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.
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.
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[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.
Yeah, but I was thinking at people with non standard accents, there a large number of people outside US that make Youtube videos and their accent is tricking the AI and the automatic subs will contain random words. The AI will have a big bias against non US creators or even US people with an accent that is not popular in the Google training data.
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 <x>" 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.
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.
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.
Schools too have a different version: "the school version of Teams". What's terrifying about Microsoft tailoring their product to (very) large customer segments?
(If you're wondering what my source is... I am a student and my school uses MS Teams).
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. But signers adapt to these changes quickly.
Those two things make this article all the more interesting, because it's a great example of how the flexibility and unique properties of ASL allows for adaptation in circumstances like these strange times.
Source: three years, almost a minor, in ASL in University. I'm no expert, but I truly enjoy the language.
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.
I feel like the alphabet + literacy does a decent job at creating phonological awareness already.
The value proposition of CS is language accessibility to Deaf/HoH people while still using English.
ASL, which comes with its own body of literature, puns, jokes, culture, etc., wasn't designed in the sense that Cued Speech was, but offers something much more valuable, in my opinion.
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?
Maybe, but I don't see the point. Speaking with your hands is weird no matter what you are doing. Learning ASL signs instead of something else is that much harder, and ASL is a lot richer than either.
Of course I can't claim any ability in ASL. When taking the baby sign language classes my teacher was very insistent that to the baby what sign you use doesn't matter, but we should use ASL signs because learning any other sign isn't any easier, and this way we have a few dozen signs that are actually useful after the baby grows up. Which is the point: if you learn some signs of ASL you can communicate better than pointing. When you learn something else your are just pointing and hoping you are understood.
Did you watch the video on Cued Speech? It's not a set of signs for common phrases at all. It's simply a small set of gestures that accompany some of the hard-to-lip-read sounds, like /m/ /p/ /b/.
So if you're saying "mat" "bat" or "pat" those all look the same to a lip-reader. With the cues, you have a small gesture that is distinct for /m/ /p/ /b/.
They combine together to make a total of about a dozen gestures that can be used to differentiate between any hard-to-understand English word.
So it's not a phrase book. It just allows you to say anything you want to say and be understood a little more clearly by a lip-reader.
Without knowing anything about deaf attitudes in general, I've learned to not mistake the loudest and angriest voices in a group as representative of all of it.
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.
I'm not sure on the "very specific" part. We use some general, non-specific signs ("OK", "good" [thumbs up, depending on your cultural background and situation]).
We, the hearing community in my country (UK), use gestures too of course.
Could you give a few examples of signs hearing people use where you are that you consider "very specific"?
>>> 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.
Whoah, really? I've improvised plenty, but I'm super curious if there's a standard set. You can always figure out "make louder", "make quieter", point at objects, mimic certain instruments. But it'd be nice to have more vocabulary beyond that.
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.
Depends on context. A lot of workplaces have specific signs for use when hearing protection is worn: things like turn the machine off now, or I'm good to go. Airport ground control has a whole set of signs. Traffic cops also have their signs that everyone knows.
One way to distinguish between something like ASL and something like whatever system is used by e.g. scuba divers and airport staff is compositionality. (Developed) Natural language has many pieces that are "productive" to produce meaning from smaller meaningful units.
Way easier to hide. If you were brave enough, you could literally read braille under the covers with your eyes closed while your parent had their head stuck through the door to check on you.
I went to a high school where the drama department did at least one play a year in ASL. Brought in instructors from the local deaf community, and all the drama kids learned it.
This was also business genius, because it basically guaranteed ticket sales. A huge number of deaf people in the area would show up for every such play, year after year. Even parents with kids at the school generally stop coming to plays after their kids graduate, but this audience was loyal on the scale of decades.
It also meant that a significant chunk of the student body was now able to communicate in/across a noisy room. During assemblies and stuff, you'd see a dozen conversations in progress, not making a sound.
Or, communicate near-silently. Clothes rustle and certain signs involve patting, but neither of those sticks out the way voices do. Coordinating a prank behind the teacher's back....
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.
Somewhat. Babies do tend to learn a few signs, and it is useful when they can indicate what they need. However as soon as they learn to talk they universally forget everything. I know people fluent in sign (a large part of their job is working with the deaf), and when they sign to babies the babies are like "you idiot: I just heard you talking to someone else so don't insult my intelligence by not talking to me" The babies can't say something so complex, but you can tell from their reaction that is about what they are thinking.
Which is too bad, sign language would be useful in later life. Unless there is a deaf person in the babies life though they will refuse to have anything to do with it once they can speak.
> I know people fluent in sign (a large part of their job is working with the deaf), and when they sign to babies the babies are like "you idiot: I just heard you talking to someone else so don't insult my intelligence by not talking to me"
The way my friends have done this is to speak and sign, not just sign. I don't think any of them would've thought it was appropriate to only sign to a hearing child. The purpose was to teach them both the verbal language and a way to communicate back while they were still too young to verbalize (or, in one critical case, unable to speak due to a birth defect but were perfectly capable of hearing).
Babies do tend to learn a few signs...However as soon as they learn to talk they universally forget everything.
This was our experience with our young child. It helped to be able to say "more" and sometimes "please" and eventually "all done" but eventually spoken words replaced this communication form. My wife and I have two semesters worth of education under Deaf teachers but have no plans of pressing further on this as a second language for our son.
> However as soon as they learn to talk they universally forget everything.
A ridiculous assertion.
My son knows quite a few signs and often uses them alongside speaking, which can really help when he's struggling to be as clear (e.g. when he's frustrated).
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", "show me what the problem is".
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.
This is evidenced by the reaction a dog has when you say anything with the, "who's a good boy?!" tone. You could be saying the dog is a dork or dumb and they're just as excited. The tone and body language play a huge role.
My dog intuitively knows just about anything I could want her to do. She follows me (or my SO if they're home) rendering commands like "come" irrelevant. If I put on pants during the day, she idles back and forth between where I am getting ready and her kennel, finally opening the door herself when I'm ready to leave, then I latch the gate.
She has a pretty consistent schedule so most of the time, when we're doing something, she knows exactly what her role is. Another great example is treats. For the longest time we only made her sit to get treats, so now she basically does that. A few months ago, I wanted her to learn lie down but I paired it with sit first. So now if she hears the treat bag, she'll come over to me, wait for me to say one word, then she sits, then waits for another word, and then she lays down. However those words are meaningless to her. If I say, "Lay down" first, she sits. You get the idea!
That said, she's a great pup and very well behaved. :)
One great life pro tip is to reward Good Dog paired with a sign, e.g. "jazz hands", so if they start going deaf, they still know they are being praised.
It can be useful to have some signs, but don't confuse a few signs with a language. One like going to a foreign country and knowing how to ask where the bathroom is, and understanding because more their pointing than their words vs going to the country and getting into a discussion of something weird with a stranger that you just happen to meet.
Sign language is a real language you can learn the language. Or you can learn a few signs: there is a place for both, but know which place you are in and don't pretend more.
I think this occurs more in some countries than others, with low sign language awareness. Maybe the US especially due to monolinguality. It seems people love to assume things about other languages that are false and can be insulting. 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.
Another example, the notion that monkeys can "learn sign language". They can learn to use some signs, like a newborn can learn some words, but how would you feel as a French speaker if someone said "look, the monkey speaks French!" just because they taught the monkey some French words? It implies not that the monkey is smart, but that French is so simplistic that even monkeys can understand it.
> 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 annunciate clearly.
When I lived in Chile as a teen, I also asked people to do the same thing frequently until I became proficient. I still ask sometimes in other Spanish-speaking countries because their accent or dialect differs from what my ears are most used to.
Speaking slowly and clearly to anyone learning a language is incredibly useful and is not insulting in any way.
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.
I had a similar experience while learning German. Berliners talk very quickly and I'd frequently request "Sprechen Sie langsam, bitte" aka speak slowly please. Unfortunately they'd usually switch to English after that, but when the speaker would stick it out with me I'd come away feeling like I'd gotten a little better with the language.
I know exactly what you mean. My gf works at a school for the deaf and we're both hearing.... and I'm sensitive to this pensiveness you mention. Three reasons: there is so much bad info out there, asl and deaf culture are evolving as we observe, and hardly anyone is cataloging or curating the info. There are no ambassadors. It parallels health information imo. I guess I should add the contemporary attitude of self-righteousness on the u.s. when ppl learn sth abt any other group they tend to shove it others' faces. E.g. knowing that it was Illegal to drive a car with headphones on, I once dared to ask if deaf ppl were allowed to drive. Instead if a simple yes, I got chewed out by a hearing person for my ignorance.
If I were to try to come up with a rationale, I guess it would be if you are able to hear, you have a duty to make your hearing available to increase safety. But, we won't automatically remove the right to drive from someone who can't hear as well or at all.
Because I have gone to see films in a number of languages I do not understand but they were sub-titled. I can't remember going to one that was not anime, and then not hearing someone complaining about having to read the dialogue.
These films (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and German) all clearly had posters at the theaters saying they were sub-titles and yet there was always someone demanding the movie be in English.
Also I think a number of people have poor/slow reading skills that they can't bluff about when someone uses signing.
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.
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 but have two semesters of ASL education).
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."
> using a language those around you don't speak can be rude,
Like generally in public? Or when you're in a social group with others?
For the first scenario, I'd almost always speak a second language if I could, for privacy reasons. And also because it's less distracting to others IMO - people tune out unfamiliar languages as noise but not conversations they can understand. But yeah it's rude in the second scenario.
The downside in public is that the people who notice you're speaking another language will assume that you're talking about them and don't want to be overheard by the victim.
It is less of a big deal than when you're in a social group, where someone could feel that you are deliberately excluding them.
I was at a (seated) concert once, and the large family next to me would sign to each other to communicate without making noise. Signing has some nice advantages over whispering: you can sign to an entire group at once, but you can only whisper to one person at a time.
It would be awfully useful if both sandwich-eaters and sandwich-makers could learn the signs for, for example, spinach, chipotle, mustard, mayo, wrap, ciabatta, red onion, and so on. At my favorite sandwich counter, a full year into the pandemic, people are still communicating with the staff by yelling at them from 3 feet away from a plexiglass barrier, while everyone is wearing masks and everyone else in the store is yelling as well.
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.
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, if they will use that word again they make up a new sign (often the first letter in a specific position). If a word is commonly used it will eventually enter the language in that city, and may or may not spread to other parts of the country/world. Obviously the finger spelling is the word in the spoken language not sign language.
Warning, don't make up words in sign language until you are somewhat an expert. I know of a novice who needed to talk about a person named Ryan, so they gave Ryan a sign - not realizing that sign was already used for retard.
> 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).
This is used for specialized words. A doctor needing to go into detail about a specifc cancer. A programer taking about the implementation of a garbage collector.
To add to what bluGill commented, there is "Signed English" which is word for word translation, there is ASL (or other signed languages), and there is a spectrum in between!
And there can be disagreements in the Deaf community about, for lack of a better word, 'purity' of the language. Is it 'okay' to just sign English words with English grammar? Is there an ethical or moral imperative to maintain ASL as a language and not just a translation of another language? And then you have one person telling another person that there's something wrong with how they communicate their native language! Language overlapping with culture overlapping with disability (or different-ability?) overlapping with people being people.
Thanks for your explanation, however it left me with additional question as to its value when politicians/government use a sign language interpreter in speeches. If it's so nuanced and regional, wouldn't reading English text translation be better/clearer?
Don't assume all deaf people are good readers. Text is enough different from ASL that learning to read is like learning a foreign language. Some learn to read well, but some do not. If you want the later to understand you, then text is the wrong answer.
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".
> 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.
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.
Based on my very limited experience and the posts above, I'd say sign languages don't really have the luxury of having many "synonyms" with slightly different connotations, at least in the same way you'd list words in a dictionary. jbergstroem mentions "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself", so I think the idea is people just say things how they are, in simple terms. I imagine ideas like politeness are instead conveyed in other body language, facial expressions maybe, instead of dancing with words.
But I'm just speculating, I'd love to hear someone's firsthand experiences here.
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 languages like English is (English has a weirdly large vocabulary, like 3 times as large as some other languages). ASL is a direct descendant of French SL, no weird mixing. Moroccan SL, in contrast, is a descendent/hybrid of several languages and it, as an example, has like a million different handshapes for different kinds of insects.
Further, a word-sentence model is too limited to describe sign languages (I know this applies ASL and Moroccan SL, not sure about others). For example, a large set of concepts are expressed through classifiers. Classifiers are systems of hand-shapes, spatial locations (e.g. side of head vs in front of chest), and motions which can specify a objects (including its shape, size, and location) and also the objects’s verb and relationship with other objects. Some people mistakenly think classifiers are a form of pantomime, but classifier motions and hand shapes have specified and limited meanings (e.g. the flat rectangular object classifier is not making a rectangle shape, it’s more of a pinching motion). That’s just one example of how sign languages diverge from a word-sentence model, many more differences exist.
The main take away is that sign languages work differently from spoken languages, it’s not that easy to compare 1-to-1. There’s definitely no word that means “rotund” in ASL, but there are certainly grammar structures that let you express that.
Although you could, there’s no need to soften or euphemize physical characteristics in American Deaf culture. You can just sign “that fat person over there” and it’s not considered rude.
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.
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 in English.
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.
>>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.
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.]
There certainly are relationships between sign languages; A(merican)SL and French SL are arguably two dialects of the same language, or at least they were in relatively recent memory. Others are distantly related or unrelated; B(ritish)SL is absolutely unintelligible to signers of ASL and arose separately, for instance. Many of the modern global sign languages are related to one or the other of those families (and might be "dialects" as you want to call them, or might be further apart and thus merely "related languages"), but there are a few others that are not, including one—Nicaraguan Sign Language—that arose from scratch less than 40 years ago.
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.
There's a fascinating history on the spread of sign languages around the world to different deaf communities. IIR most sign languages derive from only a couple source languages and have very little relation to the local native language.
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.
I live in the UK and we have BSL (British Sign Language).
It’s absolutely bonkers that two fairly different sign languages exist for the same base spoken language.
That said, BSL uses a lot of facial cues, not just hands and arms, to allow for a range expression. Eg puffing out your cheeks to accentuate certain words.
> 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 help him. So he went to France and the French taught him (Old) French Sign Language. FSL became the basis of ASL, along with a number of local influences from Martha's Vineyard sign language (a small locally developed signed language).
Even then, a friend of mine from university who is very hard of hearing and mostly signs told me that on a trip to Britain he met some British Deaf people at a bar and by the end of the night was mostly fluent. There's enough overlap and enough shared experience between Deaf people that one can learn very quickly.
> That said, BSL uses a lot of facial cues, not just hands and arms, to allow for a range expression. Eg puffing out your cheeks to accentuate certain words.
This is 100% common to all Signed languages. Facial cues are huge in ASL. Before class, not joking, I would practice in the mirror to warm myself up. My first ASL prof described it by saying that in English, you could read off each word like a robot, with no inflection or tone- and that would be the same as signing with just your hands.
These comments are fascinating and suddenly make me realize how important Thomas Galludet was for the deaf and hence the name of his eponymous university.
> It’s absolutely bonkers that two fairly different sign languages exist for the same base spoken language.
Sign languages are not based off of spoken languages. Sign languages are languages with their own grammar and vocabulary. They are not a method of encoding spoken language like writing is. The history of Nicaraguan Sign Language is a great example of this. In the 70s the government of Nicaragua set up a school for the deaf focused on teaching its students to fingerspell Spanish. Instead, the students spontaneously created their own sign language.
I'd add in a third bullet noting that sign languages generally favor omitting unnecessary grammar, structure, etc.
Like "I love you" as [love sign] -> [point at person you love].
Or for example that "very" might exist in a signed language, but isn't often used. Just substituted with a more physically animated/vigorous version of the adjective, or added facial expression.
Some go even further - my daughter uses Makaton, which is a sign (and symbol) language designed for people that have difficulty communicating (for different reasons, including cognitive impairment and neurological problems). In general the idea is to only use as many signs as you need, although of course you can amend depending on who is communicating.
As a point of note, Makaton is used at least a little at a lot of primary schools in Scotland (I would guess across the rest of the UK too), as a "supplementary language" for all kids.
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 explained my son how to use the chairlift and how the chairlift will take off.
Linguists have discovered that this is not pantomime. I forgot how they named the complicated movements but I remember it is something like a cluster of micro utterances.
Your example of «I love you» is an example of inflection. You can vary this sign, to indicate a special dynamic, for example «for a long time», «slowly increasing in intensity», «and you, too, sincerely and deeply», and many others.
Maybe you meant glosses? Usually they are all written uppercased. However glosses often omit grammar or better said they aren't inflected because they can't capture raised eyebrows and other non-manual information.
It's not about the order of words but that grandparent seems to have misunderstood something about glosses. He is thinking that grammar is simplified. It is difficult for written glosses to express the complete grammar spectrum of Signed Languages.
It's unfortunate and similar to the Blub paradox: some people will unavoidably believe that Signed Languages have a simple grammar similar to Chinese when looking at glosses.
Additionally, my local Signed Language (Swiss German Sign Language) has quite a free order. Often topic-comment is applied. An example:
The word «quite» is omitted because it's an inflection. In SGSL I would make a slightly kissing mouth, lower the eyelids somewhat and make very small and fast nodding movements.
That's not Subject-Object-Verb order.
Additionally there is a slight shift between WEATHER and THINK, it's difficult to explain, but perhaps a colon after WEATHER would help. WEATHER: THINK FINE. This what I called «shift» is an inflection: it puts the word WEATHER in topic mode.
Caveat emptor: I am not a linguist, but always have been very interested in linguistics and talk SGSL every day.
Hi. Yes. Degree in American Sign Language. Lived at a deaf school two years. Fully aware of glosses, etc. OP was posting about Subject-Verb-Object order which changes based on the subject or object being the topic of the sentence or active/passive voice.
No, it is both. Grammar that is mandatory in English is optional in ASL. At the same time there is a lot of grammar in ASL that covers things that takes several sentences in English to get out.
This isn't unusual. Even in spoken languages the required grammar are often different. Even in English some areas there are some contexts where "the" is mandatory in some geographical areas and not others. Linguists can give you a Phd if you want to study this more.
> Grammar that is mandatory in English is optional in ASL.
You can't relate the two languages like this. Sorry, this doesn't make sense. For example, ASL doesn't have articles, English doesn't have location dependent pronouns for people.
You absolutely can do this (unless I am misunderstanding your point in which case, my apologies).
That's why there are dozens of journals in things like linguistic typology and language variation and change. There are linguists whose entire careers have been generating a sort of conceptual mapping between the morphology, syntax and phonology of spoken languages to sign languages so that you can have sensible conversations about the typological relationship between a signed language and a spoken one.
See the research of eg Diane Brentari at Chicago or Diane Lillo-Martin at UConn or Wendy Sandler at UT Austin.
The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language is a very revealing case is this regard: in much the same process as creolization, a sort of "pidgin" of home signs was transformed into a full sign language in a generation by "grammaticalizing" gestures and simple home signs from older children by the younger children. So it doesn't take long for a gesture to move right on Kendon's continuum until its fully "linguistic".
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.
What do you consider speak? I know one phase in each of French and Russian - though I'm sure my accent is so bad natives would have trouble understanding me. I can read Spanish, and produce simple sentences that are not memorized, but I'm not on the level of a conversation. So how many languages do you want to say I speak? You can creditably argue 1,2, or 4 from the above.
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 calls that are primarily for audio could benefit from higher resolution/framerate video, I feel.
Discord supports 1080p@30fps screen sharing in DMs if you have Nitro classic (and 60fps in servers), but I can't tell if that also applies to your camera.
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.
Jitsi can support 1080p at 30fps, I'm not sure if it goes higher. However you may need to host your own as meet.jit.si has some quality restrictions (although it is pretty good looking for general use). Also note that most laptops only come with a shitty 720p webcam so unless you have a nice camera you won't see much improvement.
Those seem like reasonable adaptations, but i think Zoom has missed an opportunity here, we all need some kind of sign language with video calls. Where is my "Yes", "No" button, or other instant ways to communicate common things without having to turn on the mic or type in chat ?
I know what you mean and you are right, but in our team we signal trivial stuff like yes/no with gestures, without turning on mics/interrupting speakers.
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 platforms like Zoom almost always have a text chat feature. Although at least for those I can see how it might be faster and more personable for many to sign than type.
A few reasons:
1) You loose facial expression communication
2) Its slower to digest (small/slow text scrolling across bottom of screen)
3) Its harder to learn to read as the process is aided by phonetics
It's faster to read text than to listen to someone speak, yet speech remains popular. There are aspects of communication which are not easily replicated in text -- sign languages do not lack the semantic information that is provided in speech by the tone, pitch, and rhythm of voice which is not, for the most part, reflected directly in grammar (in English, anyways). These components take other forms (expression and aspect, primarily) in ASL.
> It's faster to read text than to listen to someone speak, yet speech remains popular.
I suspect there are a few reason for that beyond the explanations you gave.
1) Speech is faster to produce than text. Professional captioners are among the few who can challenge that. For everyone else, it's usually faster to give a speech or say what's on your mind than to type it all out.
2) Speech frees up the eyes. My vision is usually in greater demand than my hearing, so I prefer to avoid committing it to a single activity for a long time if possible. Unfortunately, that's not an option for those without hearing.
3) Speech is easier to attribute to individuals. I can determine who said something with minimal effort just by listening to the sound of their voice.
4) Speech is more immersive for narrative content. Movies and TV shows feel more believable when characters are talking with each other face-to-face like they would in real life.
Unfortunately, a signer in the corner can't make up for any of those factors.
I think these are reasonable. I should highlight, though, that 1, 3 and 4 are true for sign languages as well -- 3 and 4 doubly so (given how large a component individual expressions and gestures play in communication without sound).
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.
As someone who watches subbed TV and movies frequently, it wouldn't particularly bother me. I prefer audio in my native language so I have the luxury of being able to take my eyes off the screen for a moment now and then, but that's not really an option when it comes to sign language.
The simple answer is that language can't be captured in text alone.
Think of how expressive language is. You can say the same sentence 3 different ways, where the real meaning is trapped in the tone, intonation, pitch, and emotion.
Think of how dynamic and expressive the word "fuck" is... Probably the most versatile and complex word in the English language.
In addition to what others have said, text encodes oral language well but is not necessarily a good fit for sign languages. I guess it might be like writing a non-Latin scripted language using Latin letters?
Because the native language of the deaf is sign language. Spoken language has very little in common with sign language. Text is a written form of a spoken language for those who hear so it isn't too hard to learn. For someone who can't hear it is completely different from anything.
Imagine the time where you knew something of a second language, but were not fluent yet (some of you may have never tried, but most people have done at least a little of a foreign language), watching a program in that language with subtitles in that language. That is what text subtitles are for a lot of deaf.
Asl is actually a diff language than English. Surprisingly, ma y ppl can understand the asl but not the textual English. For many people English is a 2nd language they understand less well than asl.
Closed captions aren't universally available, and live captions are often pretty awful (captions for recorded content are often fairly awful).
I recall seeing interpretters on TV during special broadcasts a lot, but then they were mostly replaced by open captions or (presumably) closed captions as captioning became generally available. I'd guess there's a bigger pool of skilled captioners than skilled interpretters, but it's also a lot easier to find someone on staff who can type fast to caption in a pinch.
All that said, I do see some very special events with interpretters still, and I apprechiate that, even though I don't sign.
Many people who rely on ASL are illiterate. Turns out a phonetic portrayal of language they don't know isn't the easiest to learn, assuming they have the support to do it. Sign language exists because it is the best tool for the job.
Sign languages can convey information more compactly than a textual description. Objects can be given spatial relations that requires (relatively) elaborate descriptions with text.
Because I have gone to see films in a number of languages I do not understand but they were sub-titled. I can't remember going to one that was not anime, and then not hearing someone complaining about having to read the dialogue.
These films (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and German) all clearly had posters at the theaters saying they were sub-titles and yet there was always someone demanding the movie be in English.
Also I think a number of people have poor/slow reading skills that they can't bluff about when someone uses signing.
The best part of Zoom for deaf people is the automatic captioning.
There is one big downside of using generic video chat for signing - it’s usually optimized for clear audio, not clear video. When the connection gets weak, Zoom will drop frames but try to preserve audio. For the deaf, dropping audio is of course not a problem but dropping frames means they miss a key word in the sentence.
There are other problems with video for hearing people.
One example is WhatsApp providing an audio record button in the lower right corner of the screen. I always keep hitting the button by mistake. If I had a user script I would remove that button.
Another one is recording videos. If there were an embarrasing noise like a fart I would be obliviously send the video to someone hearing.
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 moving in your direction) carries the information about the pronouns.
At the very least, the layout on each person's screen could be consistent so that person A is always at location 1, and so on. That might restore some sense of shared space.
This shows up as a pain-point even in a spoken-language setting. If everyone is introducing themselves, what order do they go in?
> 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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 279 ms ] threadhttps://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=6...
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[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.
The government version of Teams still does not have live subtitles last I checked.
(If you're wondering what my source is... I am a student and my school uses MS Teams).
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. But signers adapt to these changes quickly.
Those two things make this article all the more interesting, because it's a great example of how the flexibility and unique properties of ASL allows for adaptation in circumstances like these strange times.
Source: three years, almost a minor, in ASL in University. I'm no expert, but I truly enjoy the language.
"I love you", "Food?", "Tea?" (we're tea drinkers) are commonly used in my home.
The value proposition of CS is language accessibility to Deaf/HoH people while still using English.
ASL, which comes with its own body of literature, puns, jokes, culture, etc., wasn't designed in the sense that Cued Speech was, but offers something much more valuable, in my opinion.
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.
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?
Of course I can't claim any ability in ASL. When taking the baby sign language classes my teacher was very insistent that to the baby what sign you use doesn't matter, but we should use ASL signs because learning any other sign isn't any easier, and this way we have a few dozen signs that are actually useful after the baby grows up. Which is the point: if you learn some signs of ASL you can communicate better than pointing. When you learn something else your are just pointing and hoping you are understood.
So if you're saying "mat" "bat" or "pat" those all look the same to a lip-reader. With the cues, you have a small gesture that is distinct for /m/ /p/ /b/.
They combine together to make a total of about a dozen gestures that can be used to differentiate between any hard-to-understand English word.
So it's not a phrase book. It just allows you to say anything you want to say and be understood a little more clearly by a lip-reader.
You doubtless already use many signs. They may not be ASL but we do use a variety of hand gestures to convey very specific meanings.
We, the hearing community in my country (UK), use gestures too of course.
Could you give a few examples of signs hearing people use 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.
https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/safety_haz/materials_handlin...
https://armynavyoutdoors.com/blog/learn-military-hand-signal...
The little girl in this vid managed to convey a very specific meaning to a passing ship using only a gesture.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETrWMvicKps
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.
Whoah, really? I've improvised plenty, but I'm super curious if there's a standard set. You can always figure out "make louder", "make quieter", point at objects, mimic certain instruments. But it'd be nice to have more vocabulary beyond that.
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.
I don't think "flipping the bird" is specific, it's either "I'm a jerk" or "I'm angry [with you]" but they both seem pretty wide ranging.
Pointing is really none specific, do you want it, want to look at it, want someone else to hold it, etc..
Military and crane operator signs seem like they're limited sign languages. Excellent example.
Driving is a good one, but it's 3 specific signs, and then pointing. I'm often annoyed that other drivers don't know BSL!
Thanks for illustrating the point, very helpful.
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 is just a writing system. Signed languages are generally not.
I went to a high school where the drama department did at least one play a year in ASL. Brought in instructors from the local deaf community, and all the drama kids learned it.
This was also business genius, because it basically guaranteed ticket sales. A huge number of deaf people in the area would show up for every such play, year after year. Even parents with kids at the school generally stop coming to plays after their kids graduate, but this audience was loyal on the scale of decades.
It also meant that a significant chunk of the student body was now able to communicate in/across a noisy room. During assemblies and stuff, you'd see a dozen conversations in progress, not making a sound.
Or, communicate near-silently. Clothes rustle and certain signs involve patting, but neither of those sticks out the way voices do. Coordinating a prank behind the teacher's back....
Which is too bad, sign language would be useful in later life. Unless there is a deaf person in the babies life though they will refuse to have anything to do with it once they can speak.
The way my friends have done this is to speak and sign, not just sign. I don't think any of them would've thought it was appropriate to only sign to a hearing child. The purpose was to teach them both the verbal language and a way to communicate back while they were still too young to verbalize (or, in one critical case, unable to speak due to a birth defect but were perfectly capable of hearing).
A ridiculous assertion.
My son knows quite a few signs and often uses them alongside speaking, which can really help when he's struggling to be as clear (e.g. when he's frustrated).
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)
My dog intuitively knows just about anything I could want her to do. She follows me (or my SO if they're home) rendering commands like "come" irrelevant. If I put on pants during the day, she idles back and forth between where I am getting ready and her kennel, finally opening the door herself when I'm ready to leave, then I latch the gate.
She has a pretty consistent schedule so most of the time, when we're doing something, she knows exactly what her role is. Another great example is treats. For the longest time we only made her sit to get treats, so now she basically does that. A few months ago, I wanted her to learn lie down but I paired it with sit first. So now if she hears the treat bag, she'll come over to me, wait for me to say one word, then she sits, then waits for another word, and then she lays down. However those words are meaningless to her. If I say, "Lay down" first, she sits. You get the idea!
That said, she's a great pup and very well behaved. :)
Sign language is a real language you can learn the language. Or you can learn a few signs: there is a place for both, but know which place you are in and don't pretend more.
Another example, the notion that monkeys can "learn sign language". They can learn to use some signs, like a newborn can learn some words, but how would you feel as a French speaker if someone said "look, the monkey speaks French!" just because they taught the monkey some French words? It implies not that the monkey is smart, but that French is so simplistic that even monkeys can understand it.
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 annunciate clearly.
When I lived in Chile as a teen, I also asked people to do the same thing frequently until I became proficient. I still ask sometimes in other Spanish-speaking countries because their accent or dialect differs from what my ears are most used to.
Speaking slowly and clearly to anyone learning a language is incredibly useful and is not insulting in any way.
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.
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.
Did you ever get an actual answer? I'd guess yes, but it's a fair question
These films (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and German) all clearly had posters at the theaters saying they were sub-titles and yet there was always someone demanding the movie be in English.
Also I think a number of people have poor/slow reading skills that they can't bluff about when someone uses signing.
You can learn from YouTube, a sign dictionary (online ones have video) ... but yes, conversation is probably the best way.
A night class or MOOC?
Noisy places, when I’m brushing my teeth, when I want to be more discrete in public, communicating across a room without yelling.
Which would have been handy at one point for me.
Like generally in public? Or when you're in a social group with others?
For the first scenario, I'd almost always speak a second language if I could, for privacy reasons. And also because it's less distracting to others IMO - people tune out unfamiliar languages as noise but not conversations they can understand. But yeah it's rude in the second scenario.
It is less of a big deal than when you're in a social group, where someone could feel that you are deliberately excluding them.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd5JGN1jno8
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). If a word is commonly used it will eventually enter the language in that city, and may or may not spread to other parts of the country/world. Obviously the finger spelling is the word in the spoken language not sign language.
Warning, don't make up words in sign language until you are somewhat an expert. I know of a novice who needed to talk about a person named Ryan, so they gave Ryan a sign - not realizing that sign was already used for retard.
Plausible deniability here.
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).
And there can be disagreements in the Deaf community about, for lack of a better word, 'purity' of the language. Is it 'okay' to just sign English words with English grammar? Is there an ethical or moral imperative to maintain ASL as a language and not just a translation of another language? And then you have one person telling another person that there's something wrong with how they communicate their native language! Language overlapping with culture overlapping with disability (or different-ability?) overlapping with people being people.
There's no easy answers. But it's fascinating.
There are many sign languages and many more dialects.
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?
But I'm just speculating, I'd love to hear someone's firsthand experiences here.
Another reason ASL has fewer synonyms is that it’s not a horrible amalgamation of a ton of different languages like English is (English has a weirdly large vocabulary, like 3 times as large as some other languages). ASL is a direct descendant of French SL, no weird mixing. Moroccan SL, in contrast, is a descendent/hybrid of several languages and it, as an example, has like a million different handshapes for different kinds of insects.
Further, a word-sentence model is too limited to describe sign languages (I know this applies ASL and Moroccan SL, not sure about others). For example, a large set of concepts are expressed through classifiers. Classifiers are systems of hand-shapes, spatial locations (e.g. side of head vs in front of chest), and motions which can specify a objects (including its shape, size, and location) and also the objects’s verb and relationship with other objects. Some people mistakenly think classifiers are a form of pantomime, but classifier motions and hand shapes have specified and limited meanings (e.g. the flat rectangular object classifier is not making a rectangle shape, it’s more of a pinching motion). That’s just one example of how sign languages diverge from a word-sentence model, many more differences exist.
The main take away is that sign languages work differently from spoken languages, it’s not that easy to compare 1-to-1. There’s definitely no word that means “rotund” in ASL, but there are certainly grammar structures that let you express that.
Although you could, there’s no need to soften or euphemize physical characteristics in American Deaf culture. You can just sign “that fat person over there” and it’s not considered rude.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_Sign_Lan...
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.
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.
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?
[Not Deaf, but I studied ASL and deaf culture for a few years at 2 colleges and in private lessons.]
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.
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
It’s absolutely bonkers that two fairly different sign languages exist for the same base spoken language.
That said, BSL uses a lot of facial cues, not just hands and arms, to allow for a range expression. Eg puffing out your cheeks to accentuate certain words.
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 help him. So he went to France and the French taught him (Old) French Sign Language. FSL became the basis of ASL, along with a number of local influences from Martha's Vineyard sign language (a small locally developed signed language).
Even then, a friend of mine from university who is very hard of hearing and mostly signs told me that on a trip to Britain he met some British Deaf people at a bar and by the end of the night was mostly fluent. There's enough overlap and enough shared experience between Deaf people that one can learn very quickly.
> That said, BSL uses a lot of facial cues, not just hands and arms, to allow for a range expression. Eg puffing out your cheeks to accentuate certain words.
This is 100% common to all Signed languages. Facial cues are huge in ASL. Before class, not joking, I would practice in the mirror to warm myself up. My first ASL prof described it by saying that in English, you could read off each word like a robot, with no inflection or tone- and that would be the same as signing with just your hands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurent_Clerc
Sign languages are not based off of spoken languages. Sign languages are languages with their own grammar and vocabulary. They are not a method of encoding spoken language like writing is. The history of Nicaraguan Sign Language is a great example of this. In the 70s the government of Nicaragua set up a school for the deaf focused on teaching its students to fingerspell Spanish. Instead, the students spontaneously created their own sign language.
Like "I love you" as [love sign] -> [point at person you love].
Or for example that "very" might exist in a signed language, but isn't often used. Just substituted with a more physically animated/vigorous version of the adjective, or added facial expression.
As a point of note, Makaton is used at least a little at a lot of primary schools in Scotland (I would guess across the rest of the UK too), as a "supplementary language" for all kids.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makaton
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 explained my son how to use the chairlift and how the chairlift will take off.
Linguists have discovered that this is not pantomime. I forgot how they named the complicated movements but I remember it is something like a cluster of micro utterances.
Your example of «I love you» is an example of inflection. You can vary this sign, to indicate a special dynamic, for example «for a long time», «slowly increasing in intensity», «and you, too, sincerely and deeply», and many others.
You look surprised => You look surprise
They came here recently => Recent they come
It's not about the order of words but that grandparent seems to have misunderstood something about glosses. He is thinking that grammar is simplified. It is difficult for written glosses to express the complete grammar spectrum of Signed Languages.
It's unfortunate and similar to the Blub paradox: some people will unavoidably believe that Signed Languages have a simple grammar similar to Chinese when looking at glosses.
Additionally, my local Signed Language (Swiss German Sign Language) has quite a free order. Often topic-comment is applied. An example:
[Concerning the] weather, [I] think [it's] quite fine.
As glosses: WEATHER THINK GOOD.
The word «quite» is omitted because it's an inflection. In SGSL I would make a slightly kissing mouth, lower the eyelids somewhat and make very small and fast nodding movements.
That's not Subject-Object-Verb order.
Additionally there is a slight shift between WEATHER and THINK, it's difficult to explain, but perhaps a colon after WEATHER would help. WEATHER: THINK FINE. This what I called «shift» is an inflection: it puts the word WEATHER in topic mode.
Caveat emptor: I am not a linguist, but always have been very interested in linguistics and talk SGSL every day.
Edit: many little things.
I appreciate your detailed response though.
This isn't unusual. Even in spoken languages the required grammar are often different. Even in English some areas there are some contexts where "the" is mandatory in some geographical areas and not others. Linguists can give you a Phd if you want to study this more.
You can't relate the two languages like this. Sorry, this doesn't make sense. For example, ASL doesn't have articles, English doesn't have location dependent pronouns for people.
That's why there are dozens of journals in things like linguistic typology and language variation and change. There are linguists whose entire careers have been generating a sort of conceptual mapping between the morphology, syntax and phonology of spoken languages to sign languages so that you can have sensible conversations about the typological relationship between a signed language and a spoken one.
See the research of eg Diane Brentari at Chicago or Diane Lillo-Martin at UConn or Wendy Sandler at UT Austin.
Here is a recent article that covers this in significant depth: https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.499/
The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language is a very revealing case is this regard: in much the same process as creolization, a sort of "pidgin" of home signs was transformed into a full sign language in a generation by "grammaticalizing" gestures and simple home signs from older children by the younger children. So it doesn't take long for a gesture to move right on Kendon's continuum until its fully "linguistic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_sign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creolization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesture#Kendon's_continuum
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.
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 calls that are primarily for audio could benefit from higher resolution/framerate video, I feel.
Perhaps changing it to allow other emoticons ... ?
- a lot of trivial interuptions are "can you see this?" , "can you hear me" etc
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 platforms like Zoom almost always have a text chat feature. Although at least for those I can see how it might be faster and more personable for many to sign than type.
I suspect there are a few reason for that beyond the explanations you gave.
1) Speech is faster to produce than text. Professional captioners are among the few who can challenge that. For everyone else, it's usually faster to give a speech or say what's on your mind than to type it all out.
2) Speech frees up the eyes. My vision is usually in greater demand than my hearing, so I prefer to avoid committing it to a single activity for a long time if possible. Unfortunately, that's not an option for those without hearing.
3) Speech is easier to attribute to individuals. I can determine who said something with minimal effort just by listening to the sound of their voice.
4) Speech is more immersive for narrative content. Movies and TV shows feel more believable when characters are talking with each other face-to-face like they would in real life.
Unfortunately, a signer in the corner can't make up for any of those factors.
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.
Think of how expressive language is. You can say the same sentence 3 different ways, where the real meaning is trapped in the tone, intonation, pitch, and emotion.
Think of how dynamic and expressive the word "fuck" is... Probably the most versatile and complex word in the English language.
Or just look at the [national anthem](https://www.today.com/popculture/asl-performer-steals-show-d...)
Imagine the time where you knew something of a second language, but were not fluent yet (some of you may have never tried, but most people have done at least a little of a foreign language), watching a program in that language with subtitles in that language. That is what text subtitles are for a lot of deaf.
I recall seeing interpretters on TV during special broadcasts a lot, but then they were mostly replaced by open captions or (presumably) closed captions as captioning became generally available. I'd guess there's a bigger pool of skilled captioners than skilled interpretters, but it's also a lot easier to find someone on staff who can type fast to caption in a pinch.
All that said, I do see some very special events with interpretters still, and I apprechiate that, even though I don't sign.
http://www.deaf-culture-online.com/aslnotguilty.html
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.)
These films (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and German) all clearly had posters at the theaters saying they were sub-titles and yet there was always someone demanding the movie be in English.
Also I think a number of people have poor/slow reading skills that they can't bluff about when someone uses signing.
There is one big downside of using generic video chat for signing - it’s usually optimized for clear audio, not clear video. When the connection gets weak, Zoom will drop frames but try to preserve audio. For the deaf, dropping audio is of course not a problem but dropping frames means they miss a key word in the sentence.
One example is WhatsApp providing an audio record button in the lower right corner of the screen. I always keep hitting the button by mistake. If I had a user script I would remove that button.
Another one is recording videos. If there were an embarrasing noise like a fart I would be obliviously send the video to someone hearing.
"I ask you" and "I help you" can each be signed as a single entity, where the motion (starting at me, and moving in your direction) carries the information about the pronouns.
At the very least, the layout on each person's screen could be consistent so that person A is always at location 1, and so on. That might restore some sense of shared space.
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.