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

I think you'd enjoy Harlan Lane's book The Mask of Benevolance. My mother had it out from the college library as part of her course, and I've been looking at it. Not from cover to cover, just browsing. It's an interesting read, though.

TRiG.

What's it about?

The subtitle is Disabling the Deaf Community. Her course is in Deaf Studies.

It has quite a lot in it near the beginning about the Belgian attitude to the Berundis (and also about the Berundi attitude to the Belgians, which is perhaps more interesting). And then it applies that lesson to the Audist attitude to the Deaf.

It also had a bit in it about researching speach patters among white and black students in an American university. When a Jewish researcher went down with his tape recorder, there was almost no difference. When the supervisor sent a black researcher, there was a marked difference in the recordings.

Colonialism? Perhaps.

It's actually a fascinating read even if you have no interest in its primary subject, because the focus of the book is on showing that things that have been well researched in other contexts apply also to the Deaf community.

Have you come across the cochlear implant debate yet? It stirrs many passions.

TRiG.

Always have to admire an excessive tag


The book sounds bloody interesting. I'm not involved in the deaf community, but always thought it would be interesting to learn sign language. I've read small amounts about deaf politics but a long time ago I think.

I know even less about the Burundi. But how fascinating that a book has been written covering such topics.

The parallels between dis/ability communities and colonialism makes sense. And I get the thing about deaf people wanting to maintain their culture. I'm all for cultural diversity (you may have noticed ).

Is the book specifically academic, or would it reach a more popular audience. I'm a bit burnt out intellectually at the moment and don't feel up to any reads that take concerted effort.


>>Have you come across the cochlear implant debate yet?<<

Do tell

(I'm interested in Sign primarily from a linguistic perspective. It's a fascinating and beautiful language, which works in a completely different manner to English.)

Many Deaf people passionatly disaprove of implanting deaf babies. I tend to agree. The implants don't work nearly as well as is popularly supposed, and they are nearly useless for someone who has not previously learned to speak and hear (the prelingually deaf). I'm not sure that I accept the argument that it is 'cultural genocide', though.

The book is semi-academic. I never finished it, and it's gone back to Trinity College library now. Fairly readable, on the whole.

If you do get interested in Deaf Culture, you might also want to read A Journey into the Deaf-World, by someone and someone else.

TRiG.

>> The implants don't work nearly as well as is popularly supposed, and they are nearly useless for someone who has not previously learned to speak and hear (the prelingually deaf).<<

Why do they do it then?


I wonder if there are similarities with the ethics of doing gender (re)assignment surgery on intersex babies. Another topic that stirs passions.

Why do it? Because the hearing parents view deafness as a disability to be overcome. Some Deaf people are quite militant about it.

TRiG.

I was wondering more about why the doctors do a medical proceedure when it's not that helpful.


I get the deaf politics and am inclined to agree especially if the implants don't work that well.

Reading Between the Signs, by Anna Mindess.

Again, it's the application of stuff from other fields to the Deaf World. This time the topic is intercultural communication. The book is written as a handbook for working interpreters, but other people may find it interesting.

TRiG.

A2903645

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2719254&page=1

You said you're interested in learning to sign. You may have more interest now that it's been recognised as an official language of the state.

http://www.eudnet.org/update/online/2006/apr06/apr06.htm#worn_02

TRiG.

That's good news

The biggest hurdle for learning any language for me is learning it in isolation. I've found this with spoken languages too - that if I don't have someone to speak to on a regular basis I make very little headway (brain like a sieve).

Hi TRiG,

I was wondering if you could help me get clearer about something. There is a gardening programme on TV here. The spoken languages used (with no subtitles) are English and Maori. There is also a woman using sign language (don't know which sorry), translating everything that is said on the programme.

I really like the programme but have been struggling a bit lately as they are using much more Maori (which I don't speak/understand) than English than they used to, so I am missing lots. There is an interesting issue here because on the one hand I feel that the information in the very good programme needs to be as widely available as possible. But on the other hand it's vital for the survival of Te Reo Maori that as much Maori is spoken as possible. Also there is a poltical issue of not subtitling all programmes in Maori (not totally sure why, but partly to do with people learning Maori better if they listen rather than also reading an English translation).

But all that got me to thinking, and I realised that I had assumed that sign language is a translation of a spoken language (as I was wondering if the sign language was in Maori or English). But now I wonder if that is a very hearing-centric assumption (I'm sure it is), and am wanting to know if sign is more a completely separate language. eg would signers be thinking in sign when talking to others or would they be thinking in the language that they can read in, or knew before they were deaf? Or was my assumption right, that sign is a translation, so that an English only person wouldn't understand a French only person?

There are signed forms of spoken languages, but natural sign languages are languages in their own right, with their own grammar, very unlike the grammar of spoken languages.

Incidentally, this leads on to one of the best examples of the general rule that to every complex problem there exists a solution which is simple, obvious, and wrong.

Deaf children will not pick up spoken language in the normal way, and yet must become proficient in at least the written form of the majority spoken language. How? Well, you can communicate with the children in a signed form of the spoken language, using its grammar on the hands. Simple, obvious, and wrong. The hands move far slower than the mouth, and manual representations of spoken-language grammar are cumbersome. They are so cumbersome, in fact, that the information is presented too slow for the brain to easily grasp: by the time the signer has reached the end of a thought, the watcher has forgotten the beginning. Signed forms of spoken languages tax the brain. It is far better, in fact, to communicate with the child in a natural signed language, which makes use of spatial grammar and the fact that we have two hands and only one mouth to work at much the same speed as a spoken language. The child then at least develops an understanding of what language is, and can go on to learn other languages later.

People who go deaf later in life often use manually coded spoken grammar, rather than a true independent sign language. In fact, there can be a continuum of different language styles: from full English, to telegraphic English, to telegraphic English with some mime and spatial grammar, to natural Sign.

(As a quick example of spatial grammar: ISL does not have 'he, she, it' pronouns. Instead, you set up people or things at certain points in the signing space, and then simply point at them to refer back to them. Many verbs can be simply inflected: "He gave it to him" would move from the giver to the receiver, with neither pronoun explicitly mentioned.)

I would imagine (though I don't know) that there is only one NZSL. NZSL, from what I've read, is closely related to Auslan (Australian Sign Language) and to BSL. All three are descendants of Old BSL. BSL is certainly in the European family of signed languages, but it has certain features (including its two-handed alphabet) which set it apart from most of the rest of the family, which descended from French Sign Language (LSF). The descendants of Old LSF include modern LSF, ASL/Amerislan (American), most continental European sign languages, and some African sign languages. ISL comes from LSF and ASL (ASL being a mixture of LSF and Martha's Vineyard SL).

TRiG.

(And some friends of mine (interpreters) went to France with limited French. They found that they could communicate very easily with French Deaf people and with LSF interpreters. Much easier than talking French. LSF and ISL are quite close.)

TRiG.