Well, yeah, ok, so it’s badly-structured FRENCH. 
It’s still beautiful, and utterly impractical as it stands.
One proposal for written sign language that I like is Signwriting. It’s not nearly as elegant as the signed form, but it captures nearly every nuance of the signed form. I keep meaning to write up a bunch of flash cards using this…
No it’s not. It’s not derived from French or English. It’s a separate language altogether. From a linguistic perspective it’s not “badly structured.” It’s as complex and ordered as any language out there. It’s perfectly practical as a spoken language and for most deaf kids it’s the only practical language for a native language.
The fact is that until CI’s get WAY WAY better than they are, most deaf kids will always be struggling in English, and many feel that without being taught ASL or another signed language within the developmental window in which children learn languages, you risk hobbling children cognitively, linguistically and socially. This is the argument - and though reasonable people can disagree with it - it is certainly a solid argument (which I happen to agree with).
As for whether English should be taught also - yes and ASAP. There’s nothing preventing children from becoming bilingual - or as bilingual as their hearing will allow. But to say that children should learn the native language of their parents as a priority is wrong - in fact casual observation of accents and speaking habits will tell you that children ultimately take on the language of their peers as their native language, not their parents’ language.
Well, there was the buildings the land the school sits on. The government gives the land to the school, that’s why most state schools were called ‘land grant schools’. Then there’s the buildings the school was housed in. The government generally pays for those upfront. And the roads, the services like water, power, sewage. Oh yeah, government subsidies pay for most of the administrative costs and faculty fees as well, which was why your tuition wasn’t a lot higher. And why your dorm fees were affordable too.
Other than that, you got nothing from the government. Unless the institution you went to bought their computers and other learning equipment through government programs. Yeah, schools can’t afford those things without government help. And the libraries, the government subsidy pays for all that, too.
Oh there’s the food - did you ever eat in the cafeteria? Yep. Even in those years when politicians cut funding for school food, the government still shells out for a portion of the kitchens and the equipment.
Then there was the government research grants that enabled a lot of the scientific discoveries that enabled you to study what you did. They also ensured that there were cures to those diseases that would have killed you years before you ever got to college.
Outside of that, the government subsidies got you nothing whatsoever. :rolleyes:
No again; Old French Sign didn’t derive from French either. Its origins are obscure but it apparently evolved ex nihilo among deaf French people, having first come to the attention of the hearing when the abbé de l’Épée came across two deaf, signing sisters by chance in Paris.
It seems to be the case that anywhere where there are a community of non-lingual deaf people, a sign will arise on its own. For example, in addition to Old French Sign, another parent of ASL was a now-extinct sign called Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, a language which originated among a substantial deaf community on that island - so substantial, in fact, that MVSL was widely used by hearing people on the island too. (This might have originated from a British sign called Old Kent SL, but this claim is disputed, since no deaf people are known to have migrated from Kent to Martha’s Vineyard.)
For another example, witness the history of the Idioma de Signos Nicaragüense, which evolved ex nihilo in recent times:
Yay, rolleyes.
Look, all those things the government spent on my education, is also being spent on education for the Deaf. In addition to all that, the Deaf get substantially more, and with that they build up a sense of entitlement and pushyness. I’m sorry I didn’t make this more clear in my post.
Is pushyness a word? How about graballyoucanitis?
I’ll forgive your lack of clarity of you’ll forgive my sick-and-tired-of-idiots-claiming-they-never-get-anything-from-the-government-itis 
What’s your metric for measuring CIs for “WAY WAY better”? My 3-year-old daughter’s (CI) hearing age is 2, and her receptive skills are that of a 4 year old, and she expresses like a 1.5 year old. And she’s still gaining ground on the expression skills. Granted, it’s a bit early to tell, but this impresses me. At hearing age of 2, she knows and recites numbers up to 12, understands numbers up past 20, recognizes and uses more than half the alphabet, and has a speaking vocabulary of 3-4 dozen words and a receptive vocabulary of close to a hundred. She’s hardly hobbled linguistically or cognitively.
And she’s such a peach with the other, hearing kids. She shares, she expresses concern when someone else is upset, she runs and laughs and tickles and plays hide & seek. Hardly hobbled socially.
And she’s hardly the exception. I’m meeting lots of kids her age and older with CIs, through speech therapy and support groups, and even the ones who were implanted at an older age still out-perform most hearing-aid kids I’ve met.
CIs need to improve, yes. They aren’t at the point where they can completely restore lost hearing. But they are, right now, to the point where they can give a deaf person enough hearing to be a viable member of an English-speaking society.
Again, this is all my opinion of course, but I think CIs got an undeserved bad rap from the militantly Deaf.
NPR this morning made the point that Fernandes learned to read lips as a child, and often spoke with her own voice (as compared to using a translator), which alienated her from the students from the get-go (audio here).
:smack:
She expresses like a 2.5 year old. She’s ahead of the curve in terms of hearing age. Okay, time to get me some caffiene…
Col_10022, did you seriously compare being deaf with being gay? CIs compared to a “straightness” drug? That’s completely idiotic. If you’re a Gallaudet student, I certainly hope the education given there doesn’t nurture such faulty reasoning skills.
My sister majored in Deaf Studies in college on her way to becoming an Audiologist, and she’s a defender of Deaf Culture, for reasons I can’t fathom, because the Deaf community she worked and studied with were pretty uniformly nasty, snotty, and bigoted. (and even she agrees the students at Gallaudet are being stupid in this case.) She would tell me stories about her experiences at deaf events and even with her professors that made me shake with rage that anyone could behave so badly towards my little sister with complete impunity.
I don’t object on account of tax dollars, I object to a “culture” that makes people into mean-hearted elitists. They’re not protesting because she’s “not deaf enough” but because they don’t like her? The reason they don’t like her is because she’s not deaf enough!
Deaf Culture serves a purpose in giving deaf folks a place to be the norm rather than the exception, but it has become an unhealthy ideology for far too many. It’s a disability, y’all, not a religion.
deaf doper chiming in. I can get defensive about the Deaf culture sometimes, but I’ll gladly concede when they’re acting like idiots. What Jenny said is spot-on.
Well CI’s are at the point where once-hearing users who get them have somewhere around 50% single-word comprehension, IIRC. There’s reason to think that children who learn to hear with them from the get-go might do better. But even still, that level of distortion is going to severely affect anyone’s communication. I’m glad your daughter’s doing well, and it seems to me this is only going to improve with the technology. But I don’t personally see why choosing between ASL and English is necessary, though. Why isn’t bilingual an option?
I should say not for your daughter, as that’s clearly a personal decision, but in general I don’t see why ASL should be excluded.
Well, bilingual is an option, in fact we (her parents) have been learning sign (Signed English) since she was born. She is learning SE now (for when her implants are turned off), because that’s pretty damn close to the language we speak natively at home. We plan on switching to ASL when she’s older, perhaps in middle school. We don’t intend on her being completely isolated from the deaf or Deaf communities.
However, if you look at the illiteracy rates amongst deaf people, how can you suggest that learning not one but two languages during early development can be beneficial? I’m not saying that 100% of the deaf illiteracy problem is due to ASL. But it is a huge, and complicating, factor.
Nor am I suggesting that ASL needs to be done away with. But I feel that there needs to be some kind of compromise, some kind of happy medium - and given that the Deaf community is much smaller than the spoken English community, I think it’s the Deaf who should bend more. And so I feel that ASL, as a language and a basis of culture, need to develop more before I’ll take it seriously. I suspect I’m not alone in this opinion, either.
And this all ties back into the OP, describing the school that champions ASL, where the students have cultivated a reputation for entitlement and isolationism about their handicap. They take it seriously, because many of them grew up with ASL, and most have since joined a large and thriving community tied together by ASL usage. But I don’t feel that these community bonds somehow legitimize their attitudes, nor do I feel that it legitimizes ASL as a cultural cornerstone.
I had been contributing stuff I had been reading in the local news. That particular response was in response to a post about why some deaf people were defensive about remedial surgery for deafness. The impression I get is that these people think that deafness is entierly normal and that efforts to “normalize” them or to “cure” them indicates that there is something wrong with them in the first place (something they do not seem to be willing to admit). Being deaf is as much of their identity as sexuality is part of s homosexual’s identity (maybe even moreso). Both are things that at least some sectors of society want to “cure” as if there was something wrong with it. Isn’t the gay community offended by implications that there is something wrong with them? So why can’t I compare deaf people’s reaction to the implication that there is something wrong with the gay community’s reaction to the idea that there is something wrong with them?
For the Dopers who’re discussing the issue of Deaf culture versus general deaf follks, I present this website FSSA Coalition. Hopefully this will provide a little more insight into the protest instead of the debate over Deaf political issues that this thread is degenerating into.
[ul]
[li]There have been two votes of no confidence in her in her time as administrator of one of the departments by the faculty. [/li][li]Faculty at the deaf school she ran feared retaliation if they stepped out of line [-- there’s a letter that has a lot of excellent bullet points listing concrete examples instead of “OMG NOT DEAF ENOUGH”[/li][li]This link URL=http://news.gufssa.com/category/fssa/faculty/, which lists the letters by a lot of faculty at the university supporting the call for her to resign[/li][/ul]
Because deaf people who claim there is nothing wrong with them are deluded. They have an organ which demonstrably does not work - the ear. The penises and vaginas of gay people are still functional - rather, the gay community takes flack for what they do with their (functioning) genitals. It’s not the same at all - I can’t believe you are honestly having trouble distinguishing these concepts.
Maybe this will clear things up for you, it being October and all. Breast cancer survivors also have a culture that tends to be close knit, and take pride in their status as survivors. Would you object to a treatment that prevented breast cancer?
ISTM to be more equivalent to the gay community protesting a drug that will automatically make children bi. After all, hearing people always have the option of putting in earplugs if they really don’t want to hear. I see nothing wrong with giving people something they didn’t have before but still retaining the option to switch back if they wanted.
OTOH, if it were impossible to deprive oneself of hearing then I could see the point of the analogy, since there are times when it is better to not hear so as not to be distracted or startled.
BTW if there were a drug that would make all bi children either gay or straight, I myself would be against that, since it would deprive them of possible experiences and opportunities. OTOH, a drug that would make all children bi I would have less problem with.
Your Internet Search abilities exceed my own, but your coding abilities stink. Here’s the link to the bullet point list of grievances: http://news.gufssa.com/2006/10/18/letter-from-clerc-center-staff/
If even a small fraction of these are true, Fernandes should have been fired ages ago. I’m surprised no one has sued. Stripping teachers of tenure without proper oversight? Verbally abusing people who came to her for guidance? No wonder the school protested her so vehemently.
Thanks for the link, lizardling
It seems that it’s not only the militancy of the Gallaudet student body that’s remarkable – What’s also astonishing is the utter tone-deafness of the board that they would persist in pushing this appointment for so long in the face of such overwhelming opposition.