Does anyone have further examples of what “written ASL” reads like?
I tried to put together the ASL signs for a song once, and it was darn difficult. There are no verbs of being in ASL, and lots of other stuff as well.
Regards,
Shodan
Shodan, I can only offer what I remember from working in a college bookstore for a school that had a highly respected ASL program. We sold a book called “Train Go Sorry.” IIRC that roughly equates to “You missed the bus.”
Anyone feel free to correct me if I got that wrong, as I only scanned the book a bit so I am obviously not an expert.
Here you go. I thought about going the “Let me Google that for you,” but it’s not like y’all don’t already know I’m an asshole.
Also I don’t know how to LMGTFY and I’m too lazy to learn.
That was written by a hearing person and is sort of a memoir of growing up connected to the Deaf Community. (Her dad was an administrator of one of the schools mentioned earlier in this thread.) So it’s not what Shodan is looking for. (FWIW, I hated that book. The author’s writing style and literary “choices” annoyed me to no end.)
In my ASL class we had a guest speaker who learned Signed Exact English growing up and she said she was happy that she learned it because it helped with her writing and reading, but was unhappy about the fact that other deaf people don’t use it because it is a lot more work than ASL. ASL is supposedly a lot more convenient to use.
I would expect so; I don’t know any ASL except for bits and pieces I remember from when they taught us to sign the Girl Scout Pledge some 20-odd years ago, but my understanding is that it’s much less fussy than standard English. Much less futzing around with verb conjugation, articles, all that sort of thing. The way it was explained to me, in verbal English or SEL, you would say or sign “I am going to the store,” but in ASL you would sign “I go store.” It certainly seems like less work to me, but not necessarily as precise about what you mean.
Yeah, I’d say that the guy probably has a few other things going on besides being deaf. Most other deaf people I’ve met are fairly sensitive about their noise level, except for one or two exceptions, because we know that it makes us stick out. I don’t wear hearing aids any more but due to early training I often err on the side of too soft when speaking rather than draw extra attention by being too loud.
As for Signed Exact English – the perception of it these days is that it’s not as widely used as ASL because it’s an artificial construction as opposed to ASL which is a true language of its own and not just a transliteration of English. To be honest, I was raised with SEE which mutated to Pidgin Signed English (more ASL-y, less SEE). And then I took lots of ASL classes in college and even spent a semester at Gallaudet for the immersion experience.
Compared to ASL, SEE/PSE is very artificial and awkward, IMNSHO – you’re explicitly putting in English tenses and order, and English is already enough of a bastard language without forcing written grammatical conventions into what is, essentially, a spatially oriented language that already has its own way of denoting tenses and grammar. While it might help kids learn English, it’s not always the best for communicating with other deaf folks.
ASL folks can generally understand SEE folks, but the reverse is not always true (less so these days with more exposure to other sign languages) because of the difference in how tenses and grammar construction are handled – explicitly spelling those out versus the spatial definition and inflection used in ASL. It depends on how much exposure the SEE kid has had to other deaf folks who will generally be using ASL in everyday conversation.
As for the oral education thing, blame Alexander Graham Bell. He had a lot of, uh, *ideas *on how to manage deaf people. Look it up if you ever want to be further gobsmacked and irritated by hearing world paternalism. :dubious:
That said, it’s easy to say “But that’s just stupid,” but there’s a great deal of practical and emotional controversy surrounding Deaf education and How Things Should Be Done. This can be an issue for overwhelmed parents who’ve just had the news dropped on them that their precious is deaf. They may also have their own biases for whatever reason, as well – in my parents’ native Indonesia, there aren’t a lot of resources for the deaf, even today. So they didn’t even know at the time whether I’d be able to function outside the home.
I don’t understand the comparisons to ESL. I’m in a position to see a lot of writing by ESL/EAL students (a=another since many kids are more than bilingual) , and get to see how they progress after X many years in the US. By the time 70%+ kids have been here 3 years, you can just barely discern that they are not native writers of English. If kids from countries that don’t speak English can grasp adequate English grammar that quickly, why wouldn’t someone who presumably has been taught to read English their entire schooling be able to also absorb it well enough to produce it when necessary to communicate? Yes, the grammar is different, but English speakers can learn proper grammar in other languages and vice versa rather than trying to write our second language in the wrong syntax.
I know that they used to send them to boarding schools that were poor in quality, but I think the majority of deaf students are now mainstreamed so it’s puzzling that people are seeing these issues in deaf folks my age and younger. They don’t write books for deaf students in ASL grammar, do they?
I suspect being exposed to English as a hearing ESL student is quite different from being exposed to it as a deaf child – after all, you can hear English pretty much anywhere you go, or anytime you turn on the TV. I bet it isn’t nearly as easy to learn if you don’t have that osmosis going on all the time in the background if you can’t hear it, even if you aren’t consciously paying attention.
Somebody please tell me if I’m on the wrong track here. I could well be.
Exactly. People seem to forget that Deaf kids need to memorize thousands and thousands of words that make very little sense to them because they can’t sound them out.
So when someone is signing, “Me go store”, depending on how they sign those three signs, it can mean “I am going to the store”, “Yeah, I go to that store”, “I was going to that store”, “I was walking slowly to the store”, “I was really angry when I went to the store”, and on and on and on, depending on the speed of signing and/or facial expressions that go along with those signs.
ASL has a very complex structure, and actually came from French, so there are even some signs that are French… The sign for “Look for” is actually made with a C handshape, because it came from the French sign “Chercher”.
Signed English was invented basically to make things easier for hearing teachers who didn’t understand ASL to try to communicate with Deaf kids. Unfortunately, it broke rule after rule in ASL, and has many ridiculous signs… The one most people talk about is “butter” + “fly” equals butterfly… Well, no, it means that some butter just flew. Also there were so many endings that sentences could take forever and not make any linguistic sense to Deaf users of ASL. Deaf education should fit the students’ needs, not the other way around.
A good friend of mine who grew up Deaf with Deaf parents was moved from Deaf classes into hearing classes to study Shakespeare, because her English was too advanced for a Deaf class. Deaf kids with Deaf parents have ASL as their first language, so have a good base to learn English. Unfortunately, most parents with Deaf kids don’t even bother learning to sign.
In the classes I’m teaching right now, out of 35 Deaf kids, I think maybe four kids have parents who sign - and maybe two of those parents can actually sign well. Most of the others are ignored, or use basic gestures with their kids. No one ever read with them, and many of the families don’t even turn on captions.
And ya wonder why their English is so poor? 
Daffyd writes:
> ASL has a very complex structure, and actually came from French, so there are
> even some signs that are French… The sign for “Look for” is actually made with
> a C handshape, because it came from the French sign “Chercher”.
To be more precise, it came from French Sign Language. French Sign Language contains signs that are sort of based on the French words for the concepts. ASL also contains signs that are sort of based on the English words for the concepts. It should be emphasized though that this doesn’t mean that an English speaker can immediately recognize what the sign means even though they don’t know ASL. It means that they can see how the sign was created if they are shown it and told what word it’s based on and told what the finger spelling for the first letter for that word is.
Also, because American Sign Language was created by people who knew French Sign Language, it’s actually closer to French Sign Language than to British Sign Language, which was created quite separately from American Sign Language.
I remember watching a film about Deaf people from France, (I think it was called “In the Land of the Deaf”), and between my basic knowledge of French, and my ASL, I could pretty much figure out what they were signing.
British Sign Language on the other hand is almost totally incomprehensible to me. I once went to a Deaf night out in London when I was studying in the U.K., and had no idea what anyone was talking about - I had to find someone who knew BSL and ASL to translate for me.
Well it depends on what you mean by “mainstream” There are plenty of kids in mainstream formal dhh programs…but there’s also many who are solitaries, who are the only dhh kid in their school. As a result they usually have to deal with teachers (including sped teachers, many of whom have very little training on how to teach kids like us) who have NO CLUE whatsoever how to teach kids like us. As a result, if we don’t respond well to minimal accomondations, then we get lumped in with the " Ummmm who’s President Obama?" dumbasses who are LEGION in special ed. Trust me…that happened to me…still am very resentful of my experiance.
If I understand it correctly, in some cases it’s a matter of inability (1), in others of (2) Deaf Pride and in others it’s (3) a compliment.
(1) some people never were taught English properly, or were taught a jumble of languages that’s never work out correctly in any of them - this happens with some hearing people as well, I’ve had coworkers whose Spanish was incomprehensible even to their own parents due to their extremely strong accent and inability to rephrase.
(2) Basically, “why should it be us who make the effort to understand them?” It’s a bit like the German attitude towards foreigners and the German language: they consider that anybody who’s in Germany has to be able to speak German (instantly!), many refuse to help coworkers with doubts on grounds that “you already should know that!” - the notion of meeting the foreigner halfway in order to make communication easy for everybody doesn’t even occur to them (not every German I’ve met was like that, but too many for my own cultural mindset, which is quite the opposite); both the person who insists that the deaf person for whom English is a second language should use it perfectly (ie better than many for whom it’s the only language) and the Deaf person who uses written ASL are set in that attitude of not meeting in the middle.
(3) It’s similar to people who DO make that “meet in the middle effort” speaking Spanish in front of Mike because they’re so used to seeing Mike as “one of us” that they’ve forgotten he’s a temporary British import and no habla español (well, he knows how to ask for a beer).
Thanks. It is a good deal like l33t speak.
Or perhaps more like what I know of various forms of pidgin English. An example from my college linguistics class was the pidgin for “friend” - the rather charming ‘himbrotherbelongme’.
Regards,
Shodan
Interesting. To my mind, it is very understandable, it just uses phrasing that is distinctly “non-native” and sounds, for whatever reason, like the stereotype of how Pacific Islanders speak. Word order is mostly correct - but everything is in the present tense or simple past. This is how I sound, incidentally, when I speak French.
“Mind-connect, me recent said future everything online. Me feel true. Why? Example, universities now have few course online.”
vs.
“I came to a realization. I believe that in the near future everything will be online. I feel that this is true, because, just for an example, universities now have classes online.”
Back to the OP, just remember, that Deaf children are lucky if they are exposed to ANY full-formed language before the age of 5. The lucky ones are post-lingually deaf, or the pre-lingually deaf raised in a signing community. The rest, will likely be permanently delayed in language aquitision.
The oral-only environment strikes me as a bad idea for the post-lingually deaf – but the thought of prelinguially deaf children raised in an oral-only environment fills me with absolute horror. Imagine the predominant language is sign, but you are blind since birth. AND you are punished if you speak!!! The only way you have to communicate is to place your hands on the hands of the person who is signing, and to imitate their gestures. You never get half the information intended to be conveyed by the sign, because you have no concept of the visual it represents. You cannot perfect your signs, because you cannot see what is wrong with them (your hands give you a very imperfect interpretation of the sign).
Terrible! The road to hell really is paved with good intentions.
It’s exhausting trying to make yourself awkwardly understood. Naturally you would hang out with other people who can speak and hear. Spend 4 weeks in a country where you speak the language badly, and you will never judge the Deaf for seeking out other ASL speakers again.