First learn sign language. Then try to sign one sentence whilst speaking a different one. It might help if you do it in different languages. This seems like a lot of work, but it'd make a good party trick even if you're not schizophrenic. (warning, might actually cause spilt-personality disorder).
How much do the world's 200 sign languages have in common? There should be universal things like 'eat' or 'me.' An interdisciplinary linguistic-anthropological thesis could study the divergence of cultural norms through the comparative visual-spatial manifestation of different signs. Of course, most people don't know shit about sign language so you could probably bullshit the whole thesis. A safer route would be to start the Disinformation Publishing Company and just print up a bunch of lies that sound believable. In honor of Vonnegut's "harmless untruths", the world deserves an Antiscience Fiction genre. Hey, it works for both the religious and self-help genres.
"American Sign Language shares many vocabulary terms with Old French Sign Language (LSF) because a French Deaf man, Laurent Clerc, was one of the first teachers of the Deaf in the U.S. in the nineteenth century. So if you know ASL, you're better off taking a vacation in France than in England!"
"ASL shares no grammatical similarities to English and should not be considered in any way to be a broken, mimed, or gestural form of English. In terms of syntax, for example, ASL has a topic-comment syntax, while english uses Subject-Object-Verb. In fact, in terms of syntax, ASL shares more with spoken Japanese than it does with English."
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
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The meme "schizophrenia" led me to find your page. I have schizophrenia. Was looking for schizophrenia the word in different languages, and became interested in the words meme, schizophrenia, and treatment. Your post is kind of interesting\funny, but I wonder if you meant the sentence-doubling was a good thing for schizophrenics to do. It might actually be. training in encounterable territory, perhaps. it could lead things to worse ground if it was a compulsive disorderly behaviour, but as a technique for offsetting the already schizophrenic, thinking mind in a self-created way it could provide practice in experiencing weird streams of perception and meaning. I learned to do it by reading ordinary sentences with completely different meaning than intended. I'd see and manipulate the ordinary sense of the words into metaphoric poetry. Warning tags for appliances and products were a favorite. :)
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