1176: Exception to Duality of Patterning Feb 27, 2018

Imagine a language where every word had a unique sound: no compounds, no affixes, and no phonemes. Even in terms of logistics, that is hard to picture, because there are thousands of words, and each would need its own completely different sound, eventually probably relying on snorts, sniffs, and knocks. This idea is called the "duality of patterning" and as logical as it is, it is not true of all languages, as it only takes one language to break the rule. While it can be said to be true of all known spoken languages, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a language forming within a community with large rates of deafness in Israel. It has been assessed that the language uses gestures exist independently. Most [all other] sign languages rely on combinations of other smaller gestures to convey what can be thought of as words; indeed in this way other sign languages have morphology, and can therefore be assessed on a sub-word level in the same way as spoken languages. What this means, in addition to being an exception to what was assumed a necessary part of language, it that the users of ABSL must know an enormous amount of gestures.
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