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From:
Bill Reese Date: Wed Jul 5, 2000 4:39 pm Subject: Re: Lucky | ||||||||
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Less "difficulty" learning a language?!? I'm still not sure of the intracicies of the English language. When people start talking about "past participles" my eyes glaze over. ;-) I'm not a linguist but let me make an attempt here at understanding a part of language. :-) There are many, many, many rules and associated exceptions of a language. If we were to base our command of the language on knowledge of them many of us would be woefully lacking. And yet they remain, for some people to understand and define and for others as an exercise in using questions like, "What?", "Huh?", "Who?", "Do you speak English?" If we wait for a signed language to be defined commonly by those who use it will we ever see a "past participle?" While I could study English a little more now and more accurately define how I am using it, would the same hold true of my ASL if I were to base my study on how it's commonly used without using ASL concepts outside of that common usage? I believe that we need to define that usage with the very same language by using signs specifically designed for that definition. There is definitely a need for rules and exceptions, an encompassing dictionary that defines commonly, widely used signs as well as the signs used to define the signs, ad nauseum. ;-) How else, then, could a sign linguist, using his own signed language, learn or speak of his language with other signed linguists without any intermediatary language? What I would like to see would be an all-inclusive sign dictionary in signwriting that would allow me not only to obtain a command of that language but also the understanding and study of it, the same way spoken language dictionaries do it now. The issue of variations should not be an exception to using a dictionary but a reason for it, if nothing more to simply understand that it is a variation and how it varies from a more widely used sign. My two centavos. Bill Reese Little ol' commoner "Angus B. Grieve-Smith" wrote: > > That definitely seems to be what's going on. But there will > always be signs that aren't in the dictionary - regional signs, slang, > intricate classifier descriptions, etc. And it's not a good idea for > people to continue going through a spoken-language intermediary (the > dictionary) indefinitely. > > Eventually, people will have to learn all the details of creating > SignWriting. I'll bet that part of the difference between us writing > signs and writing spoken-language words is that we learned to write spoken > languages as children. Probably those children that are learning > SignWriting right now, like Fernando and Irina, will have less > difficulty... > > -- > -Angus B. Grieve-Smith > Linguistics Department > University of New Mexico > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Name: lucky2.gif > lucky2.gif Type: GIF Image (IMAGE/gif) > Encoding: BASE64 | ||||||||
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