Why your Russian classmates learn ASL faster than you.
To assert that some languages convey some ideas better than others may be unpopular, but it shouldn’t be controversial: the General Semantic structure of your native language may reveal one aspect of the language you’re learning while obscuring another aspect of it.
There is a common assumption that some languages are inherently more difficult to learn than others. There is also a popular cultural idea that English in particular is somehow uniquely wonky and nonsensical in a way that other languages are not. This idea is popular for a few reasons: it’s simple enough to swallow it whole and then repeat it gratuitously without any further thought; it conforms beautifully to the woke trend of overcorrecting for American Exceptionalism; it’s really easy to pull the I’m-a-native-English-speaker-therefore-new-languages-are-harder-for-me-than-for-others card.
Ironically, while the truth is much simpler, the explanation is more complex. The difficulty of learning a new language is largely a function of the breadth of the general semantic gap between the learner’s first language and the language being learned. When the general semantics of the new language differ significantly from one’s native language, the learning process becomes more challenging.
2: CONTEXT
General semantics is a concept developed by Alfred Korzybski, which proposes that the structure of language directly affects the structure of thought. In other words, the words and phrases used in a language can shape the way we think and perceive the world around us.
General Semantics emphasizes the role of structure and symbols in shaping our perception of reality. That is, the structural framework of one language can serve to reveal or obscure important aspects of meaning. To assert that some languages convey some ideas better than others may be unpopular, but it’s far from controversial.
Because language mediates our understanding of the world, it also mediates our understanding of other languages.
Thus, the General Semantic structure of the language you already know may serve beautifully to reveal one aspect of the language you’re learning while simultaneously serving to obscure another aspect of it.
Between English and American Sign Language (ASL), there are profound structural differences, ranging from boring syntactical rules to stunning stunning modal deficits. For example, English can be conducted via many modalities (e.g. speech, writing, manual gestures al la S.E.E., singing, coding, binary, etc. etc. etc.) ASL, on the other hand, can be conducted via exactly ONE and only one modality: Visual gesturing. Seriously, that’s it.
The reason you’ve never seen written ASL is because that doesn’t exist.
But here we will focus specifically on General Semantic differences. In particular, stative verbs.
How do ASL and English differ in this way?
Well, in a nutshell: English relies heavily upon them, while ASL doesn’t even have any… at all.
3: DEVELOPMENT OF ASL
Now, if you’ve ever taken an ASL class, then you know that ASL scholars love to claim that “ASL is based on French, not English!” While this sounds clever, it is misleading in more ways than one. Yes, it is true that ASL traces its roots back to a couple of Frenchmen, namely Laurent Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. They did indeed pioneer sign language education in America. They were indeed both influenced by French Sign Language (LSF).
However, in the context of General Semantics, French is similar to English, while ASL is similar to neither. The absence of stative verbs is one unique feature that distinguishes ASL from both French and English. Whether you’re French or American, learning ASL is like trying to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture. As soon as you get started, you realize some really important parts are missing.
But that analogy only works from the perspective of a language that uses more parts than necessary. Whereas Romance Languages rely on stative verbs, ASL relies on classifiers, which use visual and spatial cues to convey meaning.
4: ASL IS MORE SIMILAR TO RUSSIAN THAN TO ENGLISH OR FRENCH
Right about now, you should be asking: “What about other languages? Are any spoken languages more similar to ASL in its general semantics?”
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It turns out that there is. If your starting place is Russian, then there’s nothing new here. Like ASL, Russian does not rely on stative verbs. In fact, the absence of these verbs in both ASL and Russian is just one of the many similarities between the two languages. But if your starting place is English and French speakers, learning ASL can feel like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
5: WHY STATIVE VERBS ARE PROBLEMATIC
stative verbs are to fundamental that those of us who use them can scarcely understand what it even means to express an idea without them.
A language that doesn’t use stative verbs? How would that even work? Suppose you manage to use words to convey an idea without using stative verbs; would it even qualify as a language? Such is the depth of linguistic prescriptivism.
Enter Korzybski. In his book “Science and Sanity”, Korzybski demonstrates stative verbs reliably lead to misunderstanding. And the pitfalls are especially pronounced when applying them to abstract concepts or personal identity.
LABELING: If you’ve ever been accused of “name-calling” when in fact you used a descriptive adjective to indicate a particular behavior or attribute, then you’ve been the victim of this one. Pick any adjective you want (e.g. “lazy” or “hot” or “happy”) and then add a “She is” in front of it. Are you indicating an inherent and unchanging characteristic of the person? Or are you acknowledging a temporary or situational behavior? If your language depends on stative verbs, then you don’t get to choose.
REIFICATION: Languages that depend on stative verbs tend to have the problem of inadvertently attributing concrete characteristics to abstract ideas. We hurl around reifications like “love is blind” and “justice is served” and “life is a bitch” They’re fun and teeming with meanings, but as a category of memes, they basically function as currency to avoid critical thinking.
IDENTITY: If your language depends on stative verbs, then you have no way to distinguish statements about group identity from statements about personal traits. For example, “they are criminals” or “he’s a ginger” or “she’s an athlete.”
Ironically, American Deaf culture manages to over-complicate things even despite their linguistic advantage by blurring the line between capital-D-Deaf (as in the cultural identity) and lowercase-d-deaf (as in ears that don’t work). But that’s a different article.
6: A FEW EXAMPLES
Consider Descartes’ famous quote, “Cogito, ergo sum” in the context of the General Semantics structures of these languages.
Another example, the phrase, “I am deaf.”
Note that in the first example, both Russian and ASL replace the stative verb with a different verb (“exist”),
While in the second example, both Russian and ASL simply omit all verbs entirely.
7: CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE & LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTIVISM
Communicating ideas without stative verbs seems weird and alien to native English speakers. But languages that can’t function without superfluous stative verbs are actually weirder than languages that don’t need them. Seriously, why do we need to put a verb in front of ASL solves the problem by integrating nonverbal cues, classifiers, and physical exploitation of human spatial awareness to enhance understanding and expression.
8: THOUGHT EXPERIMENT
Try this little thought experiment sometime: over the course of a day or two, randomly select any given idea you encounter English, and try to write a sentence communicating it without using any stative verbs. You’ll find it is more challenging with some ideas than with others. Once you’ve found an example or two of an easy one and a harder one, use Google Translate to see how those ideas look expressed in other languages, first with the stative verbs, and then without them.
