No problem. Personally, I’ve experienced nothing but welcome and understanding from the members of my local Deaf community. I made some good friends at various social and sports gatherings too (despite my complete inability at sports). The simple act of choosing ASL as a minor at Uni opened me up to a world that I previously never knew existed, and exposed me to a bit of Deaf history and shared culture. Would suggest such a route to anybody (hearing or Deaf).
Yeah I remember that too. Focusing so that you don’t miss your partner’s intent. My advice would be to “zoom out in your focus”. Try not to look at just hands, but hands/body/shoulders/face/sign space/demeanor. Your partner is trying to paint a picture in his/her sign space so allow yourself to see that “big picture” as they are doing it.
Straining your eyes won’t make a “magic eye” picture come into focus quicker. Right? Stick with it and remember to use your “non-manuals”.
For what it’s worth, my interest in this stems from the fact that I grew up near Washington, DC. I was about ten when Gallaudet University got their first hearing president. The students were pissed. I was a kid and I sincerely didn’t understand why the students were up in arms.
I recall that students were still protesting when I read an article that addressed all of my confusion with a three-word statement:
“Language is culture.”
Oh! Of course! That sentence explained it all. What’s more, it helped me understand the whole cochlear implant controversy a few years later. Beyond that, those protesting students informed and amplified a lifelong interest in language and foreign languages.
Deaf culture doesn’t need my help, but I’m grateful for how Deaf culture helped me understand language more fully.
Signed communications tend to have a significant gestural component. That helps signers to understand each other even if their sign languages are different.
Sign languages tend to be much more representational than spoken languages. Spoken languages have a few onomatopoeia, but most signs will have some sort of resemblance to the thing they represent, or to the way humans typically interact with that thing (for instance, the sign for “day” resembling the Sun moving across the sky, or the sign for “coffee” resembling use of a hand-cranked coffee grinder). That’ll make it easier for anyone to learn a sign language.
whoa. Can you clarify on this? I would think a deaf person reads at a much higher level than the hearing because that would be a major source of information.
and another question. I’m not sure if anyone can answer this, I’m watching the signer at the press conference of my state governor. her expressions are, by non-hearing impaired, extremely exaggerated. And by this I mean the governor is droning on in a relatively emotionless voice. The signor looks like someone reading a book to kids with greatly exaggerating facial expressions that don’t seem to match what the governor is saying. The person signing is backed up by another signer for a few seconds when she presumable drinks some water or does whatever off camera. The other person signing is much more subdued but does emphasize using facial expressions which to me seems inline with the conversation.
Why the great difference? It looks like the difference between talking and shouting.
Why is signing even used when Capture Control exits?
Here’s a couple of websites that say that the average deaf person reads at a fourth-grade level:
http://psych.nyu.edu/pelli/docs/azbel2004intel.pdf
The problem is that they have to learn to read in what is actually their second language. That’s hard work that sometimes the speaking people around them don’t think about. The same thing is true of people who grow up speaking one language and have to learn to read in another language immediately upon starting school. How do they get by? The same way that other people who can hear but don’t read well get by. It makes it harder to get a good job as well. It says nothing about how smart they are.
5% of deaf Americans do learn to read at a twelfth-grade level. Some deaf people go to college. As I said, there’s an entire university (Gallaudet in Washington, D.C.) where all classes are taught in American Sign Language. Americans often think that having to learn a second language is incredibly difficult, but the fact is that more than half of all people in the world speak at least two languages very well.
Here’s a recent thread about why it sometimes looks like sign language interpreters are using very exaggerated physical movements:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=892390
“Capture Control”? Do you mean Closed Captioning?
We had a thread about this less than 2 weeks ago: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=893795
Although it devolved into an argument about what “Deaf” means, the answer seemed to be that many hearing-impaired people can read Sign faster/easier than they can read text.
Has there ever been an effort to develop a written form of any sign language?
Signwriting. It has its problems.
There are Unicode signwriting characters. They represent hand gestures, facial expressions, and movements. It would be a good way to accurately accurately record something originally expressed in sign.
Makaton is BSL, British Sign Language, not ASL.
I wonder if there is an American equivalent? In Australia, (Australian Sign Language, similar to BSL), there is “Baby Hands”, which is something parents can do with their pre-lingual kids.
America has Baby Sign (and I love the term “Baby Hands”), which is more similar to SEE (Signed Exact English) than to ASL.
It never occurred to me that sign language would be the primary language. I just assumed it was in tandem with written language. But without sound a written language would have no meaning. It would just be chicken scratch without the benefit of pictographs.
I would think this would be a tremendous barrier to daily consumption of information which is something I take for granted.
Former ASL/English interpreter here. Had to quit interpreting when I developed carpal tunnel syndrome, which was successfully treated, and I can still converse in ASL with friends, but I was advised that if I didn’t quit interpreting, I would experience a resurgence that might not be treatable. If anyone wants more details about that, PM me.
I began learning ASL at age 18; I am not 53, so I have been speaking ASL my whole adult life. I am well-versed in Deaf Culture, and the politics of Deaf ed., the Deaf community, etc. Yes, I have a strong pro-Deaf bias, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s like having a pro-African American bias in regards to issues of slavery.
So, here are some responses to the posts above; I didn’t pull quotes to avoid a super-long post, but I’ll probably miss things, so I apologize-- feel free to post specific questions. Not posting in any particular order.
ASL is not the third most used language in the US, but it is a common language. It is, as someone pointed out, a very common language for which interpreting is needed. It is more common in some states or districts than others, and in the District of Columbia, it might actually be the third most common language, just because so many Deaf people settle there after going to Gallaudet, and there are a number of hearing people there who use ASL enough during the day that their ASL/oral English is in equilibrium. However, ASL is a common language in the US. Depending on the state, it usually ranks as fifth or sixth most common.
Signed languages often have loan words from the oral language in the surrounding community, but they are in no way dependent upon that language anymore than English can be said to be dependent upon Yiddish, because it has the word “shmuck,” or Japanese, because it has the word “karaoke.” There is always a way of saying something without using a fingerspelled word. Have a conversation with a Deaf 3-yr.-old, if you don’t believe me.
Signed languages ALSO have loan words from other signed languages. ASL has lots of loan words from non-ASL signed languages. It even has some loan words from other oral languages.
There is nothing close to 40% cognates in British SL & ASL. I have watched BSL, and can’t understand anything. LSF (French Sign Language) has something close to 75% cognates with ASL, because it is a tributary of ASL, much like oral French is a tributary of English. I actually can communicate with people who know LSF, because I know a little French, and the fingerspelling is the same, so I can fingerspell a French word if cognates are not working.
Signed languages have systems called classifiers, that are descriptors which do not have equivalents in spoken languages. They are a little like saying “It’s yea big, with squared corners, a hole here…” while gesturing, but much more precise and systematic: for example, there is an order in which things must be done, and rules as to palm orientation. It’s hard to explain, but classifiers as very much rule-governed descriptors that allow you to paint a picture of something in the air. But it’s not painting like an impressionist would paint-- making it up as he went along-- it’s more light drafting-- like mechanical drawing in the air, very rule-governed, so it can be done quickly, and the receptive partner in a conversation is not guessing, but knows precisely what is meant.
At least, as far as I know, every signed language that has been studied has a system of classifiers. They are not the same from language to language, but if you understand how classifier systems work, it’s fairly easy to plug into the system of a foreign language’s classifiers after observing for a while, or having someone explain it briefly. A hearing person not experienced in understanding classifiers would not pick up one quickly, but a Deaf person who grew up with a signed language would grasp a system of foreign classifiers quickly.
This is a little like the way English speakers have great difficulty learning Latin if it is the first time they have confronted a declined language (a language with noun cases), but someone coming from a declined language like Russian, which not only is declined, but has almost exactly the same set of cases as Latin, will pick up Latin declensions pretty easily. It’s also like someone from one tonal language learning another has a lot less difficulty, than someone coming from a background like English, trying to learn a tonal language for the first time.
This is one reason Deaf people can communicate more easily with Deaf people with whom they do not share a language, than hearing people do. They stick to using a lot of classifiers, along with some pantomime, and start to pick up on one another’s classifiers. The other reason is that Deaf people have spent their lives trying to communicate with hearing people who don’t know their language, and put all the communication burden on the Deaf person, so the Deaf people become VERY good at ad hoc communication. Another factor in patience. Deaf people will be patient with one another, and try to help each other. They don’t get all snobbish, and not want to communicate with a foreigner.
The Gallaudet protest of 1988-- the “Deaf President Now” campaign, was not over having “the first hearing president,” it was over having yet another hearing president. I was a student at Gallaudet when the protest happened. I actually marched for this, so I know this issue intimately.
Gallaudet had had only hearing people as presidents, and for most of its history, there were not Deaf people with PhDs, and the experience to be university. In 1969, a guy named Lloyd Merrill was president, and in 1969, there still were not Deaf people with the education of experience to be university presidents. There also was not the research there is now (and was in 1988) regarding the language status of ASL. On top of that, in 1969, there were no accessibility requirements that would have provided interpreters for a Deaf president at important meetings.
Merrill resigned in 1983. At the time he resigned, there was some agitation for a Deaf president, but due to issues with the board, a permanent president could no be chosen, so an interim president was selected, and a man named Lloyd Johns was brought in from CSUN, a university in California with the second best interpreter training program in the country (the best is the one at Gallaudet). Johns knew ASL, and knew Deaf people, and was expected to serve less than two years, which he did.
After Johns, another interim president named Jerry Lee was appointed. Johns had been good for the school, so there wasn’t much resistance to Lee, but Lee didn’t have any Deaf experience, and was a friend, it turned out, of the chairman of the board of trustees. Lee didn’t do a bad job, but was very remote from the student body, very different from Merrill and Johns.
And there was also the issue that by the time Lee’s term ended, there were lots of Deaf people with PhDs, with experience as school superintendents, as college deans, and generally highly qualified to be a university president.
Before the selection process even began, petitions were passed around, signed and sent to the board saying that the student body believed the time had come for a Deaf president.
Well, after the field was narrowed to two Deaf people and one hearing person, the hearing person was chosen, and all hell broke loose.
Understand, this person was not only hearing, she knew NO ASL, and had NO experience with Deaf people-- not that I think at this point that would have made a difference, because someone with the pulse of the Deaf community would not have applied in the first place.
ASL is the first language of most people in the US (and most of Canada) who are born Deaf or become Deaf very young. English is their second language. Due to lots of unfortunate factors, many Deaf children don’t get ASL until after they are two, or even three. So their language in behind, and then their reading ends up behind, and their reading ends up behind-- remember, they have to learn English in order to learn to read. Many never catch up.
If there’s a point I missed, let me know. If anyone has another question, let me know.
How exactly would “a loanword from an oral language” work? A sign based on the fingerspelled version of the word? A new sign invented specifically to be synonymous with the word?
That’s what the studies I’ve seen say–40-ish% cognate between ASL and BSL, 60% between ASL and LSF. YMMV by region, of course.
75% seems very high. That would be edging into dialect territory, and I’m sure everyone agrees that ASL is not a dialect of LSF.
I was watching Canada’s PM Trudeau giving his daily Covid-19 speech. There is a “signer” at the lower right. He switches to French at the 30:00 mark, with simultaneous (audio) translation. The “signer” is still there, signing. Is she still signing in English (picking up the audio translation), or in French (picking up the original)? I would assume English, since this was an English TV channel. (skip to about 29:30 to catch the changeover).
OK, so that tells me that there is a sign that’s the translation of the word “covidiot”. But how is that a loanword? Is it a portmanteau of the signs for “covid” (and what’s the origin of that sign?) and “idiot”? If some other oral language came up with their own word that was a portmanteau of their non-cognate words for “covid” and “idiot”, would that be considered a loanword?