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Super powers Sign Language -> communicate with someone in a noisy room (across the room even) Braille -> A friend of mine learned braille so he could "read" books after his parents said lights out. What a rebel.
Braille books are quite expensive though, aren't they? Did they already have braille books around the house for someone else?
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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 ...
You know what signing is amazing for? Teaching babies to communicate before they have proper vocal control (preverbal is the term I think). We're talking useful communication at under a year. Something like 9-12 months.
Her vocabulary is small (she's a dog), but we have gestures for e.g. "sit", "lie down", "stand back up", "stay", "come here", "go there", "be quiet", "show me what the problem is".
(She's a Siberian Husky)
Two quick misconceptions to call out for those less familiar with signed languages: 1. ASL is not just English with each word replaced with a sign. It's an incredibly complex language with different grammatical rules, some of which don't have English equivalents. 2. It's incredibly flexible. Many core grammar components will remain consistent, but often if you drive to another city, many words/signs will be different…
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 ...
Seriously, they haven't even tried to come up with a better system. Like.... pictures on the glass that you can point to? A form with checkboxes that you can hand over? Nope, we're going stick with yelling our lungs out.
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I would guess that has more to do with speaking in private rather than anything else. If one knows that the black guy or the fat guy or someone who loves them won't hear them, they'll refer to them however they would like. Same goes for anyone who speaks a minority language; I've had a few very good eastern European and Asian friends who told me later how I was being referred to by somebody who seemed entirely civil…
I don't think so. My deaf BSL instructor said that it was about being understood clearly, and just about deaf culture. If you're in a room of people signing everyone can see you're saying "who is the fat guy at the bar" so there's no point in being euphemistic. Might be a UK deaf culture thing.
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> 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.
Also re-reading this thread, I thought of the hand signals that every driver must learn in case their electrical turn signals go out, which are the same as bicyclist signals. Specific to the point of being enshrined in law.
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> That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself". This is fascinating. Do you have an examples that stick out?
So from my memory of ASL in college there was less worry about being rude or not offending. So if you were asked who someone was, you would start with their most identifiable feature. So if they are the only black guy in the room, or the most over weight you’d sign the black guy or the fat guy. Whereas in English it’s basically a joke now that we’d use just about any other descriptor besides those.
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> It’s absolutely bonkers that two fairly different sign languages exist for the same base spoken language Historically speaking, it's because of British snobbery, allegedly. This is how my ASL professor told us it at least. American Thomas Gallaudet went to the British school for the Deaf hoping to learn BSL, etc. But it was not long after the American Revolution and the British weren't very friendly and wouldn't he…
Thomas Gallaudet was accompanied by a French Deaf person, Laurent Clerc, who later died in Washington DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurent_Clerc
Does anyone know of a good web based videoconferencing system that does 1080p or 4K, at close to 30fps? Ideally it wouldn't require some big subscription plan, either. Meet maxes out at 720p (it's that or 320p) and what seems like a single-digit frame rate. Zoom doesn't seem much better. I don't know sign language but I have a lot of bandwidth (and am wired) and I'm tired of calls optimized for 1-5mbps wifi. Even cal…
We bought the Logitech gear for a Zoom Room years ago for our office. It was a 4K camera and participants in meetings would frequently remark on the high quality video stream. Of course, we also had a symmetric gigabit fiber connection so that probably helped.
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Swedish sign language used to be my native language due to having a deaf sister. After relocating to another part of the world and discussing languages, it surprised me how many times I had (have) to explain how "sign language" is not a language. That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself".
>>explain how "sign language" is not a language Can you explain it one more time? >>That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself". That does sound like most languages though. So maybe sign language is a language and everything local is just a dialect? I'm sorry if I come of insensitive but I don't get it.
The symbol for 1 in different orthographies, such as: 1 I ١ ― 𒐕 一 etc ...
The words for father/mother are often a bilabial and open syllable combination regardless of language family origin.
The point is that while the details of the languages (sign, oral, written) could be different, there are some human affinities that make provide commonality. Another meta-pattern might that common words in many languages are often monosyllabic, though this is less universal than the two examples I gave above AFAIK.