It’s not a transliteration, actually, but a translation. A transliteration is a rendering of a sound into the phonetic system of a given language (when the sound is from a spoken language, into the system of a different one), for example:
a transliteréishon isaréndrin ofasáun ina de fonéric sisam ofa guivan languéich. (That’s a transliteration of part of the above text into Spanish).
Signs aren’t formed by letters, any more than Chinese characters are. They have constituent elements, but those aren’t letters or phonemes, they’re gestual elements such as finger position, arm position, head position, movements, speed…
Since Signed language has by definition no sound, it is not possible to transliterate it. It is possible to translate each word in it literally, but that’s not a transliteration and yeah, it uses the words of the language it’s being translated into… just like any other translation.
My God… yes, many people learn sign language as a first language. Signers who can write are always bilingual: they speak one language and read/write in another. But how do you think a deaf-from-birth child learns an oral language first and sign second? Even without getting into the history of signed languages or digging old threads where deaf-from-birth posters speak of their experience, do you think it would be easier to move from “point at stuff so Mommy will get it for me” to “having specific signs for specific items I want Mommy to get”, or from “point” to “read and write” to “sign”?
And there are many signed languages, there isn’t only one. British, French, Catalan, Spanish-from-Spain, Guatemalan, American… turns out that if you take a group of deaf-from-birth people and place them into a newly-built School for the Deaf, within days you get a new signed language as they start trading “home signs” faster than the teachers can teach them whatever language they’d chosen to teach (I read an article in a peer-reviewed translation journal about how Guatemalan sign came to be in this way; we have similar testimony from American signers in old threads).
It’s probably not a “native language” if you don’t learn it first and use it preferentially.
Traffic signs are not universal—there are competing international standards. And they’re invariably adapted and supplemented with all sorts of local deviations which can be incomprehensible to foreign drivers. What they all have in common, though, is that they are artificially constructed sets of symbols. Some committee sat down in a room together, designed the system, and got a bunch of governments to legally mandate it. Most sign languages are not like this; they developed naturally, just like spoken languages. Sign languages have been around as long as there have been deaf communities.
No, not completely. ASL was developed out of French Sign Language. The teacher who founded ASL, Laurent Clerc, came from France and was a student of the founder of FSL. There is thus some mutual intelligibility between ASL and FSL (to what degree, I don’t know). Moreover, there is a whole family of related languages in different countries, like Holland and Russia, that have all developed out of FSL; not only that, but there is a subfamily of languages in different countries that were developed out of ASL. On the other hand, ASL and FSL are completely different from and unrelated to British Sign Language.
Do you really pronounce *system *without the t? and stress the second syllable in language?
There are dozens or hundreds of different sign languages out there.
And the reasons should be obvious. Deaf children usually are born into hearing families. There are very few large communities of deaf people. So when families start to communicate with their deaf children then often invented signs for certain things. This is called “home sign”, and is incredibly common.
So sign languages evolved organically out of home signs, when deaf kids are brought together at deaf schools or communities with lots of deaf kids, they form a regional sign language.
So sign languages are natural languages, not artificial ones. There is no universal sign language any more than there is a universal spoken language. If you think all deaf kids around the world should be taught ASL rather than the sign language traditionally used in their region, well, it’s obvious why this is going to be difficult. All the teachers and deaf adults and other signers in the community will have to switch to a completely different language. Yeah, that sometimes happens, like when American Indian languages were outlawed and kids in schools punished for using anything other than English.
So yeah, governments could outlaw other sign systems and we’d eventually have a world-wide universal sign language. The trouble is that people who grew up with a particular language as their native language are attached to it and don’t like being forced to use another language. You don’t see Norway deciding that Norwegian is a tiny marginal language and deciding that from now on Norwegian is banned and everyone will speak English.
A deaf kid doesn’t have a “native” spoken language, because they can’t hear. They can often be taught to generate spoken language, or “lip read” spoken language, but it’s not easy. And yes, they can be taught to read and write a written language, but written English isn’t their “native” language either. And since there is no notation system for writing sign languages, kids learn to read and write the language of the people around them. Of course a logographic system like Chinese would be a better fit for sign languages than an alphabetic system like English, but there is no widely accepted system currently. Sign language - Wikipedia
Anyway, the point is, sign languages developed around the world in the same ways and for the same reasons spoken languages did, and so there is no universal sign language.