the linguistics book i'm reading is from like 20 years ago or so, and every once in a while it has a spoken language take that i look at and go "yeah we actually know now that this is not exactly that way" 🙃
the last 20 years had a bunch of research about various types of iconicity in spoken language. but even without knowing that! i speak*/hear languages! i can tell i/others do things that linguists used to say don't ever happen!
1900s generativists just... ignored a lot of stuff,, kinda, and that legacy stuck
so the books all like "signed languages do this thing! and no spoken language does anything like it!" meanwhile i can think of 3 example sentences in hebrew that do the exact thing...
israeli sign language: you can sign climbing a tree by one hand signing "tree", a sign that conveniently kinda looks like a tree, and having the other hand go up next to/on top of the other. when the story tells about coming back down, the hand that climbed up now goes back down
hebrew: if i'm telling a story about climbing a tree, i will increase my pitch to signify going up. when the story tells about coming back down, i'll decrease my pitch to signify going down
heck, the hebrew verb for "to roll" is most likely a gosh dang onomatopoeia!! like,,,, dude!! iconicity in language is all over the place and all around us and it's friggin awesome!!!
ok i think i'm done spamming the public timelines with my probably-lukewarm-by-now takes on languages and the field of linguistics for now 😇