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ETA: Apparently, my communication skills are really failing me tonight. This post was briefly locked, but I have had it pointed out to me that that's mishandling it too.
Basically, I'm a pile of giant fucking fail here, in one way or another, and I am not, right now, managing to work out how I should say what I'm trying to say, and am, instead, saying things that read like I don't want them to, and right now I can't fix that. So post is cut, enter at your own risk, and I will not be looking at the post, or at comments, until morning. /ETA
I think this has been percolating since Blog Against Disability Day. I can't find the link, but I read a post by a deaf person who talked about how, despite the fact that she could write in English well, it felt like an unnatural second language to her.
I've read and been told that sign language is not, in fact, a mapping of English to gestures; the syntax and modes of expression are actually different.
This makes perfect sense to me, as a linguist; a one-to-one mapping wouldn't be the best way to make sign a natural language.
What sort of doesn't make sense to me is that, therefore, sign doesn't have an accompanying orthography. For written communication, deaf people in English-speaking countries are expected to use English.
On the one hand, it's important for them to be fluent in the language of the society that surrounds them, in order to be able to communicate with the hearing.
On the other hand, though, this means that deaf people cannot write in their native language. They are literate in a second language, but forced to be illiterate in their native language.
This? Is a problem. One that needs solving. I might make an attempt at it if I were planning postgraduate studies in linguistics rather than history, but I don't actually think I'd be a good person to do it. I have zero fluency in sign language, and even if I were to learn, I would be learning it as an adult, and one learning it for purely academic purposes at that. Ideally, developing a written form of sign language should be done by someone who is fluent with it and grew up with it.
Since sound value correlation with orthographic symbols is totally irrelevant, there should be some kind of link between the alphabet/quasi-syllabary that is at least somewhat intuitive, so that someone reading it would have some idea of how to link it to the gestured, "spoken" form. It's fine if this takes memorisation, in the same way that learning to read English involves memorising the ways in which letters represent sounds, and are modified by other letters, etc, but it has to be doable and reasonably consistent.
The ideal person to do this is a deaf person with some training in linguistics, who has grown up with sign language, and who has some talent for graphic design, to develop an alphabet/font that is clear.
Obviously I still think deaf people should be taught the written language of their society, because isolating them from the ability to communicate with the hearing population is a Bad Thing, but I find it a troubling wrongness that deaf people are forced to be illiterate in their native language.
Actually, I've just had an idea. This is the Internet.
Some of you must know deaf people.
Clearly we need to get a bunch of deaf people, and interested graphically-talented people, and people with some linguistics knowledge together, and work together to make a kind of community project of developing the Sign Orthography. Preferably from several countries, in the hopes that Sign Orthography has at least some common usefulness internationally, since as far as I know not all sign languages are the same. The deaf people can work on it, with input from other people who want to help out, and linguists can watch and point out if they've made any obvious-to-linguists mistakes, or if they can see ways to solve any problems that crop up.
If it comes to something like "designing a written form of an existing language", there's no reason why we can't get a bunch of people together and do that, now is there?
*creates a comm*
[redacted]
Let's get on this. For reals. Let's make the world a better place.
Basically, I'm a pile of giant fucking fail here, in one way or another, and I am not, right now, managing to work out how I should say what I'm trying to say, and am, instead, saying things that read like I don't want them to, and right now I can't fix that. So post is cut, enter at your own risk, and I will not be looking at the post, or at comments, until morning. /ETA
I think this has been percolating since Blog Against Disability Day. I can't find the link, but I read a post by a deaf person who talked about how, despite the fact that she could write in English well, it felt like an unnatural second language to her.
I've read and been told that sign language is not, in fact, a mapping of English to gestures; the syntax and modes of expression are actually different.
This makes perfect sense to me, as a linguist; a one-to-one mapping wouldn't be the best way to make sign a natural language.
What sort of doesn't make sense to me is that, therefore, sign doesn't have an accompanying orthography. For written communication, deaf people in English-speaking countries are expected to use English.
On the one hand, it's important for them to be fluent in the language of the society that surrounds them, in order to be able to communicate with the hearing.
On the other hand, though, this means that deaf people cannot write in their native language. They are literate in a second language, but forced to be illiterate in their native language.
This? Is a problem. One that needs solving. I might make an attempt at it if I were planning postgraduate studies in linguistics rather than history, but I don't actually think I'd be a good person to do it. I have zero fluency in sign language, and even if I were to learn, I would be learning it as an adult, and one learning it for purely academic purposes at that. Ideally, developing a written form of sign language should be done by someone who is fluent with it and grew up with it.
Since sound value correlation with orthographic symbols is totally irrelevant, there should be some kind of link between the alphabet/quasi-syllabary that is at least somewhat intuitive, so that someone reading it would have some idea of how to link it to the gestured, "spoken" form. It's fine if this takes memorisation, in the same way that learning to read English involves memorising the ways in which letters represent sounds, and are modified by other letters, etc, but it has to be doable and reasonably consistent.
The ideal person to do this is a deaf person with some training in linguistics, who has grown up with sign language, and who has some talent for graphic design, to develop an alphabet/font that is clear.
Obviously I still think deaf people should be taught the written language of their society, because isolating them from the ability to communicate with the hearing population is a Bad Thing, but I find it a troubling wrongness that deaf people are forced to be illiterate in their native language.
Actually, I've just had an idea. This is the Internet.
Some of you must know deaf people.
Clearly we need to get a bunch of deaf people, and interested graphically-talented people, and people with some linguistics knowledge together, and work together to make a kind of community project of developing the Sign Orthography. Preferably from several countries, in the hopes that Sign Orthography has at least some common usefulness internationally, since as far as I know not all sign languages are the same. The deaf people can work on it, with input from other people who want to help out, and linguists can watch and point out if they've made any obvious-to-linguists mistakes, or if they can see ways to solve any problems that crop up.
If it comes to something like "designing a written form of an existing language", there's no reason why we can't get a bunch of people together and do that, now is there?
*creates a comm*
[redacted]
Let's get on this. For reals. Let's make the world a better place.
no subject
no subject
Okay, signwriting won't work. It could be used as an aid to learning, I can see that, but it's not what I'm talking about in terms of developing a real alphabet for sign language; the diagrams are too complicated, and not conducive to being used to write novels or poetry, from what I can see.
Whereas Stokoe notation is basically, from what I see, the sign language IPA. It works for gestural description, but it requires too much in the way of detailed diacritics for feasibility as something to be read fluently, or rendered compatible with, say, typing. There's a reason we haven't dropped the Roman alphabet for IPA notation.
It could perhaps be a starting point, but I'm talking about an alphabet, not a notation or a reduced form of making a series of pictures. Something which can work as quickly and quasi-intuitively as the Roman alphabet does for literate native English speakers. It works natively for us because it's our first language, and because we absorbed links between the letter and sound value when learning to read. (It's a link that some people studying phonetics and phonology actually find it difficult to let go of.)
I'm talking about an alphabet in which deaf people can write novels that burn across the page for them, in which deaf poetry retains its beauty written down, in which passion and flair can translate to the page.
Possibly it'd end up being something which children learn by rote, the way we learn our alphabet, where the shapes can be described with Stokoe notation but really, [symbol] means [movement] Because It Does, in much the same way [t] means "unvoiced alveolar plosive" Because It Does. But there has to be a way to make this work properly.
no subject
http://www.signwriting.org/
http://www.signgenius.com/sign-language/sign-language-a-written-language-read.shtml
And then I come back and read your comments and read you, a Hearing person, deciding that the written language isn't conducive to novel writing or written language the way you define written language as a Hearing person.
Is the point I'm missing something linguistic to do with linguists? Or am I seeing a Hearing person, who's interested in the fact that Sign Language (all of them) should have multiple forms, the performed and the read, and who wants a written sign language to be something she (or another Hearing linguist leaning person) can immediately identify as language, in that it should look just like Hearing language written down.
I'm not deaf. I do not - I now know one deaf person. But I've no idea if she uses sign language or not.
I could be tripping up with privilege all over the place and I accept that, and pre-accept any calling out I may get.
But I need to ask, why does a written mode of any of the Sign Languages have to look like hearing language written down? Why does it have to have an alphabet? Why does it have to fit a standard keyboard (or at least that's what I understand you to be saying). I do not believe that Braille fits a standard keyboard (I could be wrong though).
Who defines what 'properly' is? And why do they get to define it like that? Especially if they're a Hearing individual?
Also, for the Deaf who are Japanese or Chinese and use that writing system, - which in my innocence I will say seems to be shapes that have been simplified, modified and implied over many years. How does that fit into your idea of a written language?
Since there is an opportunity in those languages for thought-concepts of layered meaning, represented by one symbol? Those languages are admitted/accepted as complex, so much so they already have a simplified form (used for children's books). Wouldn't creating a third language for the Deaf there, be complicating an issue?
Also, is it true to say that that (those particular) written language(s) is inauthentic in matching the signed language created by that community of the Deaf?
no subject
I'm not saying it should fit a standard keyboard, at all. Or should look like existing written languages. What I'm saying is that my experience is that there exists, in at least one person, a sense of alienation that she doesn't have access to a written language that feels natural to her, and I see this as a major problem, because I believe languages are important. That people need to be able to tell their own stories, and if she can't, that's an injustice.
I tend to perceive injustice as being something that lessens everyone.
I'm not saying it's something I, personally, can control fixing. I have known deaf people all my life, but those particular people hate sign language and think it's stupid, so I never exactly had a lot of incentive to learn it - the only deaf people I had a direct interest in communicating with would have told me off for trying. (They consider sign language actually immoral and a tool of the oppression of the deaf, more or less.)
Ultimately?
Language is something I care about, deeply and passionately. I am genuinely distressed that even one person feels she has no language in which to write.
I'd had a shit of a day and was trying to find something positive to focus on, a way to try and help someone. As it turns out, I didn't think it through well enough, and I compounded that by expressing myself really, really badly.
I can cite historical precedent for orthographies coming late to established languages, like Gutenberg and Sequoyah, but it's not really the point. I was wrong.
I can't undo that. I can't undo any of the ways I've fucked up today. Knowing one of the others ended with me getting sutured and pools of my blood spattering half my house, it shouldn't feel like this is the worst, but it does, and I still can't fix that.
So yeah. I fail, I fucked up, I alienated
no subject
I was worried by the later post mentioning the hospital visit. Hopefully you're stable now, and have access to resources to continue to be stable.
no subject
And, yeah. I'm stable enough now. I don't want to say too much in a public post, but... more or less exactly what you probably think, but it's all being taken care of.
On the bright side, there are risks I might take at other times that I totally won't at the moment, because this afternoon I was skating the edge of safe limits for blood loss, and even I can work out I need to be gentle with my body after that.