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The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

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Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#161

Post by jacobr1 »

SamBam wrote: post #79
rblatz wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my recollection cued speech and signed English both are controversial in the Deaf community. They are seen as clunky and forced on them by the hearing community. I think the biggest issue is that most languages including ASL have about the same informational density for a given unit of time. Whereas Cued Speech and Signed English have significantly lower informational density.

Isn't the purpose of cued speech not to replace ASL/other sign languages, but to add some support for a person who does not know ASL to speak clearly to a deaf person? If you're a teacher or a police officer or someone who needs to talk to all people, including deaf people, wouldn't learning the eight cues be a useful tool, even if you're not going to fully-learn ASL?

If the signs are just small set of cues for the most common phrases a police officer needs to convey, then why not just teach this as an ASL subset?

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#162

Post by uranium »

seniorgarcia wrote: post #150
z77dj3kl wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you explain it one more time? There is no one, universal sign language. For example, there is Australian Sign Language (Auslan), American Sign Language (ASL), etc. They're all different languages. I mean all spoken languages are just sounds, right? Sounds like one language to me, with multiple local dialects?

No, the type of sounds can be grouped into distinct language families and further down into language "branches". I just don't see (no pun intended) how this translates into different sign languages.

Any time you get enough deaf people in one place, who don't already have a signed language, they invent one. In times and places where signed languages have been suppressed, they've popped up all over the place at schools for the deaf. There's not much reason for any of the languages to share grammar and such with each other, since they're effectively unrelated. You wouldn't expect Japanese and Navaho to use similar grammar or vocabulary, right? Same here.

[Not Deaf, but I studied ASL and deaf culture for a few years at 2 colleges and in private lessons.]

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#163

Post by k_sze »

mabbo wrote: post #3

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…

Here’s another thing that surprised me until I experienced it first-hand: one-handed variant of sign language.

I rarely bump into deaf/mute people in Hong Kong. I once saw a guy holding his phone with one hand and doing sign language with the other because he was video chatting over the phone!

Of course, logically we don’t need the invention of mobile phone video chat to warrant the invention of one-handed sign language. You can just imagine some deaf/mute people holding groceries in one hand and still needing to talk. One shouldn’t have to expect them to drop the groceries on the floor in order to talk.

Nevertheless, it never occurred to me until I saw it.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#164

Post by k_sze »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #33
mabbo wrote: post #3

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…

Here's another apparent misconception: sign language === ASL. There are many sign languages and many more dialects.

Which makes me wonder: is there like an Esperanto of sign language? Is/was there any attempt to create one?

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#165

Post by nitrogen »

variaga wrote: post #152
swsieber wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I use signs (not ASL) to communicate with my dog. When she was a puppy, she was having trouble learning verbal commands, so I started pairing them with unique gestures, which worked much better. Eventually, I mostly dropped the verbal part and now we just use gestures. 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",…

I suspect that at least some dog owners who think they've verbally trained their dogs have actually trained them (and the dog has trained the owner in return) based on body language and gestures they don't consciously know they are making, or at best through intonation rather than actual spoken command words.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#166

Post by jcrawfordor »

SamBam wrote: post #81
CivBase wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1, 3 and 4 are true for sign languages as well That's true so long as the speaker is the one signing, which is probably true in the context of video calls but probably not in the context of TV.

I believe 4 is. At least, in the sense that intent, rhythm and emotion can be conveyed by a signing translator better than text can.

I've specifically heard from a deaf person that they much prefer a sign interpreter over captions because the sign interpreter can convey nuance and mood more reliably than captioning.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#167

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

hibbelig wrote: post #88
CivBase wrote: post #22

Perhaps someone on HN knows the answer to a question I've had for years now. Why use sign language on platforms where text is accessible? I've wondered this since I first saw a TV broadcast with a signer off to the side. Isn't that what closed captions are for? Surely it's faster to read text captions than the gestures of some low-res recording of a human stuck in a tiny box in the corner of the screen. Video chat pl…

> _Why use sign language on platforms where text is accessible?_ I'm not an expert, but I suppose that text is a foreign language to those born deaf. They might prefer to communicate in their native language. (But if someone has lost their hearing after learning to read and write, then it would be different.)

Sign languages can convey information more compactly than a textual description. Objects can be given spatial relations that requires (relatively) elaborate descriptions with text.

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#168

Post by codyogden »

k_sze wrote: post #164
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's another apparent misconception: sign language === ASL. There are many sign languages and many more dialects.

Which makes me wonder: is there like an Esperanto of sign language? Is/was there any attempt to create one?

Kind of. International Sign[0] is a pidgin language that came together in the early 1950s at the first World Deaf Congress. It was more formalized in the 70s. However, it's never used in a day-to-day fashion (like at home or school), so people don't adopt native fluency.

It's not perfect, but it does help resolve communication barriers at large world Deaf-culture events like the Deaf Olympics.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#169

Post by codyogden »

bluGill wrote: post #52
gnuvince wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know much of anything about ASL, but seeing David Cowan at some press conferences in Georgia made me a bit curious. There's a nice video of him on Youtube[1] where he explains that deaf people's native language is ASL, and not English. That was absolutely flabbergasting to me, because I had always imagine, like you said, that it was just "do this gesture to mean this word and this gesture for this other word…

It is more complex than that. ASL comes from french sign language, and so was always different from British sign language, and I suspect the grammar roots make sense in french. However since then things have diverged to the point that you can't really say there is anything in common with french sign language. Sign language only has a few (thousands) of signs. For the rest the signer finger spells the word they need,…

> Sign language only has a few (thousands) of signs. For the rest the signer finger spells the word they need, if they will use that word again they make up a new sign (often the first letter in a specific position).

I'm not sure where this information comes from, but doesn't quite seem correct. A sign is much more involved than simple vocabulary, and qualified signs exist outside the concept of a one-to-one, sign-to-word relationship.

There are five parameters to any sign: handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual communication (e.g. grammar, tone, and emotion). These parameters are all in use for every signed vocab word you can think of, but they're also used in idioms, whole phrases, classifiers, depictions, and even lexicalized English words that have incorporated fingerspelling elements with other parameters to create complete, separate, non-vocabulary signs of their own (e.g. KILLED, PIZZA, BUZZ, COMMON).

Re: The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language

#170

Post by codyogden »

tyingq wrote: post #133
_nalply wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing of omitting grammar: That's simply not true, I am sorry. Signed languages have a complex visual grammar. Words are inflected in many ways. I am a somewhat native speaker of the local signed language, and I sometimes discover that I uttered something I couldn't translate into German (the local oral language) without losing some meaning. This usually concerns dynamics, location and emotion. One example, I exp…

Perhaps there's a better way to characterize it? I'm talking about stuff like this for ASL: You look surprised => You look surprise They came here recently => Recent they come

You're asking about Subject-Object-Verb order.
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