LL-L "Language contacts" 2004.10.03 (02) [E]

Sun Oct 3 19:10:19 UTC 2004

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L O W L A N D S - L * 03.OCT.2004 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Language contacts" [E]

In June, Ron asked:

>> Are there ever any sound clues outside of finger spelling
(like "sounds like 'fish' but is a container" = "dish" in
charade fashion), or would that make signing too
spoken-language-dependent? <<

and I replied:

> Firstly, you have to realise that deaf people can't hear - a concept that
> I've noticed a lot of hearing people have difficulty grasping! Any such
puns
> will normally be based on lip patterns, not sounds, or they can hardly
enter
> into general deaf culture (though I can think of one exception - "Tesco"
> which is signed as "sneeze" - is this something only a hearing person
would
> think of? - but "Tesco" isn't _really_ like "atchoo" - so is it something
> only a deaf person would think of?).

> There are some English lip-pattern based sign constructions, usually
> intentionally humorous, eg "M-Spider" for "Marks and Spencer", because
> "Spencer" is apt to be lipread as "spider" if there's no context.

> ["Marks and Spencer" and "Tesco" are Brtiish chain stores]

I have since managed to think of a few other examples of sound-based signs
in BSL of the type Ron asked about.

One is "Bristol", which is sometimes signed as "pistol". The other is
"Leeds", which is sometimes signed by indicating a dog lead.

I still stand by my idea that the sounds of words don't normally enter BSL,
but I have to qualify it by saying that sometimes hearing people do invent
signs that get accepted.

It's significant to that if we take the examples of the sounds of English
words being put into sign language paronomaisiastically, all the examples
I've thought of so far are brand or town names, which, as I've mentioned
before, are often not known throughout the whole community, due to BSL not
yet being a written language.

As well as this, these examples also have alternative signs and sometimes
derivations that suggest that the Hearing may have been involved:

Bristol: this is more widely signed by fingerspelling "BL".

Leeds: the "leads" sign appears in a popular book of signs for schools,
which is notorious for including "suspect" signs invented by hearing
teachers who didn't fully understand the struvture of the language. There is
an alternative sign used by the Deaf community in the Leeds area.

Tesco: I learned the sign I explained from a hearing mother of deaf
children. The Deaf community here have a more abstract sign for it.

If course, signs do enter BSL as puns from English, but when introduced by
the Deaf are based on the English lip patterns rather than the actual
English word. An example of this is "M-Spider" for "Marks and Spencer" given
above. Another is the BSL sign for "committee" which though now widely
accepted in a slightly abstracted form, was once thought of as slang because
it was clearly the same as the sign for "cup o' tea".

As for the use of "BL" for "Bristol", British sign linguists currently
describe the borrowing of English through fingerspelling as conforming to
the structure of BSL signs. In my opinion, however, British linguists are a
bit confused about sign structure: if they would use Sutton Signwriting
instead of their more academic-looking Stokoe and Hamnosys notations they'd
be able to understand it a lot better.

British sign linguists say that signs are disyllabic - by which they mean
there are two positions involved. To a Signwriter this is a bit disingenious
as it ignores the movement between the signs. In signwriting this would be
trisyllabic (position-movement-position). In the case of "BL" this works
either way. British sign linguists are at a loss, however, to explain why we
have such "fingerspelling signs" as "BBC". In Signwriting, however, the "BB"
here is a single syllable, so it falls into its correct position in the
language quite naturally. This isn't to say that fingerspelling always fits
the language - sometimes acronyms just have to be spelled out in full.

Sutton Signwriting records four types of sign structure (using P for
Position and M for Movement):

P
PM
PMP
PMPM

although a convention is Signwriting is to not write the final movement in
the "PMPM" form unless absolutely neccessary. Obviously it's all one
structure (Position followed by Movement up to a maximum of four Positions
and Movements) and I could belabour the success of Signwriting in
representing the structure of signed languages by saying that even compund
signs fit into this structure - in Signwriting they don't drag on as if the
two parts were two different signs.

Anyway, this goes some way to explaining why it's "BL" rather than, say
"BRSL" for "Bristol", the other question is which letters are chosen.
Firstly, vowels are dropped: this is because the five vowels are
fingerspelled in BSL by pointing at each of the five fingers, so they're
less distinct from each ther as the consonants are, and are therefore the
first to go.

British sign linguists have suggested that the choice of consonants is
perhaps the first consonant in each syllable, but this doesn't explain "BL".
I would suggest again that the linguists are falling for a "hearing"
solution and forget that the only clearly lipreadable consonants in
"Bristol" are "B" and "L", hence "BL"  for "Bristol".

In my experience, there's more to it than this, however. Not only is there
the distinction between Hearing and Deaf (note the use of capital letters,
as is currently accepted, to denote "culturally hearing" and "culturally
deaf" though as often as not I find it difficult to decide which to use in
different contexts), but amongst the deaf people according to how good their
English is.

Most deaf people nowadays seem to read English perfectly, however this is
not always the case, or sometimes a deaf person will not think much about
English even if they know the language.

There's a town here called "Crewkerne". Usually towns which don't have
accepted signs are denoted by a fingerspelled sign locally. In classes
around here "CK" is taught as the correct way of signing it, which accords
with what the linguists say. However, I know native signers who consistently
sign it as "CW". I think that this is either because "CK" is more awkward to
fingerspell, or that the "CW" is easier to read, or that the "ew" sound is
the only lipreadable part of the word. At any rate it shows that what we
learn academically can be at odds with the language as actually signed.

Another example is a four-year-old deaf boy I know who, when being told
someone's name by fingerspelling (and having no idea of English), seems to
me to copy just enough of the most visible letters to make a
correctly-structured sign (don't ask me how infants manage a better grasp of
language structure than professional linguists!). Thus I've seen him signing
"Michelle" as "MH" rather than the "MC" you might expect as a hearing
linguist.

Having said all that, there is one more aspect of sign borrowing from
English, which I explained before, using a sort of classifier system where
the English lip pattern is made while making a sign to give it context, eg
signing "Edinburgh" by mouthing "Edi(n)b(u)rgh" while signing "Scotland".

SO we can see a pattern of "Hearing" vs "Deaf" solutions to borrowing into
BSL from English. I always find the "Deaf" solutions better - they fit the
structure of the language better and have stood the test of frequent use and
so are easier to acquire, produce and receive.

As you'll maybe realise, a lot of the use of fingerspelling and lip patterns
involves the names of towns. This is pretty much to do with the fact that
sign languages haven't been written until recently, and BSL still isn't, so
it's not possible to, for example, publish a BSL atlas. However, with the
advent of Signwriting I'm beginning to learn signs from ASL for American
place names such as Oregon and Colorado. Hopefully in the future this sort
of borrowing of place names not only from other parts of Britain but from
foreign countries and foreign sign languages will become more common due to
the availabiilty of written forms.

But some of the larger towns and cities and areas have their own
non-fingerspelled signs which are more widely known. To give you some idea
of how these get derived (note that those which can be signed as an English
word often have non-manual features - features produced by the face or body
rather than the hands - which distinguish them from the object the sign is
derived from):

Perth, Scotland: "Pearl" (from the fact that pearls can be found in the
river Tay near Perth.

Glasgow: originally fingerspelled "GW", this has become altered into a
distinctive sign.

Dublin: a form borrowed from Irish Sign Language which, though in ISL is
based on fingerspelling, seems abstract to British signers.

New York: similar process to "Dublin", but from ASL.

Chesterfield: "Twisted Spire".

Sheffield: "Cutlery".

Brighton: "Expensive".

Glastonbury: "Hippies".

Yorkshire: "Three areas (ie thridings or ridings) in the north".

Exeter: "Keep your hands out of sight".

London: "Loud".

There are other towns such as "Durham" and "Margate" which I know as signs
that to me are abstract though they probably represent something about the
town which I don't know about.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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