages. In short, great question, and it happens to have an actual answer from which we can learn deep things about the nature of language and the degree to which it depends (or does not depend) on communicative modalities. Check out this work by Prof. Carol Padden and colleagues, for instance:
Padden, Carol & Meir, Irit & Aronoff, Mark & Sandler, Wendy. 2010. The grammar of space in two new sign languages. Sign Languages: A Cambridge Survey, 570–592. New York: Cambridge University Press.