Re: Sign Language?

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.  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.

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.

**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).  Maybe it's just that ASL is more adaptive to various
circumstances; I don't know if you can consider Pidgin SL as an offshoot of
ASL or not.

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."

Sarah Marie Parker-Allen
lloannna@surfside.net
http://lloannna.blogspot.com
http://www.geocities.com/lloannna.geo

"There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even
though the end may be dark."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien

> -----Original Message-----
> Behalf Of Amanda Babcock
> I'm curious as to what you mean by "somewhat independent" and "ASL tries
> to be"... ASL, having developed naturally as the native speech of the deaf
> children in the deaf schools, doesn't *try* to be anything.  By "somewhat
> independent" do you mean, for example, "uses initials from the English
> alphabet to make up new words"?  Or do you mean something stronger?
>
> In my experience, the entire structure and grammar of ASL is utterly alien
> to English, and the whole thing is not easily translatable at all.  (Now,
> this may just be sour grapes since I inexplicably was not able to learn it
> when I tried - the little language computer in my brain apparently never
> caught on to the fact that it was supposed to be hooked into this strange
> pantomime I was learning...)
>
> Amanda
---
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