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Sign Language? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| bakedbeansjulia Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 6625 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English, German* Studies: Portuguese | Message 9 of 27 17 April 2007 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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haha, you guys are funny!!!
Sign languages differs from country to country! Obviously! Different grammar, different cultural background. In Brazil there is even some different signs for the same word depending on where you live! Sign language from the US and the UK is also not coherent! A child attending an English Sign language school will not be able to understand the American friend very well unless it takes lessons. Then I am sure it's sort of easy for the student to get into it. Once you know one sign language it's easier to learn new ones. There is a few coherent sings, yes. But that's about it. In Germany for example you mainly speak in front of those part of the body where the face and upper breast is, in Brazil the space in which you talk is like 3 times as big! Hope that gives some sort of clarification! xx Edited by bakedbeansjulia on 17 April 2007 at 12:11pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cameroncrc Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6517 days ago 195 posts - 185 votes  2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Ukrainian | Message 10 of 27 17 April 2007 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, but I was talking about International Sign Language.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| PETE Triglot Groupie United States Joined 6483 days ago 73 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 27 22 April 2007 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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"I read about sign language as a official second language report by some linguistic that stated it would be pretty much impossible to do, he gave reasons but I don't remember and I'll try to find the link."
Some of the reasons are very obvivous: - Certain hand gestures, while acceptable in some countries/cultures, are deeply offensive in others. - The left hand is concidered unclean in some countries because of what they use it for. Using it to gesture while "talking" to someone would be offensive. The plight of the deaf in this country has been a tough one. A hundred-plus years ago deaf people were considered ignorant or mentally deficient. They were treated like second class citizens, had a language they did not want forced upon them and were forced to live in sub-standard institutions and treated poorly, to say the least. Things have since changed greatly for them. There is a prestigiou university geared towards educating the deaf, Gallaudet, they are covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, and part of everyone's phone bill is dedicated to a phone service which allows deaf people to "talk" to hearing people over the phone. Unfortunately, the Deaf Culture is becoming more elitist. There is at least one nightclub here that is "Deaf Only" and hearing people are not allowed in, even as guests. And many deaf couples are hoping to have deaf children. Many deaf parents who have deaf children are forbidding their children from getting Cochlear Implants because they feel the "deaf culture" will be lost. They forget that man was meant to hear and that if a person can't hear, that means something went wrong. They would rather a child not hear his parents voice, listen to a lullaby, enjoy the tinkle of laughter or the sounds of nature...all to preserve their "culture." That is very sad. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6472 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 12 of 27 22 April 2007 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm going to try not to drag this thread down into a debate about Deaf culture, but I feel I had to put in my two cents on that issue.
Deaf people want to believe that there is nothing wrong with being deaf and they can be perfectly self-sufficient in that state. That is a perfectly understandable behavior and I agree with it: many deaf people can and do get along just fine in this world. But at the same time, people need to be realistic: being deaf is still not advantageous, and I feel there is no room for being elitist about it. Indeed, I'm opposed to elitism in all its forms. Part of the problem is us, the people who can hear. To this day, many people don't understand deaf people. I wouldn't say that I understand them myself, because my experience with deaf people is extremely limited, but I understand more than the average person does (I know that sign language is rich, complex, and capable of expressing everything spoken language can, for example). On one level, they're no different from you and me, as they are perfectly capable of functioning in society. But on another level, being deaf is very, very different in some ways. Imagine being in a room full of people and not being able to communicate with any of them because you have no translator, and you have to deal with this situation all the time. And, unlike living in a foreign country, you can't just expect to learn the language. Deaf people can learn to speak and lip-read, but I'm sure it's an order of magnitude higher in difficulty than an ordinary hearing person learning another language. Then you come across people who are in your same situation, people you can actually talk to and interact with in ways that are much more meaningful to you. It's hardly a surprise, then, that deaf people like being around other deaf people. I think the elitism is partly an extension of that, and partly an extension of a universal human selfish tendency to want everybody to be like oneself. I'd say that human selfishness is the biggest cultural universal there is. People want their friends to be like them. One phenomenon that's easy to observe in America (and probably elsewhere!) is that black people tend to make friends with other black people, Asians tend to be friends with other Asians, etc. That doesn't necessarily mean they're racist against other races; they just relate better to people of their own race. People can and do make friends with other people who are very different from them, but few people actively seek such friends. It's not really human nature. All else being equal, we gravitate toward people like ourselves, even if the only similarities we can find are something superficial like skin color. Going back to the selfishness theme... more than once I've seen Christians claim that even atheists, "deep down", believe in God. I think that such a belief stems partly from a subconscious desire that everybody should believe the same thing they do. The statement "deep down, everybody is an atheist" would strike these people as absurd, but they both make as much sense to me and both statements probably have the same amount of supporting "evidence". The point I'm trying to make is that this is fundamental human nature, and Deaf culture is just like any other culture, really. It has its good side, its bad side, and its ugly side. So I guess the only thing we can do is do our best to understand each other, and when that fails, just shrug our shoulders. - Kef 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| PETE Triglot Groupie United States Joined 6483 days ago 73 posts - 85 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 27 22 April 2007 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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"The point I'm trying to make is that this is fundamental human nature, and Deaf culture is just like any other culture, really."
- As soon as you can name another culture that has its parents purposefully preventing their children from gaining one of their five senses in order to preserve said culture, then just maybe you will have a point. As far as elitism goes, if you can show me a club today that is "hearing people only" or even "whites only" then your point on elitism may find some validity. Many, many, many deaf parents want deaf children and will prevent their deaf children from getting cochear implants and actually hearing the world around them just to preserve their "culture." Their justification, however, is almost comical. They state that just like hearing parents wanting their children to be able to hear, they are deaf parents wanting their children to be deaf. They would prefer to deprive their children of one of their five senses due to their own personal interests. A simple Google of "deaf parents want deaf children" will bring up some interesting reading. Cheating your child out of the gift of hearing just to "preserve your culture" is at best unkind. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6472 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 14 of 27 23 April 2007 at 12:30am | IP Logged | ||
When I made that statement, I was speaking of Deaf culture as a whole, not just the fanatics. Every culture has its fanatics, too; they just get fanatical about different things.
There aren't any clubs that say "hearing people only" because there aren't enough deaf people around for people to be concerned about. Hearing people generally don't feel threatened by deaf people. As for "whites only", I'll bet you anything that if it were legal to have a sign that says that in the United States, those signs would pop up everywhere -- just like they had been there in generations past. I'm not saying that's a good thing (indeed, it'd be terrible), but it'd happen. There are other regions in the world where signs exactly like that exist; even in Japan, there is the occasional (but thankfully rare) sign that says "Japanese only". And I do agree with you, I don't think deaf parents should force their children to be deaf. In fact, I don't think parents should force their children to be anything at all (well, I'd force them not to be homicidal maniacs, but...). But I do think it's important to understand why people do think that way, even if we don't agree with them. - Kef 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| dbh2ppa Diglot Groupie Costa Rica Joined 5688 days ago 44 posts - 74 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Japanese, Sign Language | Message 15 of 27 06 September 2009 at 4:56am | IP Logged | ||
Depriving? It's not like they're taking away one of their senses, they just don't have it. I see nothing wrong with not wanting to put an implant on a kid, when the kid doesn't need it. (And no, deaf people don't need to hear. Just like you don't need to be able to see infrared "light", or feel magnetic fields (or were your parents evil by not giving you magnetic implants at birth?)) "gift of hearing"? really?... are you kidding me? how can you cheat someone out of a "gift" they don't even have? I'm siding with the "deafness is not a decease" group. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Katie Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6718 days ago 495 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, Hungarian Studies: French, German | Message 16 of 27 06 September 2009 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
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I learnt sign language in highschool (I taught myself). Well, I learnt how to 'spell'
using the finger alphabet in primary school (as part of our school's awareness programs), but taught myself AusLan in highschool. I used to babysit a little deaf girl and a friend of mine's nephew was also severely hearing impaired however, both of these things came AFTER I had learnt it. I was just fascinated with sign language. The good thing about it was that my friend and I were basically fluent, and our other friends learnt quite a bit of it just for fun - so we had some great conversations in classes when we weren't allowed to be talking! LOL Worst part was, apparently one of our teachers was also fluent in sign language and was 'watching' our conversations all along. One day, we were mucking about and my friend called me a not so kind name (in sign) and all of a sudden the teacher yelled out "Hey you two! That's enough!"... it was then that she told us that she had been keeping up with our conversations all year and had found them rather interesting! LOL I dread to think what we had talked about in all that time! haha But anyway, in the last 10 years I have had no use of my sign language at all, so I'm sure that I will have lost most of it. Sad really. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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