Tag: sign languages

lulavcentrism:

From A Disability History of the United States by Kim Nielson. Another section (linked) describes signed languages as extremely common of most Indigenous groups to North America. 

image text: 

The Spanish explorers assumed they encountered discrete gestures–not a language. Today’s scholars confidently argue that signed language among indigenous nations served deaf and hard of hearing people as well as the communication needs of peoples of different languages. European explorers benefited from already existing signed languages or signed communications, but dismissed them as unsophisticated hand signals.

Spanish explorers were contemporaries of the Spanish Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de Leon (1520-1584), who was just beginning to argue that deaf people could be educated and is credited with developing the first manual alphabet. 

North American indigenous sign languages thus existed long prior to any signed language in Europe. (France, the home of other early explorers, became a leader in deaf education, but not until the 1700s.) Members of indigenous nations believed that people born deaf had intellect and personal capacity. European peoples tended to believe the opposite. 

getmeachargerquick:

mixed-apocalyptic:

thatpettyblackgirl:

it’s just they never seen a song in 3D.

Iconic performance

Black magic! 

AAVSL (African American Venacular Sign Language) is wild because you really see the culture in it and if you are Black and hearing/don’t know ASL, you still understand it because so much of black communicatiom is nonverbal

Reblogging again because I didn’t know AAVE had a sign language equivalent even though now it makes so much sense.

slashmarks:

“The baby sign language phenomenon connects to what culturally deaf people celebrate as “Deaf Gain:” the notion that all of humanity can gain significant benefits and insights from Deaf visual-spatial contributions to the world, including A.S.L. and all its rich linguistic possibilities. Deaf friends I talk with applaud hearing parents for learning some signs with their children, and express hope that, someday, more people will use a signed language on an everyday basis, making communication easier for all of us. But the developers and users of baby sign language don’t necessarily see A.S.L. fluency as a goal. Many of the books and websites actually assure parents that they don’t need to learn full A.S.L., and also that using baby signs won’t impede a child’s spoken language acquisition. […] Finally, there is one more reason I feel ambivalent when my hearing acquaintances tell me they are using baby signs with their children. Often, I notice that these acquaintances are people who have never attempted to use any sign language with me — even though I am deaf, even though I am the one person they know who could most benefit from visual communication. This omission strikes me as a huge loss, even a huge injustice. […] For decades, medical and educational professionals have discouraged hearing parents from signing with their deaf children. My own parents were told not to sign with me when I was a baby — and then proceeded to disregard that advice, for which I am exceedingly grateful. Some of these professionals believe that speech is superior and signing is only a crutch for spoken language acquisition, despite the fact that A.S.L. has been recognized as a full language since the 1960s. The consequences of this philosophy of enforced speech for deaf education, literacy and language development have been disastrous: It has meant that many deaf children never acquire a fluent native language that will enable them to reach their potential. This is starting to change, but most deaf children still do not receive full A.S.L. exposure in their early years, which are critical for language acquisition. The fundamental injustice of the baby sign-language trend is that our culture touts the benefits of signing for hearing children, but disregards A.S.L. for the deaf children who need it the most.”

— Rachel Kolb, Sign Language Isn’t Just for Babies
(via k-pagination)

Native American Hand Talkers Fight to Keep Sign Language Alive

andreashettle:

snowgall:

Research has shown that Hand Talk is still being used by a small number of deaf and hearing descendants of the Plains Indian cultures.

“Hand Talk is endangered and dying quickly,” said Melanie McKay-Cody, who identifies herself as Cherokee Deaf and is an expert in anthropological linguistics.

McKay-Cody is the first deaf researcher to specialize in North American Hand Talk and today works with tribes to help them preserve their signed languages. She is pushing for PISL to be incorporated into mainstream education of the deaf.

@clatterbane

Native American Hand Talkers Fight to Keep Sign Language Alive

Why Sign-Language Gloves Don’t Help Deaf People

allthingslinguistic:

The problems with all of those sign language translation gloves that keep getting media hype. Excerpt: 

[A]ll the sign-language translation gloves invented so far misconstrue the nature of ASL (and other sign languages) by focusing on what the hands do. Key parts of the grammar of ASL include “raised or lowered eyebrows, a shift in the orientation of the signer’s torso, or a movement of the mouth,” reads the letter. “Even perfectly functioning gloves would not have access to facial expressions.” ASL consists of thousands of signs presented in sophisticated ways that have, so far, confounded reliable machine recognition. One challenge for machines is the complexity of ASL and other sign languages. Signs don’t appear like clearly delineated beads on a string; they bleed into one another in a process that linguists call “coarticulation” (where, for instance, a hand shape in one sign anticipates the shape or location of the following sign; this happens in words in spoken languages, too, where sounds can take on characteristics of adjacent ones). Another problem is the lack of large data sets of people signing that can be used to train machine-learning algorithms.

And while signers do use the American Manual Alphabet, it plays a narrow role within ASL. Signers use it “to maintain a contrast of two types of vocabulary—the everyday, familiar, and intimate vocabulary of signs, and the distant, foreign, and scientific vocabulary of words of English origin,” wrote Carol Padden and Darline Clark Gunsauls, who heads Deaf studies at Ohlone College, in a paper on the subject.

[…]

Also, though the gloves are often presented as devices to improve accessibility for the Deaf, it’s the signers, not the hearing people, who must wear the gloves, carry the computers, or modify their rate of signing. “This is a manifestation of audist beliefs,” the UW letter states, “the idea that the Deaf person must expend the effort to accommodate to the standards of communication of the hearing person.”

That sentiment is widely echoed. “ASL gloves are mainly created/designed to serve hearing people,” said Rachel Kolb, a Rhodes Scholar and Ph.D. student at Emory University who has been deaf from birth. “The concept of the gloves is to render ASL intelligible to hearing people who don’t know how to sign, but this misses and utterly overlooks so many of the communication difficulties and frustrations that Deaf people can already face.”

[…]

That’s not to say that Deaf people don’t have futuristic fantasies that involve technology. For example, Kolb says a dominant fantasy among her friends is for glasses that would auto-caption everything that hearing people say. Several teams of researchers are working on algorithms to make signing videos on YouTube searchable. Even more thorough, higher-quality captioning and better interpreting services would improve the lives of many.

Read the whole thing.

Why Sign-Language Gloves Don’t Help Deaf People

aegipan-omnicorn:

strangestructures:

fierceawakening:

andreashettle:

askclint:

mugasofer:

mad-yet-glad:

just-shower-thoughts:

Do Deaf people understand puns? Are there some combinations of sign language which are hilariously ambigious?

Signing the word milk when moving it pas your eyes is “pasteurized milk” (past your eyes milk)

That’s appalling. Have a like.

Make your pinky “jump” on the back of your other hand. That’s IHOP.

One Deaf American anthropologist I’ve met likes to sign “anthropology” as “ant throw apology”.

The four puns listed above are all examples of puns based on English words. The first two are puns I’ve seen used in American Sign Language (ASL), the “IHOP” pun is not one that I’ve seen personally so I’m not sure which signed language it is from. Though due to the use of the letter “i” (the pinky finger) as part of the sign, and the fact that the pun only makes sense if you know English, I suspect it must be ASL also.  (British Sign Language uses a COMPLETELY different finger spelling system, so the same pun in that language would have to be very different.)

Now here is a purely sign-based pun:

The usual ASL sign for “understand” basically involves holding your hand near your forehead and flicking your “pointer” finger away from your thumb. Sometimes, if a Deaf person is only understanding a tiny amount of what is being explained to them, they might jokingly substitute the use of the smaller (pinky) finger as a way of representing a small amount of comprehension.

Another one I’ve never seen in person, but have heard described: There is apparently a film that Deaf people made of themselves signing in ASL back in the 1920s (a historical film, preserved like various other historical films from the Deaf community at Gallaudet University). And in this film, one Deaf man apparently says to another, “I hope it will not be long before I see you again.” The usual sign for “long” in ASL basically involves using your pointer finger to trace the length of your other arm. But in this film, the man raised his foot and started making the sign for “long” by tracing his finger all the way up the length of his leg, and only then continued tracing his finger up his arm. So this is basically a really exaggerated way of making the sign for “long”.

I am curious to know if there is anyone reading this familiar with sign puns in any of the other 200 or 300 signed languages used around the world who could share more examples?

“I understand a little” was great but “loooooooooong” cracked me right up.

In German Sign
Language, a form of poetry involves finger spelling a word while
using the letters to “mime” the world. So for example, you could
spell golf (same spelling in German) and move the g (index finger
pointed downwards) like a golf club, then the o would be the ball
flying away, on the way down you turn it into an l to represent these
lines you see in comics to show movement and it would land in an f.

In my ASL 101 class, when I was in university, I learned an American version of that same “pun,” only the “g” was setting the tee in the ground, the “o” balanced on it, the ‘L’ was the swinging golf club, and the “f” was the ball flying through the air – to wit:

image

[Image description: a collage of different hands fingerspelling “golf” in the ASL manual alphabet. Description ends]

Oh, and back then, when I was practicing my sign in chatting, and I had had a particularly long day, and was tired, I’d exaggerate “Long” by tracing my arm up to the shoulder, then switching hands to trace back down the other arm, before finishing the phrase with “day”.

Because she was lonely.

aegipan-omnicorn:

idreamofsubtext:

So, today, a woman came into our shop. It was a woman I’ve only heard my parents refer to as ‘the Deaf Lady’. My mum had told her about me, explained that I was doing Sign Language, and come to find me on a day she knew I was working.

But today, she didn’t need her lawnmower repaired. In fact, she hadn’t touched it since it had been, and as far as she knew everything was fine.

She’d come in to sign to me.

She waved hello, and instantly explained that my mum had told her I would be in today. I asked her how she was, and the smile that she had on her face was the biggest I’ve ever seen.

And we spent about an hour in my family’s little shop, talking about everything. She told me about her life, about how she’d lived in the same house for 60 years.

She’d been born deaf, and been a Brownie, but never a Guide, because of the War… she’s now 86.

She had some amazing stories to tell, and twice she cried. One of those times was remembering her youth, and the other was when she was explaining to me that her husband had died around 20 years ago, and how he’d been the last person she’d known that could communicate with her.

She’s been alone for 20 years, living in a silent world, unable to communicate with anyone for the most part. The most interaction she has is when she writes things down for people, but she’s struggled to make any recent friends, and her family is long gone.

Now someone explain to me what’s wrong with every school teaching a certain amount of Sign Language, and for colleges to offer it more freely and frequently. People should be encouraged to learn BSL, because otherwise we’re cutting ourselves off from talking to around 8 million people or so (in the UK alone).

That’s millions of people who are no less important than you are, who have their own stories to tell, and the same need for communication as anyone else on this tiny little planet.

J. cried today because it was the first time for a long time that anyone has asked her for her name, or listened to her stories.

She’s also coming back into work tomorrow, to sign with me, and help me practice. But also – because we’re only human – for the company.

Every school should offer the native sign language of their region.

Normalize and celebrate language in all its modes, and the cultures that go with it.