Re: Sign Language?

On 1/15/03 9:36 PM, "Peter Clark" <peter-clark@...> wrote:

> 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.
<snip>

Alien Sidebar:  speaking of "alien" sign languages, Denis Moskowitz (doth
thou lurk?) has a language, Rikchik, described as follows:

"The rikchiks' language is covered on another page. Briefly, they use their
tentacles to communicate in a sign language. Their grammatical structure is
very versatile, and their vocabulary is logographic."

It can be found at:

www.cs.hmc.edu/~dmm/dmm.html

Most playful and interesting.

Diana