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What gibberish means for language

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https://aeon.co/essays/what-the-trolly-l...r-language

EXCERPTS: . . . Gibberish - language that cannot be understood - is not quite the same as nonsense. In nonsense writing, we read individual words but can’t parse them into any meaning that makes sense according to conventional expectations. ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously,’ as Noam Chomsky put it in "Syntactic Structures" (1957), in an example of a semantically meaningless sentence with syntax present and correct. Gibberish, on the other hand, makes indecipherable words out of the sounds and letters of language.

[...] The term ‘gibberish’ is mostly imposed unfairly on others, a quick-and-easy way to express prejudice and to downplay the language of others as mere noise. Gibberish is, however, sometimes created voluntarily for benign purposes and this too has a long history. Some Old English medical charms, preserved in a manuscript written around the year 1000 CE, have passages of gibberish mixed up with words from Old Irish, Latin, Greek or Hebrew. These unintelligible words have defied attempts to untangle their meaning or etymology, and so the scholarly consensus is that they form a placebo, like the magic words that accompany a spell. Just as a fancy Latinate or Greekish-sounding name on a modern packet of pills might make us feel more confident of a cure, so these sounds and syllables that refuse to match up to anything recognisable in Old English or any other language might have persuaded those who heard them that this charm was sure to work.

Gibberish syllables are also used to build invented or fictional languages. Many of these ‘conlangs’ (a portmanteau word smushing together ‘constructed’ and ‘language’) are carefully developed as artificial languages, but some invented tongues never gain all their working parts and thus remain essentially gibberish. Paired with a translation, they might seem to be a language but, without their glosses propping them up, they only ever pretend to have meaning. The 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen, composer, philosopher and mystic, devised a lingua ignota, an ‘unknown language’ [...] Likewise, on its own, the imaginary language of Sir Thomas More’s "Utopia" (1516) is nothing but symbols. [...] Such an invented tongue is a kind of anti-English, using letter combinations and phonology that appear only rarely in English or the other languages that More’s readers would know.

[...] The language of "Utopia" is an esoteric gibberish, but there are more everyday examples of unintelligible language. Once we have acquired our language as children, you would think that babbling and gibbering would cease, but there are weak points where gibberish can easily break through. Singing seems to teeter on the edge of gibberish, enticing us to switch from words to noises. When we forget the lyrics of a song, we hum and la and ooo and di-dah. Or, if there are no words, the human voice might join in as an instrument: tee-tum, taa-raa.

[...] Linguists call these fragments of sung gibberish ‘non-lexical vocables’, sounds we can vocalise but that aren’t words in any usual sense. You might think of the scat-singing of jazz, or music such as doo-wop or bebop in which the vocables themselves provide the style’s name. In jazz, the human voice competes with other instruments in improvised sections, and it is much easier to improvise in gibberish than with real lyrics. Similarly, swaying and singing to lull a fractious baby to sleep when you are so tired you can hardly think straight creates the perfect conditions for gibberish to emerge. Words aren’t important to a pre-verbal infant: what has mattered since time immemorial is voice-made music. Medieval lullaby carols in the voice of the Virgin Mary comforting the Christ child preserve some of the earliest of these sung non-lexical vocables in English in their choruses: lulley, lollay, lay.

[...] While Mary’s lulling vocables are revered and celebrated, other medieval texts disapprove of the wordless vocables found in the choruses of carols and folk songs. ... Not every early English writer is quite so dogmatic about peasants singing the joyful gibberish of non-lexical vocables. ... Three decades later, Protestant reformers disapproved of Catholic mystery plays, and they also frowned on the happy singing of gibberish in folk songs.

In the following centuries, English gibberish grows relatively dormant. Other related phenomena emerge: there are fashions for nonsense verse, and invented languages - whether angelic, fraudulent, fictional or alien - appear from time to time. Perhaps the age of reason and science finds unintelligible pseudolanguage embarrassing. Gibberish bursts back into view in the early 20th century. Written first by German and Italian futurist and Dadaist poets, and a little later by British and American avant-gardists, sound poetry is written in gibberish spellings representing not words but pure sound. Modernism embraces gibberish as part of its desire to refuse tradition and make all new, but risks ridicule in the process.

[...] Gibberish always seems to exist in this uncertain state: is it trivial or valuable, is it a symbol of immorality or a kind of pure, natural, musical expression, perhaps even divine? The most paradoxical of gibberish’s qualities is the key part it plays in how we learn ... to language acquisition because it prompts carers to stage mock conversations with babies infant vocalization, baby babbling]. Babies chatter gibberish to us, and we talk back to them as if they had said something utterly astounding. Also needed for language development is ‘contingent imitation’, those interactions where caregivers copy the babble of babies and infants who burble at them. Recent research from Japan shows that contingent imitation is particularly valuable for increasing the social engagement of young children with autism. If we harness humanity’s natural talent for gibberish, our children will be more fluent speakers of intelligible language, a truth long understood.

[...] To create gibberish is both to flee from the familiar features of our mother tongue and yet also to draw on our deepest understandings of what language is and how it works. Gibberish plays a vital role too in giving us our own language as babies and infants. ... Gibberish is perhaps the bumpiest of human communications, yet through it we discover much about language, its possibilities and its boundaries... (MORE - details)
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