WAG: Maybe the American missionary didn’t KNOW ASL?
Whack and handy, it may help you to understand all this if you examine the notion that words are somehow naturally abstract and signs are naturally concrete. They aren’t.
Hands can only hint at or approximate even the signs for things they directly imitate. If you get beyond basic nouns, they can’t even do that… so the vast majority of signed language is abstract. A philisophical concept is no farther removed from a hand gesture than is, say, the concept of “Shetland Sheepdog”. And unless you’re Tom Keith of A Prairie Home Companion, it’s the same in spoken language.
The Ethnologue report mentioned that the CSL was developed since the 1950s, some 60+ years after C. R. Mills founded his school. The Ethnologue also alludes to some home Sign languages, thus indicating that there are, in fact, more than one Sign language still extant in China. It does not mention what particular Sign language, whether native to China or not, that Mills used in his school.
This link gives a number of works with the key phrase “Chinese Sign Language.” I think the first, third, and nineteenth works listed would be quite interesting, especially the nineteenth.
Here’s an interesting link about some Chinese students at Gallaudet University. Reading the bios there, you will notice that there’s a sea change in the PRC’s attitude towards the Deaf.
Checking the Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts for works including the phrase “Chinese Sign Language,” I get:
[ol][li]The Weight of Tradition in the Formation of the Name Signs of the Deaf in China; Shun-chiu, Yau; Diogenes, 1996, 44, 175, autumn, 55-65.[/li][li]Chinese Sign Language; Yau, Shun-chiu; Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orentale, 1991, 20, 1, summer, 138-142[/li][li]Language Training of the Deaf in the People’s Republic of China; Fromkin, Victoria A; The Liguistic Reporter, 1975, 18, 1, Sep, 3[/ol][/li]So, it’s quite evident that the following are all true regarding Sign Language in China:
[ul][li]There is more than one Sign language used.[/li][li]The dominant language, Chinese Sign Language, has more than one dialect, of which the Shanghai dialect has prestige status.[/li][li]Mills founded his school for the Deaf quite some time before the PRC government got involved in educating the Deaf.[/li][li]The PRC government is changing its attitude towards the Deaf insofar as education is concerned.[/ul][/li]I spent quite some time trying to discover which particular Sign language Mills used for his school; however, I could not get any answer. Heck, I gave up after page 30 or so of the google search! I’d like to know which school he founded, if it still exists, which language he had as the standard Sign language there, and of course if that particular language was (a) one of the home Sign languages of any of the students, (b) one of his own devising, or © a Pidgin Sign language developed by the students themselves.
One of my classmates is on vacation in China & I’ll ask her to look for a text book on CSL. As soon as I know, I’ll update this thread with the major grammatical features of CSL.