sami | [redacted title]

Entry tags:

blogging against asterisk day

[redacted title]

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.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

You know about Signwriting, right? And Stokoe notation?

Nope. *googles*

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.

There's a real challenge to this from a linguistic perspective-- ASL is almost a written language in itself, but it's pictograms, not components. I don't know if ASL can be written down to the equivalent of phonemes or not.

It doesn't have to be. After all, English isn't - the English alphabet is an abstraction, where phonemes are often triggered by conditions. It'd probably need a larger alphabet than English has, but there's nothing wrong with that - I'd just rather there existed something less complicated than, say, kanji.

"Pictograms"? It is components. Handshape, location, movement, prosody, and various other aspects that can be correlated fairly closely with the phonological features of spoken language. There has been a large amount of research done on the phonology of signed language, which has been going on for decades. There is published work on it, journals, books, etc. There are university courses specifically about sign language phonology.

Hmm. But English is made up of phonemes-- there's just a lot of borrowing from other languages, which is why it's not consistent.

One of the reasons Deaf speakers of ASL have trouble learning written English (and this applies over other languages) is that they conceptually have trouble with the phonemes. (This is why if we needed to teach my daughter a signed language it would have been cued speech.) One of the big challenges in terms of getting Deaf people access to proper employment, etc. is bridging that gap. A 'phoneme'-based language would help in that respect in a way an abstract one wouldn't.

That's helpful to know-- can you check my comment above and help correct me?

This... really reads as incredibly paternalistic to me.

Essentially, it reads like, despite there having been d/Deaf people around for centuries, who have a vested interest in making their communications as easy and fluid for themselves as possible, a large number of hearing folks are going to get together and "solve" a problem for them - a problem that may or may not exist for a large number of d/Deaf people.

I also think it ignores the existence of ASL poetry and ABC stories, and jokes This is a culture that has traditions around communication and the like. Just ones that aren't widely acknowledged by the mainstream.

Other than one post by one d/Deaf person, I'm not even sure how much reading you've done on the history of deaf communication, or even the rather painful history of "Let's save the d/Deaf people".

You could start with Google or Wikipedia or a bookstore or something. I suggest ultra basic 101 type reading on both the mechanical linguistics of signed languages, and on the sociolinguistics of signed language and Deaf history, especially the history of what "well-meaning" clueless hearing folk have done to Deaf people and their languages.

Apologies.

English is made up of phonemes, true. But very few of them are reflected in English orthography.

For example, the /n/ sounds are, in fact, different in the words anne and anthem. This is determined by context on a level native speakers aren't even going to be consciously aware of. There are a lot of things like that, without even touching the subject of the vowel space. Or homophones. Or homonyms. You can pare down a lot, the question is what.

(Bear in mind: I am in fact a linguistics major, currently studying Phonetics and Phonology. I speak not from a position of total ignorance.)

Ah, and I see trouble has found her way here while I was writing this. Seriously, I am biting my tongue SO HARD here. Go read something.

Frankly, most of the research has been done in the U.S. Plugging "deaf" into your local library should give you a large number of books to start out with. Heck, the original "Sign Language is a Real Language" is available free on line.

... Which I can't find right now, and my reference material isn't right next to me, but Stokoe Notation on that Very Important Academic Resource of Wikipedia *cough* has some notes.

I haven't. This is just vague thinking. And there's a reason why I think deaf people should be doing it, just with input from people like linguists, and possibly the assistance of people who are good at font-type stuff.

But the thing is, a lot of language stuff is best approached by the tandom efforts of native speakers and outsiders, because there's a lot of things which native speakers take for granted. Native speaker bias is a serious problem for working with every language, and, I suspect, one to which the d/Deaf are not immune.

Hence, what I actually think is that a bunch of deaf people should do this, with input from others. It's not that d/Deaf People Can't Do This, it's that no-one can conduct serious investigation of their own language without reference to and criticism from other language perspectives. (Some people have trouble even then - for example, there are people who refuse to recognise that the difference between unaspirated and aspirated /b/ sounds is significant, even though in some languages it is as different as /b/ and /p/. Because in English, both sounds are used, but are not used to distinguish meaning.)

I am aware of the existence of ASL poetry and so on. The problem is, as far as I know, there isn't a good way to, say, publish books of ASL poetry - not in a way that is as rewarding as publishing books of English poetry is, say. (Aesthetically rewarding, not financially, btw.)

If there is, fine, this isn't necessary - instead, the problem is that there can be Deaf people fluent in sign language, but constrained to write in English and forever feel trapped in an alien language, which means a serious fucking flaw in the education of at least some deaf children.

I actually do feel quite strongly about this - I have a thing about languages, and I think it's a deep, profound wrong for people to be without a proper, sufficient language of their own. And if even that one deaf person feels that way, that's one person too many, and there is a serious wrongness. I don't care if it's a problem that "may or may not exist for a large number of Deaf people" - it's a problem that exists for at least one, which means it probably exists for more than one, and it's a problem I consider important. Everyone should have access to their own language, and that includes being literate therein.

deaf people should do this

there isn't a good way to, say, publish books of ASL poetry

I think it's a deep, profound wrong for people to be without a proper, sufficient language of their own.

I'm out. Out, out out. OMFG.

Some of the things I said were badly and probably hurtfully phrased (now I've had my shower my brain is working better) and some bits I was just wrong on. I'm going to bow out, because I think any other participation on my part is going to boil down to a lot of mansplaining and nothing of value, but I want to apologize for any hurt I caused.

I am... confused. Search engining brought me to:
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?

Ok... so I'm not imagining the words that are cuing me that there is - uhm, well, fail.

I found similar links. The problem I perceive with it as a written language is that it's essentially diagrams of the movements, which makes sense, but is problematic for printing something novel-length, with necessary size.

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

lauredhel completely, and I really regret all of it, but I can't undo it, and I don't know what else to say.

Fucking up sucks. Worse yet, fucking up when you're convinced you're just having your own thoughts in your own space, sorting things out - sucks even more.

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.

Thank you for understanding that.

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.

I'm wondering if the stumbling block here is because you're well-studied in linguistics, which is about spoken language. I mean that perhaps you may be subconsciously expecting to see familiar linguistic patterns in the written language that deaf people use, and, exactly because you don't see them, you see "null" instead of "different"?

Alphabets are based on spoken language -- the characters are a visual notation for sounds. If one doesn't use sound to communicate, but gestures and pictures, why an alphabet for one's own non-verbal communication? It seems like it would be for the benefit of the hearing, rather than the deaf.

Disclaimer: I'm not deaf; I have no close friends or family who are. I did take courses in ASL ~1980 in California. At that point a good 1/4 of the course was discussing the immense differences between spoken language and signed language. It also taught that ASL isn't the same as signed English and that there's no one sign language since they each developed with input from the spoken languages around them.

... I was going to answer this, and then I realised that, realistically, I can *either* keep going on this discussion, *or* I can have a realistic chance at making it through this week without ending up in hospital *again*.

So I'm done. This may be me failing harder, but you know, I have my own problems, and apart from anything else, if I end up back in hospital again this week they probably won't let me leave, and I really, really don't want that.

I am truly sorry that my words caused you pain. It was unintentional, which helps not at all, I know.

Some dayas I really hate that words on a screen don't have gestures or tones, because reading mine after your comment I see how they could be hurtful, and they were *meant* to be gentle, not hurtful.

I apologise with my whole heart, and you are in my thoughts and prayers. I hope you will make it through the week intact, and I wish I could take back the pain I gave you.

Carys

It wasn't you, it's just... all of it.

Yesterday was hell, and then this post was a kind of thinking aloud, where I didn't think *through* well enough - which I acknowledge, and the fact that I have a disability that directly causes me to lack the ability to think things through doesn't change the fact that doesn't so causes problems. I upset people. I upset one person enough that she dropped me from her circle, which kind of hurt.

Especially since - in the best *Fail tradition - I meant well. On a crappy day, when I was short on reasons to think I even deserve to live, I seized on an idea to try and make something positive, in an area where I care really a lot. Language is *important*.

And I screwed up really, really badly, and upset people, and all that stuff, and... I recognise that, but I can't dwell. If nothing else, having skated the cusp of dangerous levels of blood loss yesterday, I can't afford to bleed more this week, and when I break down, there is, generally, blood.

For what it's worth, though I don't think you were at fault here, I forgive you completely for the degree to which I was upset further by your comment.

In ordinary situations, I am happy to accept criticism, and discuss the question of where and how I went wrong, but right now, I can't do that.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 1 of 3

[redacted title]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

I am so very sorry for failing in turn.

Re: I am so very sorry for failing in turn.