Language Log

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A Twitter thread from Incunabula, starting here:

Language development – in this case sign language – happens in real time, as the need arises. To ensure needed supplies reach them quickly, Hong Kong’s protesters have developed a unique system of hand signals, to send messages through the crowd about what equipment is required. pic.twitter.com/1G5YTGhya0

— Incunabula (@incunabula) August 5, 2019

The second item in this thread leads to a succession of videos that show how the Hong Kong protesters use these hand signals in real life to move supplies quickly and efficiently to front lines:

A VIDEO THREAD: How did HK protesters use hand signals & human chains to get supplies quickly to front lines on Monday? Here, they need more helmets at the front line at LegCo doors. What to do? The hand signal for “helmets” is passed from the front line through the crowd… pic.twitter.com/hKWDaohpvf

— Antony Dapiran (@antd) July 3, 2019

For linguists, we have this thread from Bill Benzon with commentary on whether this mode of communication constitutes "sign language". As Ben Zimmer points out:

Dan Everett, who's currently writing a biography of C.S. Peirce, makes the Peircean point that the signs being used are icons and indexes but not symbols, which you need for a full language.

Upon initial encounter, I thought that this couldn't be a language since it only has nouns, but no verbs.  Then I realized that it does have at least one verb ("Raise Up"), and there must be others as well.

In the history of writing — at least in the development of Chinese writing — it is harder to convey specific verbs than it is to indicate particular nouns.  For the latter, you can "picture" them, but for the former all you can do is borrow the sounds of those nouns to stand in for the sounds of homophonous verbs, e.g., using "wheat" — rebus fashion — to stand for "come", as explained in the comments to this post:

"Of shumai and Old Sinitic reconstructions" (7/19/16)

Here are the relevant graphs from Wiktionary, together with their Old Sinitic reconstructions:

lái 來 ("come") — glyph origin (you can see that it starts out looking like a stalk of wheat with ear, leaves, stem, and roots)

Old Sinitic:

(Baxter–Sagart) /*mə.rˤək/, /*mə.rˤək/
(Zhengzhang) /*m·rɯːɡ/

mài 麥 ("wheat") — glyph origin (augmented form of lái 來 initially used in the borrowed sense of "come"; later switched for the latter's original sense of "wheat")

Old Sinitic:

(Baxter–Sagart): /*m-rˤək/
(Zhengzhang): /*mrɯːɡ/

Returning from the Bronze Age to the present day in Hong Kong, whether or not the hand signals employed by the Hong Kong protesters are only a set of icons and indexes but not symbols may be moot, but one thing is sure:  it is an another interesting instance of resourceful ways in which the protesters maximize the effectiveness of communication among themselves, as we've witnessed in numerous posts, for which see "Go protest on Causeway Road" (8/4/19) and the "Readings" section with which it concludes.

August 6, 2019 @ 7:08 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Sign language

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