And Now That I'm Temporarily Hard Of Hearing ...

[bloodyrosemccoy]

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When you mention to people that you’re taking ASL, you find yourself having to answer the same questions all the time.  Mostly they’re asked by people who never gave sign language much thought, so they’re not really stupid questions so much as questions that have not been well-thought-out.  So I thought I’d do a PSA on here so that you don’t find yourself asking these questions of a signer.

 

Answers to Frequently Asked Questions I’m Sick Of

 

1. No, ASL is not just a code for English. We have something for that. It is called Manually Coded English, and it is silly. It actually codes for irregular English verbs. But ASL does not, nor does it follow English grammar. It makes much better use of the visual medium and facial gestalts available to it.  While ASL uses the English alphabet for fingerspelling and will fingerspell borrow words from English, ASL has different word order, different expressions, different semantics, and is in fact an entirely different language.

 

2. Yes, that’s right, sign language is a real language.  It is different from crude gestural systems because you can discuss anything you need to: people who are not here, hypothetical situations, and highly abstract things like philosophy. It has a grammar and a number of linguistic features, including an equivalent of ‘phonology.’ Just because it’s a different medium doesn’t mean that it’s less successful as a language.

 

3. No, there is not a universal sign language that everybody everywhere around the world knows.  If there were a universal sign language that everybody automatically knew, you would know it.

 

Special note to people who argue with me about that: This is not illogical. This is how spoken languages work. I do not care if you think that that was poor planning on deaf people’s part.  Hearing people and their abundancy of languages shows the same poor planning.

 

Special note to people who still argue with me about it: Look, I realize you don’t think that’s how it should work and that it’s unlikely. That’s how it is.

 

4. ASL is not artificial, any more than Spanish or Hindi or Japanese or English is. It is natural, as are most of the other sign languages in the world.


This has been a somewhat unfriendly message from your cyberlocal ASL student, who had one of the more argumentative question-answer sessions like this today and is frankly getting tired of it.

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Most don't. I think most people just don't give it much thought, but people have argued with me before about that. For some reason they don't like the idea of sign languages being on par with spoken. Go figure.

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

And then there are the idiots who thing Linguistics means you know lots of languages and that's all there is to it.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, lord, yes. How many times have people replied to hearing that you're a linguistics major with "How many languages do you speak?"?!

I've finally started answering with "I am fluent in six million forms of communication."

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

Good answer! I think I'll borrow it. Either they'll get it, or they won't.

[gondolinchick01.livejournal.com]

Well, at some point I was planning on being a smart alec and asking if you knew the Drasnian merchants' language, but this has been much more informative. Thank you for clearing up my stupid questions before I had a chance to ask.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Heh, yeah, Eddings manifests the opposite ignorance from most people. He believes that deaf people can read lips with total accuracy, and he has the Drasnians speaking one thing while signing another, which isn't cognitively feasible. Also, the idea that the language is so subtle that no one notices is pretty funny.

But I like 'em anyway.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

That was actually pretty informative, even though I'm glad I got to have the answers without having to ask the grating questions. u_u But wanting to think of sign language as somehow inferior, man, that's still a low I'd never sink to. I'm assuming it can be translated to and from just like the spoken ones, but I still wish I knew enough about it to include bits of it in a story or something sometime without misrepresenting it (although I suppose just giving a description of general content exchange between two people signing would be the best way not to make any mistakes about it, perhaps).

The closest pet peeve I have to this is that every damn sci-fi show out there's got a "universal translator", and as a translator myself, differences between languages often seems too complex, nuanced, ambiguous and context-dependant for it to be possible for something like that to really work. What about the connotations built up from culture and history, what about the psychological effects created by alliteration, what about what the etymology of words reveal about how the people who speak that language perceive reality...?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Heh ... if you want complaints about universal translators, read on ... and I showed a lot of restraint, too.

At least Douglas Adams had the decency to admit he was cheating spectacularly.