Illiterate hammers

Every now and then--predictable in hindsight yet seemingly always a surprise--the limitations of a particular technology that we take for granted utterly fails to fulfill its purpose. Case in point: the telephone, among the most quotidian and useful of electronic devices. The telephone allows us to communicate over any terrestrial distance by whisking a voice first this way, then that. We use it every day and fully expect it to project our intent like a hammer. Sometimes nails are bent through imperfect application of that force (or uncooperative wood), but in the end an understanding can usually be worked out and something is held to something else which it wasn't previously.

But what if a nail absolutely didn't speak "hammer"? What if you picked up the phone, dropped it deftly on the nail above soft wood, and it remained utterly unfazed? What would you do if all the nails available for the task at hand were fully incompatible with your hammer? You quickly realize that your hammer isn't up to the task of nailing, and what's more, even if the nail tries to explain itself your hammer remains unenlightened and useless, heavy in your hand.

But that's if you're trying to hammer a nail over the phone. In person, body language and other tricks can be used to coerce just about any nail you can find. Audio has its limitations, and one of them is just there. In person, we have available quite a number of communications protocols if the first one fails. With voice, we're stuck with just one port.

Which makes me wonder just how small a bare minimum universal communications protocol for humans might be. Not a full-fledged Esperanto; really minimal. 100 nouns, plus proper names as appropriate? 20 verbs? 50 modifiers (colors, qualifiers, adjectives)? With that I could say, "Where is X?", "Do you own a car?", "That is my book," and so on. No real grammar would be necessary.

I don't know of any such thing that exists. I wonder if it even could exist, being so small and unattached to a culture or population. If people taught it to their children, the kids might start to replace the words from their own language, at least at times, and a lot of people wouldn't like that. But if people didn't use it at least very occasionally, it would be forgotten and useless.