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The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

scientificamerican.com

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Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#111

Post by smithza »

wittjeff wrote: post #13
thepete2 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of unrelated, but I wonder if a small amount (say 100 signs or so) of sign language (ASL or local equivalent) wouldn't be useful for hearing people in their day-to-day lives. I'm very interested in sign-language, but language being what it is you can't do it alone ...

Check out Cued Speech (one-handed phonetic signing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn4e9V3oigs It's a different modality of the local spoken language, not a separate language like ASL. You can learn it in a weekend. IMO it should be taught to everyone in the 2nd grade to help with phonological awareness, which is helpful for visual literacy. But it'd also be useful in a lot of noisy situations throughout life.

My wife and I learned under a Deaf school teacher (for a Deaf school) for a semester where she taught ASL and a little about Deaf culture. She was very sincere in her description that there is a lot of pride in Deaf culture. Now I have also heard the story of a hard-of-hearing woman who, having hearing parents, was greatly conflicted in going all in on ASL vs. learning Cued Speech. The Deaf community she was learning from spoke very intensely that she should not go that route and instead stick with ASL; partly I think because of this pride they feel in the culture and arts surrounding the language. There was shame and guilt in her story but she found a way to be connected to both the Deaf ASL community and the hearing community with Cued Speech.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#112

Post by jhbadger »

Jtsummers wrote: post #101
bluGill wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that the government doesn't take the latest updates vs having a different program called teams. The government may also refuse to install some plugins.

More importantly, the "government version of " is often hosted on something separate from the commercial version. That is, 20 companies all using MS Teams may all be actually communicating with a common (or barely segregated) backend. The government version is often running on a distinct suite of servers that only the government version touches.

Yeah. There is also a government version of Zoom for similar reasons.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#113

Post by TeMPOraL »

swilliamsio wrote: post #84
leesalminen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like when you say an English sentence to a Mexican who doesn't understand it, and you respond by saying the same thing again but louder and slower. It looks like you think they're dense. My wife is learning Spanish right now because we are moving to Costa Rica. Her most used phrase is “de espacio, por favor” which means “slowly, please”. She’s able to understand much more of the language when folks slow down and an…

Yea, but speaking slowly and clearly is _only_ useful to anyone learning the language. If I spoke to you in Klingon, and you don't understand Klingon. Would speaking to you in Klingon slower and louder help you? Undoubtedly, no, it would instead make me a rude person.

Depends. English is somewhat special in that it's the current lingua franca, so almost everyone has some exposure to it - and at the same time, it's a hodge-podge of words from different language families, so it's quite likely that an English speaker can pick out some words they understand from another language, if spoken slowly ("false friends" notwithstanding). So whether you're speaking English so someone who doesn't know it, or someone is speaking a language you don't know to you-the-English-speaker, there's stochastic benefit in slowing down.

It's the same phenomenon as within language families. I don't know Ukrainian, but I can pick up words that share etymology with Polish words, assuming they speak slowly enough for me to isolate individual words. Similarly, I don't know much German, but I can route individual words through English.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#114

Post by Jtsummers »

jhbadger wrote: post #112
Jtsummers wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More importantly, the "government version of " is often hosted on something separate from the commercial version. That is, 20 companies all using MS Teams may all be actually communicating with a common (or barely segregated) backend. The government version is often running on a distinct suite of servers that only the government version touches.

Yeah. There is also a government version of Zoom for similar reasons.

That was spurred (accelerated? started?) by the various revelations of where Zoom data was going and the weaknesses in its security model when everyone was forced to work from home last year and the government heavily adopted Zoom as one solution. They couldn't continue using the commercial version and be compliant with government controls on communication.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#115

Post by TeMPOraL »

gugagore wrote: post #95

I think the most interesting part of this is the lack of shared space in video conferencing, and how it gets in the way of ASL's use of space. As the article mentions, many verbs in ASL are inflected ("conjugated") according to semantic roles (roughly "subject" / "object" (not exactly, because passive voice)). "I ask you" and "I help you" can each be signed as a single entity, where the motion (starting at me, and mo…

> This shows up as a pain-point even in a spoken-language setting. If everyone is introducing themselves, what order do they go in?

On team meetings, we usually go clockwise by the order of pictures on the screen of the PM. That order is both seemingly non-deterministic and persistent over weeks - we have a little in-joke where we try to game the sequence by joining early or late, aiming to be sorted last. We haven't been able to figure out a pattern for it, though; it seems MS Teams sorts pictures in whatever way it feels this month. So for instance, whether I join before or after our PM, this month, I'm the first in the standup queue. Last month, I was the but-last.

Personally, I'd love if there was a shared ordering assigned and windows were simply numbered, and the numbers were displayed on screen. Would help both sign and voice users.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

chaorace wrote: post #59
mercurywells wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is not always the preferred language. An user of ASL may not necessarily be as proficent in English. The government version of Teams still does not have live subtitles last I checked.

That's a terrifying sentence: "the government version of Teams". Out of curiosity, what makes it different?

My guess? They don't want the content of their conversations to be processed and data mined by Microsoft. It's for the same reason myself and the teams I work with don't enable this feature in Teams, or in Google Hangouts/Meet/whatever, where I first saw it.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#117

Post by TeMPOraL »

shawnz wrote: post #14
gambiting wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already do. There was the case just the other day where someone explaining chess strategy had their video removed for "racial violence" when talking about.....white and black sides of the chess board. Obviously google knows what was said thanks to the speech to text translation.

It's not confirmed that's actually why agadmator's channel was removed. That was just a theory

Still, whatever in that video triggered the detector, that such ban happens at all is worrying. This, plus Google's penchant to ban you across the board for a perceived violation in one service[0], means you absolutely cannot trust Google with your speech.

--

[0] - Examples abound; my favourite was the great many people who got banned after a YouTube livestreamer asked them to vote by typing in color emojis in the chat, and as they did so, YouTube spam detector banned their Google accounts.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#118

Post by vgel »

elil17 wrote: post #98
willcipriano wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the language have the sort of precision required to say something like "rotund gentleman" instead? If not I can't really blame someone from saying something in the most polite way a language practically allows.

Limited practical knowledge here (beginner ASL and some time in a linguistics research lab) - there are fewer synonyms, but facial expression and other movements make a huge difference. Much like German adds suffixes that can really change the meanings of words, a eyebrow or tongue movement can modify a sign in ASL. Another reason ASL has fewer synonyms is that it’s not a horrible amalgamation of a ton of different l…

Classifiers aren't unique to ASL or signed languages, though how they're expressed does differ somewhat due to the medium. For example in Japanese, counting objects requires classifiers, like 'hon' for cylindrical objects or 'nin' for people.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#119

Post by mcguire »

smithza wrote: post #108
ViViDboarder wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m heading but learned ASL at work. Ever since, I’ve tried to get my wife to learn because I’m always noticing times when it would be handy (pun not intended). Noisy places, when I’m brushing my teeth, when I want to be more discrete in public, communicating across a room without yelling.

when I want to be more discrete in public .. I think there is an unkindness here, though I do not think your intentions are unkind. I had very close Brazilian-internationals while a freshman in college who very deliberately chose not to speak their native tongue around Americans due to them thinking it unkind. My wife and I frequently do use some simple signs across the room, like "ready to go" (we are both hearing b…

In general, using a language those around you don't speak can be rude, but I was imagining more along the lines of "Come rescue me from this conspiracy theorist."

Which would have been handy at one point for me.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#120

Post by sandworm101 »

myself248 wrote: post #105
sandworm101 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> where you are that you consider "very specific"? Flipping the bird. Pointing at things. Hand signals when driving (more a thing for motorcyclists). Then there are plenty of job-specific things. Crane operators have their own system of very specific hand gestures for directing crane operations. The military has a host of standardized gestures. DJs/audio techs/musicians have a set for talking in loud environments.…

> The little girl in this vid managed to convey a very specific meaning to a passing ship using only a gesture. And it's SO specific that just reading that sentence, I knew exactly which meaning you meant, and which gesture. (Clicking the link to confirm was totally worth it though.) I've been on both ends of that gesture and it's always a hoot. > DJs/audio techs/musicians have a set for talking in loud environments.…

https://blog.sonicbids.com/8-jam-session-hand-signals-musici...

http://www.preservationsound.com/2010/09/microphone-hand-sig...

https://www.cybercollege.com/hand_sigs.htm

And any orchestra can follow a conductor, baton or not.

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