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From:
Jerry Spillman Date: Wed Jun 6, 2001 3:46 pm Subject: Re: friendship (Thank you, Tini ;-) | |
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Dear Valerie and List, On May 16, my wife and I were privileged to travel to Ukraine to visit our missionary son and other friends there. We returned last week on Wednesday, and have been trying to get caught up on everything since then. We found Ukraine itself to be quite beautiful and interesting. The people for the most part were very warm and friendly. The spoken and signed languages used primarily in the Odessa and Crimean regions is Russian. We were privileged to travel from Simferopol to Yalta with a Russian Sign Language interpreter from the Simferopol Baptist Church, who also spoke English, so during our visit to that region, we had excellent conversations and explanations. Upon comparison, we were of course inadequate to converse in sign, only knowing some ASL, but there are a few signs similar. Again, as we have previously discussed, due to cultural differences, many signs were same as ASL but much different in meaning. And we were warned of several that could be offensive to use there, such as the fingerspelling letter "t". I did, however, mention the use of Sign Writing to our missionaries to the deaf in Simferopol, and perhaps have sparked an interest there. Again, the same questions as we hear in the US, why do we need to have another writing system, etc, etc, to which I referred them to your Q&A pages. Our missionaries have computers and seem to use them for communicating quite a lot. Whether we can influence them to SignWriting, well, it remains to be seen. Jerry. |
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