sign language

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Orleander, Jul 5, 2007.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    These days you're right. Most people everywhere would probably recognize it. However, it's not the one they would all use. In some countries it's the little finger rather than the middle finger. In others, it's a larger, more public gesture: Raising your fist with the back of your hand toward your target, your elbow bent, your other hand grasping the horizontal upper arm in the crook of your elbow.

    How many of you can do the "Vulcan finger"? My own invention which I can do after years of practice: Do a Vulcan "live long and prosper" salute with your middle finger and ring finger separated. Then curl your index finger and your little finger down, leaving your middle finger and ring finger making a V. A guaranteed way to induce fits of laughter in any Star Trek fan.
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Thanks for finding that one. I have merged the two threads.
     
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  5. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I´m not sure but think sign language rarely uses (or perhaps does not even have) pronouns. I.e. instead of saying "Bob was skying when he hit the the tree." The signer at first mention of Bob, will "park" Bob at some location in space and then later pick Bob up there to continue with "hit the tree."
     
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  7. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Sign languages do not imitate the grammar and syntax of spoken languages. They do indeed tend to get along without "noise words" like articles, pronouns and even prepositions, one of the many ways they manage an information transfer rate comparable to spoken languages. Another way is to use an inherent feature unavailable to spoken language: the expression of more than one word simultaneously. They don't just use their hands, but also facial expressions and their entire bodies.

    To the extent that there is much commonality among them, I believe the majority use topic-description syntax, like Japanese, instead of our subject-verb-object syntax. Perhaps this allows deaf people to speak in Zen koans.

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    And I said, "to the extent that there is much commonality," because every sign language was invented independently. There are no deaf-language families with noticeable similarities.

    American Sign Language (ASL) was actually borrowed from the French. The rest of the anglophone world uses "dialects" of British Sign Language. Spain and Mexico use two entirely different systems.
     
  8. Promo Registered Senior Member

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    I know sign language is also different based upon the region you live in here in the states. My mother who is from Rhode Island has a very "proper" sign where my father who is from Florida has a very lazy and improper sign. It's always been interesting to me that common signs change from city to city and state to state. The only universal sign I've seen is ASL and even that can change depending on the person who is signing.
    http://www.nchearingloss.org/asl.htm
    Tells the difference between ASL, PSE and SEE
    http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-layout/asl1.htm
    Older link with basic ASL info.
     
  9. rcscwc Registered Senior Member

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    Strictly speaking, sign language is no language at all. It is at most a silent way of conveying a message, like a script. Hence, such signs can be pretty specific to the language in which it conveys the message.

    Indian dance forms extensively utilise signs to convey emotions. It is in combination with body movement plus facial expression.
     
  10. raydpratt Registered Senior Member

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    In Nevada, Carson City, the former maximum-security lockdown unit known as Unit 7, "a prison within a prison," had some cells facing the exercise pens outside, but it was virtually impossible to converse through the windows without also yelling every word to the tower guards outside or yelling clearly to the cell speakers inside. The solution was to learn hand spelling, but not one word of sign language. It's not that the side-visible gestures were avoided, but rather that the common instruction was unavailable, and hand spelling was itself easily teachable through the windows with very little lip reading and context. Conversations took awhile, but creative ideas and solutions to security problems got shared.
     
  11. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    I disagree. It has all the characteristic of languages - complex grammar etc. If languages must be verbal then there are no books in German or English languages etc. Why such emphases on communication by moving mussels in the neck area instead of the arms and hands?

    Would you also say that people with binoculars taking to each other 500 feet apart via lip reading are not using language too?

    As far as using sign language to "flirting with the chicas in the car in the next lane" - Hell with hands off the steering wheel you will probably bump her fender anyways so just do that lightly with good control, stop and exchange telephone numbers, (insurance companies too, but it her telephone number you want).
     
  12. Promo Registered Senior Member

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    I personally know many deaf people that would disagree with you.
     
  13. rcscwc Registered Senior Member

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    Deaf ones can disagree enbloc. But signs are just a form of script, and without a represented language have meaning.
     
  14. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    You're dead wrong about that. A language is simply a system of communication. It's not at all clear that the first human languages were expressed with vocal sounds. They may very well have been hand signals, as Jean Auel postulated for the Neanderthals in her "Clan of the Cave Bear" series of novels. The human brain has a speech center; if it's damaged the person may not be able to talk but most can still read and write. The brains of other species of apes do not have a speech center, yet both gorillas and chimpanzees have learned ASL and in fact have taught it to their own children.

    [Auel wrote the first book in her series of six 30 years ago, and at that time biologists did not think that the Neanderthal brain had a speech center. Analysis of fossils with today's far superior instruments has proven them wrong, but it's too late to rewrite the books. The ability to speak has several second-order effects in our anatomy. The most dire is the lowering of our larynx to increase the number of sounds we can make. The result of this is that we are the only mammal that cannot breathe and swallow at the same time, which causes quite a few choking deaths.]

    Some communication systems are obviously transcriptions of written language, such as Morse Code and the semaphore system. Many writing systems are obviously transcriptions of spoken language, but some, such as Chinese, stretch that definition a little. Spoken Mandarin only has 1,600 syllables so there are thousands of homonyms, requiring the formation of somewhat redundant compounds for clarity. But written Chinese has almost 100,000 han-zi or logograms, so it is possible to write much more concisely than one can speak. But no one actually bothers to write that way and it would be regarded as way beyond eccentric by a people who value conformity.

    Deaf sign languages fall somewhere along that spectrum. Each sign is not merely a transcription of a spoken or written word. Sign languages have a considerably different grammar from their associated national language, free from inflections and in fact rather like Chinese in their disdain for "noise words" such as "the" and "an." Since most people have two hands they can make two signs at once, in addition to rotating them or positioning them at different places around the body. This gives sign language a considerably different syntax from speech and writing.

    As for your assertion that sign language is specific to the associated spoken language, you're wrong about that too. American Sign Language is based on the French system, whereas other anglophone countries use the British system, which is almost totally incomprehensible to Americans, and vice-versa.

    You meant "oral," a common mistake. The word "verbal" means "by use of language." Both oral and written language are verbal. So many people misuse "verbal" to mean "oral" that dictionaries have grudgingly acknowledged it (English is a democratic language so our dictionaries also list "dove" for "dived" and "buffalo" for "bison"), but here in the Linguistics Academy, let's be more precise in our terminology.

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    I guess you don't have the phenomenon of "rush hour" in Brazil. In America's major cities we spend quite a bit of time sitting in our cars without moving. Flirt? Hell, I could put my car in Park and climb into theirs for a quickie before the traffic lurches six feet forward.

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    You seem to imply that people who were born deaf and therefore have never used spoken language are, therefore, not actually using language at all. That's rather cavalier. If you said that in the USA you'd probably be punished for insulting a minority group!

    Right here in Washington we have Gallaudet University, which is run by and for deaf people. All the classes are taught in sign language. Many deaf people also know how to read lips, but they don't communicate that way with each other.
     
  15. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Actually it has at leas two. What you say is ture of the one near the motor cortex, called "Broca´s area (Name not spelled correctly?) It is concerned with how to move mussels of speech, so screw it up and you will not make many words - perhaps some curse words or names if not too badly damaged but not much else. The other area is in the temple lobe(s) more one than the other and related to right/left handed ness - why stuttering is more common in natural lefties that were forced to switch. It is called Wernica´s area (again not spelled correctly) that is where higher learned language at least is constructed. When it is damaged, but Broca´s area is OK you may speak a lot, but it is meaningless "word salad." However, it may have some grammatic structure: noun/verb/object (tree ran dog) patterns present at times. - There is a net of nerve fibers from here to Broca´s area - not often but sometimes it alone is damaged. Then you have "conduction aphasia."
    Except human babies can - have not yet transformed from the earlier design - good evidence that there is some truth to:
    Clearly babies are born many months before the are fully built -see this in spades in their brain development too.

    PS too busy to edit well.
     
  16. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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  17. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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  18. Buddha12 Valued Senior Member

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  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Human babies are born at an earlier stage of development than any other placental mammal. Baby giraffes literally "hit the ground running." Our babies are helpless for many months.

    Our ratio of brain size to body size is much greater than any other mammal, so the brain has to be relatively small to fit through the birth canal. And of course the human pelvis could not be made any wider because the strain of bipedal walking is already enormous, as we transfer our entire body weight from one leg to the other with every step.

    Baby whales mature in two years; baby elephants in five. Humans require intensive parenting for a decade and a half! Because of this, our species has developed other traits, which, while not completely unique, are rare among mammals. One is that human females are physically capable of engaging in copulation when not in estrus--even while pregnant or nursing. This has the effect of encouraging fathers to stay closer to the hearth and participate in parenting. Another trait that is extremely rare is that we live for many years after we lose our ability to procreate. Human communities have a superannuated generation of non-breeding elders, something few others have.

    Long before we even invented the technology of agriculture and began actually living in villages, the saying, "It takes a whole village to raise a child" was already, apparently, true. They don't just need two parents, they need four grandparents too.
     
  20. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    True, and more so in modern developed societies where both parents now seem to need to work outside the home just to "make ends met." In China, with the one child policy, you have two couples (who want to be grand parents) saving to buy house for their son + other´s daughter to marry. There is a strong cultural requirement (except in the very poor) that the man must have a house before woman should marry him. This means that the typical mortgage is LESS than 50% of house cost or does not even exist.

    So the recent Chinese housing bubble bursting - a mild ~10% drop in home values at most, did not cause foreclosures, or great hardships etc. What it mainly did was to cause rich Chinese to seek other investments. Not uncommon in the recent past for them to have owned a dozen homes or apartments to rent to group of same sex, unmarried factory workers, usually. Many are now investing in EU or even the US as the yuan grows stronger wrt euro and dollar. Chinese companies are doing this on a grand scale.

    Who would guess all this is based on human´s unique biology!

    BTW, I have seen a newly born calf, immediately get up and walk, not too well, but walking none the less.
     

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