The thing about deafness is that the deaf are linguistically isolated. Some deaf people can learn to communicate via voice, but most can’t. That’s pretty much the definition of deafness–not the amount of hearing loss you have, but whether you’re able to generate and understand spoken language. If you have a lot of trouble doing that, you’re deaf. If you can get by, you’re hard of hearing, or some such.
My nephew can read and write English just fine, and can lipread sort of OK, but he can’t really generate spoken words that you can understand. Does the fact that he can’t speak English make him a different ethnicity than me?
The case of English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish is pretty comparable. These are different ethnicities. You can be a Scot who speaks English and lives in Ireland and has Canadian nationality. Nationality, language, religion and so on sometimes conform to ethnic lines, but often doen’t.
I did not distinguish between sign language and spoken language, or for that matter between braille and print. A language need not be restricted to oral communication.
I think the point is that American Sign Language (ASL) is not just English-with-signs, but a distinct language with its own grammar, vocabulary, and idioms. Deaf people are usually bilingual to the extent that the communicate in person via ASL and in writing via English, but they are not even close to different forms of the same language.
I will have to see a transliteration of an ASL sample to be convinced it is unrecognizable as English, and even if it is, ability to use standard written English ought reasonably to be considered compliant with my definition.
Also, people with disabilities may be expected to constitute numerous exceptions to numerous generalities, and so do not contradict those generalities.
In other words, you don’t believe us (or Wikipedia). This site should help, especially when you remember that the signs aren’t actually English words—they could just as easily be rendered in French or Farsi.
ASL is their primary language. That they also speak English isn’t necessarily relevant to ethnicity. Most nations have minorities who must learn the national language as well as their ethnic language.
In other words you did not provide a citation until now, and the citation you now provide does not support your argument.
So what? The alphabet does not actually consist of English letters, and may just as easily be rendered in French and many other languages.
Furthermore, your cite provides the following example transliteration: “MY CAR, I WASH WEEK-PAST” whose vocabulary is 100% standard English, and whose meaning is clear enough to identify it as a form of English, just as I thought.
I earlier placed the most weight on the language spoken at home. I realize that is not a universal defining criterion, and that it is not the only defining criterion, and I said so to begin with. I do think it has application in some big cases, such as French/English divide in Canada, in the Latin-American/English divide in the US, and the Russian/Ukrainian divide in Ukraine.
Given this, plus his well-known penchant for inflating his own biography, I wonder if he ever identified as Moldovan as well. For a couple years early in his career he was the leader of the Moldavian SSR. Under the policies of razmezhevanie and korenizatsiya, the territories of the Soviet Union were politically divided and named according to their predominant ethnic group, and the government and administration of each political subdivision was supposed to be staffed primarily by members of its titular ethnic group. Adherence to these policies varied over the decades, though even in periods of more overt russification it may have been convienient for Moscow to maintain the pretence that the Moldavian SSR was still governed by and for the ethnic Moldovans.
Anyone happen to have a copy of the 2nd edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia? This was published in the 1950s so the entry for Brezhnev might shed some light on how his ethnicity was officially reported at the time.
Which of the words in the original ASL were English words?
The document cited does not provide a transliteration. It provides a gloss—i.e., a word-for-word (or morpheme-for-morpheme, if you want to be precise) translation—in exactly the same way that Acsenray did for a French sentence. The fact that both glosses use “100% standard English” vocabulary is hardly surprising, since that’s what a gloss is. You will note, however, that in both cases the grammar is not standard modern English. The fact that both the vocabulary and word order of the originals is markedly different from English is very good evidence that both ASL and French are indeed separate languages from English.
Yes, and none of the “words” (if you can call them words) in ASL are English words. ASL is a communication tool that is not based on English words. Signs can be given English equivalents, just like French words can, but that’s a different matter.
Thank you for the information. It is still not clear to me why ASL should be considered more than a system of graphemes-- the sign PAH! does not register in the minds of ASL speakers as “P-A-H-!” but as the English expression “aha” doesn’t it? Or do the speakers go through some kind of process like seeing the word “voila” and saying to themselves: oh, that is the French equivalent of “aha!”
And even if ASL is a separate language recall in post #49 I listed (1) spoken language, (2) written language and (3) self-identification as being part of the concept of ethnicity, and by spoken I meant oral. When deaf people learn to communicate orally they do not do so in an oral form of SL, but in the language of the ethnic group they belong to. And even if they never learn to communicate orally, possessing the other two attributes ought to provide grounds for inclusion in one ethnic group or another. Perhaps one way of viewing it would be that one or more language criteria are necessary but not sufficient for establishing ethnic identity.
And recall what I wrote in post #64:Also, people with disabilities may be expected to constitute numerous exceptions to numerous generalities, and so do not contradict those generalities.
Now, I am tired of going back and forth about whether my provisional criteria compel me to consider deaf people who use sign language as ethnically separate. I am satisfied they do not and may not have anything else to say about it.
On an unrelated note, if a deaf American meets a deaf Frenchman, would they be able to effectively communicate only by sign language? Would they even recognize they come from different countries? I guess it depends on whether the French also use the so-called ASL. Which brings another question of just how universal the sign language is. Do, say, the Chinese use the same sign language than us Americans or do they have a different system?
I think the sign PAH! does register in the mind of an English speaker as “aha” and in the mind of a French speaker as “voila”. As such, the sign PAH! can be understood as a word in a different language than both English or French. Thus, ASL can be understood as a separate language.
Sign language is not universal. ASL is completely different from the sign languages used in other countries. I always thought this was sort of a missed opportunity, it would be very cool and advantageous to have a universal sign language used by the deaf world-wide.
The highlighted phrase should be: sufficient but not necessary thus allowing the Irish to be considered ethnically distinct from the English without forcing them to be an exception to a rule.
As far as OP is concerned I would still like to hear from a resident of Ukraine.
I’m not sure I follow you. How is ASL a missed opportunity at a universal sign language any more than English is a missed opportunity at a universal spoken language?
Probably because nobody learns sign language as a first language (or does?). Even though you cannot speak or hear your native spoken language, you still need to read it so you still need to learn it. Because of that, sign language has a potential to act as a lingua franca for all deaf people everywhere. Kind of like how traffic signs work as a “lingua franca” for all drivers everywhere, even though they are not completely universal, but still universal enough.