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July 24, 2024 - artificial language communication honk linguistics meaning pragmatics priorities psycholinguistics semantics semiotics skilled reflection theory values
I like to think of honking as a language with only one word: hey. “hey” can accomplish a lot, because driving is a system of behaviors with many rules and conventions. By understanding what is “normal” and “appropriate” when driving, a honk invites a driver to check for discrepancies.
Some typical meanings:
“Hey, check your car.”
“Hey, check the road (or lane).”
“Hey, check other cars.”
Even though a honk is quite useful, the “word” has very little meaning on its own. Try reading an essay of only beep beep beeps. By paying close attention to the relationship between what is communicated and the context or purpose of communication, we can learn a lot about the communicators.
Suppose we had two different kinds of honks. You could argue this is the case with long versus short honks.[^] What can you accomplish with a second word, or eight more, and so on? As vocabulary size increases, the words move beyond “Hey.” Perhaps we use one as a friendly “hi”, and another only for “danger”. I think it would be good to distinguish between “my car” “your car” and “up the road”. “danger”+”up the road” might encourage a driver to notice construction or flash-flooding ahead, whereas “danger” “your car” might suggest a smoking tire or a blinker that’s been on for 10 minutes. With more bits, we increase the ability to get meaning out of context, too.
But any language, even one with tens of thousands of words, maximizes the effect of its meanings by relying on assumptions about the context. To understand honks is to understand vehicles, roads, and driving. This is no different for any other language. The past few years I’ve been interested in trying to define the aspects of context that are universally relevant for human languages, and develop a system of honks for it.
At first I thought I was pursuing a logical kind of language. What are the fundamentally most important truths about the world? But I realized that the language can accomplish a lot more by speaking directly to what humans care most about communicating, which is strongly influenced by interpersonal information. Honks are also used to express affiliation and feelings: “Hey, I know you!” or “Hey, you’re making me mad!”
While my minimal languages are still very much a work in progress, the process has constantly taught me something deep about what we take for granted, and what we implicitly strive for when we say words. Check out the game What words would you replace? I’d love to see what meanings you think are essential.