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