Darmok and the Developmental Pediatrician at Tenagra

[nightengalesknd]

Darmok and the Developmental Pediatrician at Tenagra

Comments

not the main point, but...

[q10]

My theory of how you learn Tamarian, as a Tamarian child, is that you actually bootstrap by learning the myth-references before you learn the myths.

That is, first you learn that ‘Shaka, when the walls fell’ means something about failure or frustration, without knowing anything about the legend of Shaka or what words like ‘when’, ‘wall’ and ‘fall’ actually mean.

Then, when you have acquired a big enough vocabulary of these things, which for you are unanalyzed units, you're in a position to have the legends of Shaka explained to you using these.

And then, once you've learned the legends, you can reconstruct what the individual words are about, which lets you make novel legendary references.

This is probably aided by the existence of localized ‘home legends’ that help to tie stuff to perceptible physical reality. So a household will have myth-vocabulary items like ‘Mr. Whiskers, when he got stuck in the crawlspace’ that will be anchored to events that the child my have observed and might remember.

Re: not the main point, but...

[nightengalesknd]

Yes, but none of this theory of language acquisition would make it impossible for Dathon, a fully-grown adult, to say to Picard in plain Tamaran, "There's a horrible beast on this planet!" or "I want to be friends!"

I mean, how do they discuss dinner? Do they list literary and historical references where people ate various things? "Harry Potter at Halloween" for pumpkin juice? "Dipped in tears at the Seder" for parsley?

Re: not the main point, but...

[glynhogen]

On the subject of fictional languages, have you read Embassytown? Or other Miéville. But Embassytown is particularly relevant in that it deals with language as colonization as well as an artifact of culture and neurology, and something that can be negotiated politically, socially, and physically.

[q10]

is there research literature on any of these acquisition paths you have observed in the autistic population?

[nightengalesknd]

Not much that I know of, although there may be more in your field than in mine, where most research is in "how do we get autistic people to act more normally?" rather than "how do autistic people do things?" I read a fascinating PhD dissertation online once about how autistic children growing up in signing homes with Deaf parents (whether Deaf or hearing themselves) orient handshapes and I think it was for linguistics.

But I haven't done any sort of literature search although I probably should. Stay tuned?

[nightengalesknd]

A brief googlescholar turns up a few things from the ling literature and a few articles from the 80s speech language pathology literature that I can't access.

This mom blogged about the phenomenon in her kid and quoted an SLP she heard speak on the topic. So there's some stuff out there beyond my ramblings. If we ever got out of the cause-cure-prevention rhetoric in my field, there'd probably be a lot more.

[mst3kforall]

Your non-exhaustive list elements all make total sense.

Would you ever be in a position where you might want to write a book about things like this that a lot of people (especially neurotypicals) may not have any idea of? You understand so much, and you empathize so much; and you can communicate wonderful things that everyone needs to know. I think you could change the world if people would read you (especially, but not limited to, parents of autistic people). I love learning from you (as I do Jillian, and other people whom I consider to be "teachers" by nature)

[nightengalesknd]

I've thought about it.

Until I had the final initials after my name, it wasn't going to happen.

Now. . .maybe someday?

[gallian]

The pragmatists guide

Yeah.

You do know we are running out of excuses not to start? (Besides that whole time and spoons thing...)

[nightengalesknd]

Well I only got the initials at the end of last June. So our excuses really started less than a year ago.

Also I need to e-mail you with a book rec.

[plasticsturgeon]

I think the problem is that people like that don't care about the complicated mental processes of autistics, they're just frustrated and want us to BEHAVE. DO WHAT I WANT YOU TO GODDAMMIT. I mean, look how autism usually gets described--in terms of "social deficits." Nothing about how it actually works or where it comes from, just a description of what annoys them.

[plasticsturgeon]

I suspect that if you were to explain the thought processes to them, they'd cut you off with some variation of, "That's nice, but it's annoying and unproductive so how do we get them to stop doing it?"

[plasticsturgeon]

C and I did something like that in a rpg once: we had some aliens that had taken human hostages but were refusing to negotiate with human scum, even to the point of making demands. One of our characters figured out that they would, however, communicate via Shakespeare quotes, since poetry and literature were a separate thing that came from the gods and all mortal beings were impure vessels for it, so they could all use it. And of course everyone reads Shakespeare. :)