Re: CHAT: My new treasure

En réponse à Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:

>
> I have a friend from Belgium whose mother is divorced and deaf.
> Somewhere she met an American deaf man, and they got married; and it
> seems that French Sign Language and American Sign Language are (still?
> i
> seem to remember reading that ASL was based on or influenced by FSL, i
> don't remember whatever it was mentioning the existence of more than
> one
> FSL) mutually intelligible, because if i remember correctly she speaks
> FSL and he speaks ASL and they understand each other; which is good
> because i'm pretty sure that she doesn't speak English and he doesn't
> speak French or Dutch.  My friend would always participate in programs
> for the deaf community when we were in highschool.
>
This story doesn't surprise me at all. In an interview, Emmanuelle Laborit (our
famous deaf actress) was saying that she once met a deaf Japanese person. She
knew nothing of Japanese SL, and he knew nothing of French SL. Yet after a few
minutes of adaptation, they could talk together as if they signed the same
language. She explained then that the way people view space and facial
expression is pretty universal, and thus shared by all sign languages. So even
if the hand shapes may be different (especially for abstract concepts), the
movements and facial expressions tend to be identical, and thus help very much
to understand the other one. Of course, it has limits, but still a French deaf
person and a Japanese one can manage to communicate, while a monolingual French-
speaking person would never understand anything from a monolingual Japanese-
speaking person, unless they resort to some signs! :)))

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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