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From:
William MacGruder Date: Tue Jan 5, 1999 7:43 pm Subject: Re: Bilingualism & SignWriting | ||||||||||||
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In a message dated 1/4/99 3:20:07 PM Pacific Standard Time, writes: << As you can see, I receive lots of interesting questions regarding SignWriting. Today I received a message asking this question: "Is SignWriting this Bilingualism thing that we hear so much about...?" I have not answered the person yet. How would some of you suggest I answer that question? :-) >> My answer would be to lay a bit of groundwork, ground rules if you will for the ensuing discussion. The first ground rule would be to examine the validity of considering Sign Language (any one Sign Language of your choice) as a language in its own right. I've stated before in this forum that I consider Sign Language to be a viable language; however, I do recognize that it's not completely immune to the influence of the prevailing linguistic community surrounding it. That leads me to the next ground rule: that regardless of the number of Loan Words adopted from other languages (for example the finger-spelled word C-L-U- B) present in the Sign Language, the Sign Language itself is still a viable language, not a dialect of the spoken language surrounding it. The last ground rule would be to agree on exactly what writing accomplishes at its most basic level. For the last one, a little more comment obviously is needed: (1) A good number of people of my acquaintance can not distinguish between the idea of writing to record sound and the idea of writing to record words. To me, that's a mistake on their part. (2) To me, the basic reason to have writing is to convey the original message; it should not matter if that message had been uttered with sounds, pantomined with hands, or even if it had been a game played on a board (chess game records are considered a form of writing and also have quite rigid rules regarding their manner of writing; those rules, then, could be considered "spelling and grammar"). (3) Once you've agreed to the parameters above, the next step is to determine if one person is "at home" in both "languages" being compared. Sometimes, the person may very well be writing nothing more than a gloss of the signed language into the script used for the sounded language or vice versa. (4) If you can determine that the person is able to write naturally in both scripts without having to compare the two, then I'd say "Yes, this person is practicing a form of bilingualism." (5) If you can also determine that the person can utter the sounded language, but is only able to write the signed language (using SignWriting of course) but also has no knowledge of Sign Languages beyond that, then I'd have to say, "This person is merely writing the same message in a different script and thus is not bilingual because the scripts mean the identical thing to him including what he believes the original message's manner of conveyance to be." (6) Lastly, if you can find a person who can utter the sounded language and write that sounded language in its script and can also use the signed language and write that language in its own script, yet is able to do this completely independent of the other language, then the answer is, "This person is a complete bilingual." Cheers! -William J. "Chip" McGruder Monterey, CA | ||||||||||||
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