Re: CHAT: My new treasure
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 22, 2002, 10:48 |
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En réponse à Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...>:
>
> I don't have my British Sign Language stuff with me here in Taiwan or
> I'd
> scoure it for BSL influences. One thing that surprise me is that HKSL
> has a
> finger alphabet (TSL doesn't). That in itself wasn't really shocking,
> just
> a bit of a surprise, but it did shock me to see that the HKSL finger
> alphabet is NOT the BSL alphabet which is two-handed. THey use the
> AMERICAN
> alphabet! Exacly, letter-for-letter, the same. Does anyone know if
> the
> American fnger alphabet was borrowed from one of the French sign
> languages?
Well, IIRC French SL alphabet is single-handed (at least that's how it's
represented in the drawings explaining how to use it). Seeing in the program
they have on Dutch TV to learn sign language, they use the same one. It could
be that Britain, as usual, wanted to do differently than France, and invented
their own SL alphabet :)) (and made it two-handed to make sure that it will
never be like the French one :)) ).
> (For that matter how much does Parisian SL differ from Lyon SL?)
Much less even than Parisian French and Lyon French. France is centralised when
it comes to spoken language, but is even worse with sign language. All sign
language school teach the same SL, since most of SL teachers come from the same
school, which doesn't help to grow diversity :)) . Also, the fact that the
number of sign language teachers is quite low (sign language has never been
very much in favor in France. Many doctors, when discovering a child is deaf,
still advise the parents never to have their children taught sign language,
telling them that it will prevent them from learning anything about spoken
language... and making in this way the life of those children awful, preventing
them to have a normal social life) obliges people from many places in France to
move to Paris to learn sign language, so basically FSL is quite monolithed.
Christophe.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.