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Laughter is a universal language. Now all we have to do is codify it.
Of course, this is going to make it difficult for us to talk to aliens, or to determine whether someone is laughing at us.
My original thoughts, unelucidated in the idea, were along the lines of... what universal set
of sounds can we all reproduce, that would make a universal language? (Phonology, thanks jutta).
Remember, many sounds not included in our birth tongue are all but impossible to learn later. Laughter may well be that set of sounds, that would allow us all to learn a language that all were able to speak, given we already use the basic sounds now, in everyday communication.
I'm not suggesting it be used to just convey emotion, but the entire gamut of communication. Most would feel laughter is simply unstructured sound, but that's true of any language, until we learn its component sounds and grammar.
I doubt this will be necessary, as English seems already to have pretty good footing.
Universal phonemes?
http://www.spinnoff...t=10355&highlight=&
A bunch of phonologists trying to figure out whether there's any phoneme that every language has. [jutta, Mar 28 2006]
[link]
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I was thinking something like Kanji, which are the 64 basic sounds of the Japanese phonetic alphabet. |
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The A~boner never asked the question; just dropped a bone and ran. |
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Probably ran off to have a good laugh. |
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<cue Evil Overlord Laugh> |
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- Nice to meet you too, Mr President. |
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Interesting how this one seems to have evenly polarised readers... yet, laughter is the only language all people have in common. |
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This could make it a little hard to have a serious discussion. |
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Better inform the Unicode people of their
omission. |
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Yep. Try talking in Unicode, to the residents of Ulan Bator. |
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Are you referring to the addition of Phags-pa to Unicode in version 5.0? And if yes, why? |
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"yet, laughter is the only language all people have in common"
You don't think other voiced involuntary emotional expressions are just as shared, such as groaning, crying, or weeping? |
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Nowhere near so expressively as laughter. We already imbue our laughter and mock facsimiles of it with expression, emotion, pain, irony, joy, desire... itls almost a language, as it stands. |
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The problem with Unicode is that to speak it we are still going to use our native language to form the words necessary. Therein lies confusion, as I see it. |
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Unicode is not a language, it's a character set - so, uh, obviously it isn't a language. But then, laughter isn't a language either (it lacks arbitrariness). |
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If either of us were dropped into a society whose language we don't speak, we'd shut up and look at people's faces and point a lot. We'd laugh if other people laugh, and we'd use laughter the same way it's used here, in order to join social groups. But we'd also cry if we're hurt, and feel sad if other people cry around us.
Voices and faces in general transmit a spectrum of built-in emotions. |
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Laughternis a lot more special than Phagspa. That script dropped dead about 100 years into its evolution, didn't it? I remember reading about it in a travel guide. |
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I think Ian Tindale dragged Unicode into the discussion. I understand it's a charset, but that doesn't mean you couldn't use it, albeit laboriously, to spell words, if you knew them. Pointless really, because that would mean spelling words you could speak, however badly. |
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My original thoughts, unelucidated in the idea, were along the lines of... what universal set of sounds can we all reproduce, that would make a universal language? |
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Remember, many sounds not included in our birth tongue are all but impossible to learn later. I stand by my assertion we could all learn a language that all were able to speak, given we already use the basic sounds now, in everyday communication. |
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I'm not suggesting it be used to just convey emotion, but the entire gamut of communication. Most would feel it is simply unstructured sound, but that's true of any language, until we learn its component sounds and grammar. |
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Ah! So it's kind of a "universal phoneme set" that you're looking for?
I'm not a linguist, but I think the problem here is that phonemes are about grouping sounds, not about making them. We all get the same cake, but we slice it differently - you hear distinctions I don't, and vice versa. I'm not sure whether that bleeds at all into how we hear laughter - but that's a really interesting question. |
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Yes. Sorry for my poor explanation of the idea, previously. |
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Obligatory mention of Loveabet, the universal labguage of |
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I think we've come to the conclusion that verbalisation of emotions came before those communicated in formal words (surprise surprise!). That there is such a thing as a dirty-laugh (implying sexuality), and that other guttural (non-linguistic) noises are also associated with fairly fundamental things (anger / excitement / joy / ecstasy...), and that those in-turn imply that there is meaning to the noises beyond just communicating a fact that one is (say) happy - (raucous laughter implies very amused, not just tickled) - Fitting a grammar and syntax to that may be a problem, but it's certainly worth a bun/grunt.
But Hang on - there's already a vocabulary for this sort of thing, and it's ASCII compatible - Emoticons or smileys :) Baked! B) [m-f-d, redundant] |
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Ha. Ha ha ha ha. Hee hee. I get it. (No I don't, but I don't care. I can laugh if I wanna.) |
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Muahahahahahaha! (Did anyone catch that?) |
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I've done more research on this. It appears that we not only lose the ability to make certain sounds... We can't even hear them, after a few years of age. |
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an example of what Jutta has said, when we lived in Japan, my 4 y.o. had toy robots and guns and spaceships and played for a couple hours with Japanese kids with only sound effects. Turns out that is how males communicate world wide, neh? :-P |
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To follow up on what jutta and dentworth said, there's a whole range of universal non-verbal communication responses tied to the limbic system. |
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I used to run transformative conferences - getting a lot of people, who generally don't get on, to meet and try to sort things out (widely used in Australia, and elsewhere). Looking for such responses was an essential part of ensuring that the right person was asked the right question at the right time, and so on. Over the years I dealt with a wide ethnic range of participants, and all groups displayed such responses - any differences tended to be on an individual basis. |
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As a side effect of this, the 'startle' response may be the reason why some sprinters jump the gun. This response kicks in far quicker than cognitive processing of the gunfire sound. If so, then some athletes may have been unfairly disqualified in the past. |
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//Laughter is a universal language// I thought it was a (/the?) panacea. |
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//Kanji, which are the 64 basic sounds of the Japanese phonetic alphabet// - You might want to double-check that. I thought kanji were the Chinese characters borrowed by the Japanese, and therefore not phonetic at all (unlike katakana and hiragana). |
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