I know about ASL (American Sign Language) and ESL (Exact Sign Language). Is sign language different in other countries? If so, how does it differ and why?
Canthearya, Mearless
I don’t really know the answer to your question, but I know that one of the first people to teach deaf students was a frenchman called Charles-Michel, abbe de l’Epee. His system (called French Sign Language) was the ancestor of American Sign Language. My understanding is that the sign language is independent of the language in which you are trying to speak, i.e. that you are expressing concepts and not spelling out words.
So I imagine that the sign language used in France is very close to the one used in the USA. I don’t know if other countries use an individually devised sign language, or have relied on the work of the french originator.
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Maréchal Lyautey
In Britain, we have British Sign Language, which I understand is significantly different from American Sign Language. A dictionary of BSL has been published in the past 4 or 5 years and was considered to be groundbreaking as the compilers had devised a system for setting out the signs in order so that they could easily be looked up.
In my sign language class in college we were told that each spoken language has it’s equivalent in sign language.
Life is a tragedy to those who feel…and a comedy to those that think
ASL=american sign language
SEE=Signing exact english
These are the most widely used in the USA.
Other countries have their own sign languages which depend on culture & genderizations.
Two points.
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ASL is not descended from BSL, because the BSL community wanted nothing to do with the Colonies. Colonial signers invented their own system. When Galladet attempted to organize teaching of the deaf in the USA, he was rebuffed by the British, and went to France. ASL began, therefore, as a combination of American Colonial signing and French. (The Colonial system wasn’t adequate to use by itself, because it lacked too many sophisticated referrents; educated deaf people lived in the hearing community and didn’t use Colonial sign, and Colonial signers lived in a de-facto educational ghetto.)
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SEE, LOVE, and the like aren’t very popular in the deaf community. They’re half-sign, half-English pidgins, and are generally regarded as respectable only for hearing parents of deaf children. (Hearing adults generally find real signing too difficult to learn.)
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This site, http://www.signwriting.org , not only shows how to write a Signed Language without using English (or French, or Spanish, or what have you) glosses, but also has original literature, written in SignWriting, in a few of the different Signed Languages. You can make your own comparisons to ASL if you desire from the translations provided.
ASL is pretty widely used I believe. Thats what we learn here in Canada and thats what I’m teaching my son.
We are, each of us angels with only one wing,and we can only fly by embracing one another
There is an Australian/New Zealand sign language also, but I think it’s a combination and extension of both British and American Signing.
My Mother had to learn a sign language called Makaton when she was teaching the Intellectually Handicapped. I can’t remember where that sits in the scheme of things.
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Culture determines signs. For example, in ASL, ‘man’ is signed near the brain in a motion of taking the hat off. ‘women’ is signed near the mouth, because of bonnets.
In Japan, ‘woman’ is signed by pointing up your little finger & ‘man’ the index finger, cuz woman is ‘smaller’ than man. At least there anyway.