h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>And Kenya/Keenya is a notorious post-colonial shibboleth

>>The chap that told me it should be 'Keenya' was from Nairobi, and of Indian extraction, not a descendant of the colonials.

Possibly so. But I've been told of the shibboleth by various Africans.

From one of them, a Zimbabwean, I also learned to listen to other Zimbabweans for the hard L or hard R sounds of Matabeleland or Shonaland. Nobody could work him out because, being of mixed parentage, he had both L and R. Plus his father would beat him if he spoke to him in anything other than English.

>> ...his father would beat him if he spoke to him in anything other than English. <<

Ah-so! So they're not all savages then.

~jwf~

This is actually a reply to post 469. I must do some reading and catch up with the rest of ye.

Back then, the conversation was partly about gender classifiers in language. And a mention was made of Japanese. This made me think of Japanese Sign Language.

Many signed languages use classifiers to represent objects and people. The sign ('word') for 'car' in ISL is to use two hands and mime turning a steering wheel (this is the same as the verb 'to drive', the difference being shown by the length of articulation, the facial expression, and the mouth pattern). However, if you wish to say that a car overtook you, you will represent the car with a flat hand, palm sideways. If you wish to say that a person overtook you, or that two people met, or anything else about moving people, you will represent the person with a raised index finger. (Occasionally, a v-hand can be used to represent legs, if talking about physical activity: dive, run, kneel. But if you're not being precise about the exact nature of the movement, a raised index finger represents a person.)

(So the line "Do not run or overtake others" in a safety announcement has a very different looking sign for 'overtake' than the same English word talking about cars.)

BSL uses a palm-down flat hand for cars, using palm-sideways for cyclists, lorries, busses, and other similarly-shaped vehicles.

Returning to where we started: Gender markers and Japanese. Japanese Sign Language is I think the only one which distinguishes between genders in its person classifiers. If I recall correctly, a male is classified by a raised thumb, and a female by a raised little finger.

TRiG.

Right, back to the backlog now.

>>a male is classified by a raised thumb, and a female by a raised little finger.

That's generous. I'd have thought vice versa.

That's interesting: I had a vague idea that deaf sign language was universal, and that two deaf people who both know how to sign could communicate regardless of country of origin or its spoken language form. So it's not as simple as that?

There are many different sign languages.

TRIG's the expert.

Far from it. British, American and Irish sign language are different, for a start.

Sign language has a special place in recent linguistics history, since it allowed the study of how new languages emerge.

In pre-revolutionary Nicaragua, deaf children were not well cared for. They were farmed out all over the country. If they developed language skills at all, it would be impromptu sign languages of their own making.

After the revolution, a central institution was established for thair care and education. Children brought from all over the country had to learn to communicate with one another. They managed to settle on a basic set of signs. But it wasn't easy for them to say much of any sophistication - their new system lacked grammatical sophistication. In linguistics terms, it was a 'pidgin'.

However, as new, younger children were sent to the institution, they quickly picked up on the system and started to play tricks with it. In pretty short order, they spontaneously developed an inflected language as capable of complex expression as any other. In linguistics terms, it was a 'creole'.

Over to Trig....

Creoles form spontaneously pretty readily, apparently. I read somewhere (Gould, Diamond?) of creoles in Hawaii forming between 1900-20, and by talking to various old people (in the 50s or so), you could work out very accurately when certain developments had happened.

Recipe for a creole: get a pidgin, then add children.

So give it ten years and Europe will be speaking a Slavic-inflected, English-based creole?

Horrorshow!

Forgot to mention, of course, that the kids mustn't have a common language to talk in first. But the grammar seems to spring up quite spontaneously.

Me? Expert?

Well, my mother's in the second year of her interpreting course, and I read many of her notes and textbooks, so I've picked up a little.

BSL is distinguished from all other European SLs by its two-handed alphabet. BSL (and its siblings Auslan and NZSL; all are descendants of Old BSL) is still recognisably in the European family of SLs, and, like all the rest, is largely descended from Old LSF (Langue Signe Francais). ASL too is of European origin, with a major influence from LSF. Indeed, a slightly modified form of LSF was used in the first school for the Deaf in the USA. ASL is also influenced by Martha's Vineyard SL, a SL which arose in a small community with an abnormally high deaf population (in days before easy mass transport, these things happened). In that community, everyone was fluent in the signed language, and it was useful even between hearing people in certain circumstances. MVSL is now extinct, but it has been partly reconstructed by linguists noting the differences between ASL and LSF.

ASL is used (with many dialects) throughout the USA and in most of Canada. There exists also LSQ, amd interestingly the dividing line between French and English is not quite the same as the dividing line between ASL and LSQ.

ISL has been strongly influenced by ASL and LSF, variants of which languages were used in Deaf education in Dublin.

[Note: Auslan is Australian Sign Language, so called because the name ASL was already taken by American Sign Language, which is sometimes called Amerislan.]

TRiG.

Are there regional accents within sign language yet?

My sister taught her son a few signs before he could speak: 'milk', 'more' 'all gone' 'hot,' that sort of thing. It's supposed to help relieve the baby's frustration.

nnnYeahhh...I staffed a charity stall at a community event a while back. At the next table there was a woman trying to sell classes in 'Signing For Babies' to middle-class parents with too much spare money.

I humbly suggest that people with normal hearing have managed without signing for millenia. A baby's frustration can be cured by handing it a chunk of apple to suck on.

I was told once that in the fifties and sixties the deaf children in Ireland were taught two different singing systems: one for girls, another for boys. In case they might attempt to communicate.

From Encarta http://encarta.msn.com/encyclopedia_761556941/Sign_Language.html

"Sign languages exhibit the same types of variation that spoken languages do. For example, sign languages have dialects that vary from region to region. In the United States, many African Americans in the South who communicate through sign language use a variant of standard ASL, just as many African Americans might communicate through their own vernacular English in speech. In Switzerland, there are five geographic dialects of Swiss German Sign Language with slight variations that derive from regional schools for the deaf.

"In Dublin, Ireland, where boys and girls attend different schools, the sign language used by deaf boys has a distinctly different vocabulary from that used by deaf girls. Although girls learn the boys’ signs when they begin dating, after marriage women continue to use the female signs with girls and women."

I was told that about the Irish deaf schools as well, although I wasn't told any reason for it.

Presumably the boys' signs include things like 'football' and 'puke' while the girls have words for 'relationship', 'commitment' and so on.

Ed: >nnnYeahhh...I staffed a charity stall at a community event a while back. At the next table there was a woman trying to sell classes in 'Signing For Babies' to middle-class parents with too much spare money.

I humbly suggest that people with normal hearing have managed without signing for millenia. A baby's frustration can be cured by handing it a chunk of apple to suck on.<

Fine. You know best obviously.

Partly, the Deaf boys were taught by Christian Brothers, and the Deaf girls by nuns (Sisters of Something, no doubt A14608712). The two sets of teachers didn't communicate much, and used different signs (one being influenced more by LSF, the other more by ASL). Of course, neither set of teachers used a proper signed language: it would have been manually coded English. And when they decided to adopt the proposals of the Congress of Milan (rather later than other schools for the Deaf), they dropped signs altogether, and tried to teach speechreading.

So the sign languages would have been developed independently by the students, based on an older preexisting indigenous sign language which some pupils must have known.

There are still vocabulary differences (and perhaps slight grammar differences too), and some research has been done in this area.

For comparison, have a glance at the Gender Genie: http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

TRiG.