Abstract
Yerkish is a visual language designed for exploring the extent to which great apes could be taught to acquire linguistic skills. This instrumental aspect of Yerkish as part of an experimental communication study had a strong influence on its design and must be kept in mind all times. For this reason, the first part of this paper briefly outlines the context in which the Yerkish language originated: the LANA research project (1970–1976). In the second part, the language itself is presented in more detail: first the main distinction between an ordinary and a “correlational” grammar like that of Yerkish, then its lexicon composed of graphic word symbols, so-called “lexigrams” and finally its grammar with examples of Yerkish sentences. We propose that the LANA project was successful because Yerkish grammar is fundamentally different from ordinary grammars; for this reason, the third part gives a brief introduction to the foundation of Yerkish in Silvio Ceccato’s Operational Methodology, particularly his idea of the correlational structure of thought from which the term “correlational” was derived for distinguishing the grammar of Yerkish from other ordinary grammars.
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Appendix
Appendix
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Table 1. Operational Lexigram Classes
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Table 2. Semantic Color-Coding of Lexigrams
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Table 3. Operational Correlators connecting lexigram classes and sub-classes
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Table 4. Yerkish conversation with Lana recorded on May 6th, 1974
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Bettoni, M.C. (2021). YERKISH. In: Soares, M.M., Rosenzweig, E., Marcus, A. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability: UX Research and Design. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12779. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78221-4_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78221-4_24
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