by Alden Rose
With words being a sort of white noise to the images that surround us, studying a television show with no explicit verbal context was interesting. Television shows have become soaked in visual imagery that gives the viewer layers of information to sort through, often hard to separate from basic elements like character relationship or narrative. Pingu is a Swiss claymation television show that first aired in 1986 and came out with some new episodes in 2004 (but definitely not as good). The show is about a community of penguins that’s pretty much it, but they do not speak a recognizable language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGPhXrc78Jg&feature=relatedThey lack words in their communication, but what is retained? Levinson talks about deixis as “the ways in which language encodes or grammaticalizes features of the context of utterance or speech event, and thus also concerns ways in which the interpretation of utterances depends on the analysis of that context of utterance.” In other words, there are many different elements that contribute to the meaning of speech acts, context being one of the most important. He talks about the context specificity of pronouns, demonstratives and tense, but for Pingu where there aren’t any words, so we have to work with a partial deixis.
In this clip, Pingu and his friend start playing hopscotch. You actually see them playing the game, a cooperative event. Even without words their speech acts provide tone, inflection, and temper. You can see that they are successfully engaging in a conversation, even though the content remains unknown.
Next, an adult penguin rides in and interrupts their game, using a more aggressive and authoritative voice. As he cleans their game up, Pingu’s speech becomes rapid and agitated, implying annoyance and even defiance.
Many productions draw on preexisting social contexts to define a character’s roles, with a great deal based in a culture and language. The relationships between these anthropomorphized penguins emerge as we pick up visual and auditory clues, such as the adult yelling at Pingu. Like the hidden indexical components (Hanks 159) in Hanks’ Don Chabo exchange, all speech acts are extremely relational. Some viewers may find it offensive that Pingu has in a sense talked-back to the man (though we only know this because of his tone and gestural usage), while others may find it acceptable and even humorous.
The adult’s next few actions come off as odd, as he draws a red box ontop of their game, and puts up a sign with a “P” on it (parking maybe) and a sign with a penguin and a ball with an X on it. He has just designated this as his parking spot, but the viewer only comes to this conclusion after his actions are completed. Without words, other aspects of linguistic communication are amplified
It is interesting that someone has put captions in Swedish for the show. The Swedish captions, though not understood by us, give more verbal encoding than is originally implied by the show’s ambiguous language. Youtube had been a goldmine of redefining the meaning of speech acts in another language by using captions. Such as .
This type of open-language is also used in many role-playing computer games, such as The Sims.
These types of undefined languages can draw from all aspects of language; specific accents or a certain cultural vocal pattern can be used. But without words, these languages really do become universal, allowing you to interpret deixis personally. As Pearson (the woman interviewed in the previous clip) finds, “I can make up whatever I want about it.”
Pingu and The Sims draw an international audience, aided by their peculiar languages, but appeal to the creativity provided by this open indexicality. The viewer is given much less information, so the majority of the context is left for them to decide. “It is the minute details of linguistic structure that coordinate this awareness and make it known with a delicacy unparalleled by any other mode of expression.” (Hanks 165) You can pick up on the relational meaning of these indexicals because of structure of language and how much our interpretation relies on the referential content provided outside of word meaning and usage.
As the above comments have stated, there need not be recognizable morphemes in order for speech to have indexical intelligibility. While we have a gist of what the Sims or Pingu are saying, it is not because the syllables they pronounce have a recognizable meaning, but because the manner in which they say them is. I could not provide a word-for-word translation of what the tiny Swedish penguin is saying, but since its voice rises and intensifies while its posture grows more rigid and it makes angry-eyebrows at the adult penguin that has intruded on its game, there is little doubt as to what (or at least the nature of what) is being communicated. We know the physical actions and spoken tone correspond with the speech act (Why would you yell and make an angry face at someone if you weren’t angry at them? As Jesse mentioned, facial expressions are widely universal) and the situation, and by such indexical means one may infer what the actual “language” might be communicating.
I am reminded of the children’s show “The WotWots,” in which a pair of fuzzy toddler aliens converse with one another using only the sounds: “wot” and “wotty.” Yet despite their “limited” vocabulary, a remarkable range of feelings and intents are communicated, such that their two-word nonsense language is able to communicate a variety of intents and moods to younger and older viewers, probably because the aliens use a variety of exaggerated tonal changes and gestures to facilitate communication. Granted, as with Pingu, we cannot derive a literal meaning from their statements, but the notion is easily communicated by the presupposed indexical nature of gesture and words. If anything, this is a testament to the true arbitrariness of language, as even nonsense languages constrained to two utterances can still communicate broad ideas.
I think that one of the things these fictional languages illustrate is that language features, not even just accent but also phonetic structure, can be indexicals.
I was watching the Simlish video and at different points thought it sounded like English, Spanish, and Japanese (though I don’t have the experience with Japanese to back that up). Wikipedia tells me that Simlish is based on the sounds of Ukrainian, French, Latin, Finnish, English, Fijian and Tagalog. It was designed, I imagine, to sound as though it could be any language and that’s why I kept changing my mind. But the fact that I could identify Simlish with real languages seems to me to say that the phonology of a language serves as an indexical that tells the listener what language it is- even when they can’t understand the words.
An example of this phenomenon might be the Swedish Chef, who speaks faux-Swedish with some English thrown in. The Chef’s tendency to speak from the lower-back of his mouth and to elongate “oo” sounds might be two of the reasons we so readily identify his gibberish with Swedish as opposed to French or Hindi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY_Yf4zz-yo&NR=1
I agree with Luke that languages like Pingu and Simlish could be considered universal languages. We are required to rely on context and indexical clues to comprehend the conversations. I am not one-hundred percent sure about whether or not the gestures themselves are universal (or if they are Western), but the concept of using context to understand a made-up language is probably universal. Furthermore, it is likely that the gestures are universal. A social psychology study by Paul Ekman showed that facial expressions are universal. They showed pictures of happy, sad, disgusted, angry, scared, and surprised faces to individuals of multiple cultures and asked them to identify the expressed emotions based on the facial expressions only. Ekman found that the facial expressions were universal, so it is likely that gestures are universal as well. Thus, it is likely that the same context and indexical cues could be used around the world to interpret invented languages or foreign languages.
With their lack of words, I think Pingu and Simlish are a more universal sort of communication. But can they be truly counted as languages? And are they truly universal, or are their gestures rooted in Western social norms and expectations?