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Sign Language is No. 4 in America | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Yurk Triglot Newbie United States Joined 5731 days ago 29 posts - 37 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Azerbaijani Studies: Modern Hebrew, Sign Language, Korean, Spanish, Indonesian, Irish Studies: French | Message 9 of 9 09 December 2010 at 12:25am | IP Logged | |||||
I certainly hope this is not a position that most people truly hold. Here are some pages I think will be useful in dispelling this: Writing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_writing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokoe_notation http://www.signwriting.org/read.html Examples of specific families: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Sign_Language_family http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_sign_language (Korean Sign language is sometimes considered to be a part of this family. Article only says it shares "some signs" so figured I'd elaborate) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BANZSL Sign languages do in fact have everything that one would consider properties of a language. They have varying syntaxes, grammars, idioms, vocabularies or signs, different kinds of "morphemes" (for lack of a better word), and so on. I think one of the worst misconceptions, though, is that most sign languages are simply artificial. This isn't true. It's just that, in most cases, knowledge of their histories is far less available to us than that of spoken languages. michau's link on Nicaraguan Sign Language is a very strong case for this, if you have some doubt. They can be categorized into isolates and families, just as their spoken counterparts can. Finnish sign language (a language in the same family as Swedish sign language) is an official language in Finland. In Catalan, Catalan Sign Language (not sure, but I believe it's in the French Sign Language family) is an official language. People are at least acknowledging their status as natural languages now, albeit slowly. edit:
Can't comment on the Bantu statement. But as for the second question, maybe I can answer that. Perhaps it'd be better to call it something like "Anglophone" sign languages, or something, as English sign language makes me think of signed English. That'd be the "third" form of English that people are referring to here, and is rarely used as it has a odd manufacturing made to attach it to the spoken language it derives from. Australian Sign Language and British Sign Language are in the same family, BANZSL, although I think Australian Sign Language has some amount of borrowing elements from the French Sign Language family. American Sign Language is a member of that French Sign Language family, and is closer to Thai Sign Language or Spanish Sign Language than it is to the other two Anglophone ones mentioned. American SL is probably as close to Australian SL and British SL as Finnish is to Russian, or as Mandarin is to Korean. They're simply not in the same family. Edited by Yurk on 09 December 2010 at 2:26am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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