Re: Sign Language?

On Wednesday 15 January 2003 06:53 pm, Sarah Marie Parker-Allen wrote:
> Well, what I meant was, almost every one of the major words/concepts in
> English connects directly with a specific sign.  There are a lot of extra
> signs that don't seem to have English translations (at least not easy
> ones), but ASL is hardly as alien to me as, say, Chinese.
        Well, "alien" is a very relative term. There are some members of this list
who would find ASL much more alien than Chinese, considering that it is their
first or second language. :) You stated that your family has some signers, so
of course the concepts are not unfamiliar.
        If you crack open a Chinese dictionary and get past the hanzi, you'll find
that "almost every one of the major words/concepts" in Chinese corresponds to
an English equivalent. Naturally, there are different semantic ranges
(doesn't that make life fun?), but we're all human.

  Especially given
> that you can make grammatically correct English statements by adding a few
> extra details (signs for structural words like "the") to ASL, getting
> Signed Exact English, I can't really say that ASL is fully independent from
> English.
        "Independent" is a rather nebulous term. ASL is no less independent from
English then say Spanish spoken in the Southwest. English is simply so big
and a part of everyday life that it is bound to influence other languages
that share its environment.
        BTW, would someone more in touch with the Deaf community tell me what is the
status of Exact Signed English in the eyes of ASL signers. My impression is
that it is looked down upon, but then again, I'm not a part of the Deaf
community.

> Someone told me once that there are other SLs out there, designed by
> speakers of other languages (effectively a "Russian Sign Language" or
> "African Sign Language" or "Soviet Sign Language" -- not necessarily
> connected to a particular language, but clearly not connected to American
> culture, the English language, OR the US).  I don't know if that's true or
> not, though I do know that there are fingerspelling signs for Russian
> characters.
        The Ethnologue lists 114 signed languages; the only other one that I am
remotely familiar with is Russian sign language, which has its roots in
Austrian and French sign languages. (ASL, btw, is also rooted in French sign
language; British sign language is, from what I've heard, significantly
different.) And yes, there is finger spelling for Russian sign language.

> **NOTE** I do know there are a lot of differences between ASL and English
> on a practical level -- the grammar is different, the structure is
> different, etc. -- that's one reason why parents of deaf children have such
> pains learning it, and why some deaf children have trouble with English
> language acquisition in school.  HOWEVER, it doesn't seem to be as fully
> different from English as even a Romance or Germanic language is, and you
> don't need nearly as much grammar to begin expressing some pretty advanced
> concepts (as compared with what you need to know to express yourself in,
> say, Slovenian or Finnish).
        I'm puzzled as to why you say this. The "vocabulary" is completely
different--signs, rather than sounds. The grammar is more like Japanese than
English (note that I'm not saying that ASL is a dead ringer for Japanese,
it's just the topic-focus and SOV nature of ASL that reminds me of Japanese)
and the only thing that makes it easy is the more intuitive grammar (since
gestures and facial expressions are easier to decode than random sounds) and
the large number of "onomatopoeic" (is there a better term than this?) signs
in its vocabulary.

> I should probably point out that, unlike with Cued Speech, all of my
> experience comes from Introduction to Sign Language in school, which was
> only 10 weeks long.  Every deaf person I know personally, is neither a
> member of the Deaf community, nor chooses to use ASL in any portion of
> their life.  In my SL class, we were learning Signed Exact English, which
> was odd to me, as I'd never considered the idea that a sign language would
> need "the."
        I think that you are associating ASL too closely with Signed English. I've
never studied Signed English, and from my limited contact with the Deaf
community, I get the impression that if I tried signing English grammar to an
ASL signer, they would be very puzzled as to why I am wasting so much time
with such unnecessary signs, assuming they understood them at all.
        'Course, right now my signing abilities have all grown hopelessly dusty, and
I doubt I would be able to do anything more than fingerspell! :)
        :Peter

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