Re: Non-spoken colangs?

>Have you heard of Nicararguan(sp?) Sign Language? I understand it was
>spontaneously created by deaf children in a school there (unlike, say,
>Auslan, which has its roots in British Sign Language). I saw an interesting
>PDF on the web about it some time ago; you might want to google.
Thanks you. No, I'd not heard of this. It's not quite the scenerio I meant,
as the kids are surrounded by hearing individuals, but it is nevertheless
very interesting to me.

Google yielded several sites, amongst them
http://www.signwriting.org/nicaragua/nicaragua.html
and
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/nuggets/028/nugget.htm

At this moment, I've not the time to read these sites at depth, but two
comments:
1. I find it interesting that they seem (key word "seem") to be making good
use of signwriting, which though repeated attempts has not (to my knowledge,
really caught on in the USA, the result being that the deaf in the USA write
a form of English but sign using a totally different grammar.
2. For good or ill, local prejudice in Nicaragua seems to have created a
rare "lab" in which sign language is developing (though not spontaneously,
as the kids creating it were being taught a type of SL beforehand).


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