LL-L "Orthography" 2007.04.21 (01) [E]

Sat Apr 21 22:55:26 UTC 2007

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L O W L A N D S - L  -  21 April 2007 - Volume 01

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Orthography" 2007.04.18 (04) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Orthography
>
> Could your sense of shape in combination with language be
> above-average or more integrated because signing is second nature for
> you, Sandy?

An interesting question, which I've been duly pondering, though the
answer does seem to be taking us away from the focus of the forum. I'll
stray a bit off the current topic then work my way back to it...

I'm deafened rather than native deaf, so signing isn't really second
nature to me although it's getting that way. On the other hand, this
means that I'm aware of a definite feeling of "fine tuning" in my hand
coordination which perhaps native deaf wouldn't notice because they've
never lived without it. Naturally enough, I see the evidence of this
when I try to teach non-signers a few signs and they just can't copy my
handshapes and movements accurately, the way a proficient signer would.

Then again, before I was able to sign I was a proficient juggler, and
this gives a different sort of hand (or rather, hand-eye) coordination,
which just goes to show how much potential there is for development of
hand-eye coordination in various ways undreamed of by those who never
practice such stuff.

For example, people who goof off in the office soon learn that throwing
a rubber or something at me for a laugh doesn't work - no matter how
fast it's moving I'll catch it even if it's only in my peripheral vision
(of course, in an office setting, clowns stay within certain safe
parameters of velocity and visibility!). Once someone knocked a woman's
drink off a table and I caught it before it fell the few inches into her
lap, without spilling any. People seemed to think this was impossible
because my hand had so much further to go than the glass, but the answer
to both situations is that a juggler is very predictive about those
things and puts his hand where the object will be when it gets there,
not where it is when he reaches out. To others it seems a remarkable
piece of luck, but in the juggler's mind it was "already caught".

(Ok, not spilling any was partly luck, but remember W C Fields :)

I mention these incidents to give an idea of how far hand-eye
coordination can be developed through mere practice.

Something every good juggler knows is that both hands have to be treated
as equals. In practice, this means that a right-handed juggler does as
many everyday activities as possible in a left-handed fashion: for
example, my mouse is on the left side of the keyboard and the button
functions are reversed; anybody seeing me making tea, or drinking it,
would think I was left-handed, and so on. The most difficult everyday
activity? Spreading butter! It's extremely confusing when you first try
to do this with the unaccustomed hand: suddenly you're a child again!

I also write with my left hand, but only if it's all right to have it
down in mirror writing! Which takes us back to the writing thing. Why is
my left-handed mirror writing in exactly the same writing style as my
right-handed writing? I think at this point I have to concede that the
lack of writing mistakes in handwriting must be a "bit of both" at the
very least, because most of the writing process must be in the brain and
some centre in the brain is controlling the hand muscles of both hands
in exactly the same way, otherwise why would the left hand do mirror
writing? This reminds me of some people I know who, whenever they make a
movement with their right hand only, their left hand also makes a
reduced form of the movement. Or indeed a linguistic fact that applies
to all sign languages: in large numbers of signs, the left hand copies
the right hand exactly (I'm writing here from a right-hander's point of
view).

To get back to what it's like doing sign language. Sign languages are
like word languages (I'm forever trying to synchronise oral/manual
terminology but it never quite works!) in that, written forms aside,
there are two skills to be mastered: speaking and listening. So compared
to juggling, there's not so much hand-eye coordination as the two
separate skills of production and reception, which don't seem to me to
develop in tandem but separately, one getting ahead of the other
according to how much listening and how much speaking the learner is
doing.

In production, an experienced signer doesn't pay much attention to his
hands when signing. So I suppose it must be that most of this is
kinaesthetic and tactile. Conversely, in reception an experienced signer
doesn't pay much attention to the other person's hands either. This
seems to me to be the same phenomenon as in juggling, where a juggler
seems to use his peripheral vision most of the time, giving rise also to
the way I tend to catch office missiles without looking at them, to a
chorus of oos and ahs. But it's not a stunt, it's just the best way to
perceive moving objects.

(As a footnote, there are plenty of times when a signer deliberately
draws attention to his hands when signing, either by looking directly at
one or both of them or by pointing to one with the other - but this sort
of activity carries grammatical meaning, it's not the fundamental
signing method.)

Having thought all that through, however, I think my conclusion is that
just as some people are "nervous speakers" and can't control, say, the
speed they speak at (causing us lipreaders to mark them down as
nonentities :) so some writers are "nervous writers" and write only one
way, at one speed, and if it's readable it's readable and if it's
unreadable, then tough!

I myself used to write like this when I was at school but then decided
to change my writing as it was unreadable. So now I always write in a
controlled fashion and perhaps this is the real reason I write better
than I type - because I'm a controlled writer but a nervous typist.

When we talk about our typing being bad in some way, perhaps we ought to
think back on the days when highly-trained secretaries typed all day
almost flawlessly with very limited opportunities for correction. I
think this may really be the answer. Typewriter typing and handwriting
offer few opportunities for correction so subconsciously you know you
have to be careful. In typing into a computer you can correct anything
you get wrong, so you're naturally more careless.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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