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<br>L O W L A N D S - L - 27 January 2007 - Volume 03<br><br>=========================================================================<br><br>From: <span id="_user_sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk" style="color: rgb(121, 6, 25);">
Sandy Fleming <<a href="mailto:sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk">sandy@fleimin.demon.co.uk</a>></span><br>Subject: LL-L 'Language varieties' 2007.01.26 (06) [E]<br><br><span class="q">> From: Mark Dreyer <<a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:mrdreyer@lantic.net">
mrdreyer@lantic.net</a>><br>> Subject: LL-L 'Language varieties' 2007.01.26 (03) [E/LS]<br>><br></span><div style="direction: ltr;"><span class="q">> & then 'Hunters Sign' in Bushman communities must go back to the Dawn
<br>> of Man - we were hunters first. I know of a Bushman kid who caught<br>> measles in his infancy & became deaf. He never learned to speak, but<br>> the whole clan talked to him & he talked back in Hunter's Sign. He
<br>> wanted for nothing in reason. Sign isn't limited to where to find it &<br>> who is to kill it. I believe that sign language started not with the<br>> deaf but with men on a hunt, or women hunter-gatherers, who didn't
<br>> want to draw unnecessary attention to themselves from the buck, or<br>> perhaps a pride of lions. We were not always perched on the very top<br>> of the food chain...<br><br></span></div><div style="direction: ltr;">
As I understand it, hunting language and American Indian "Plains Talk"<br>are quite a different thing from Deaf sign languages. These are signed<br>relatively slowly, are sometimes ingenious but much more basic than
<br>everyday signed or spoken languages. This is because for a method of<br>communication to develop into a full language it has to be the main<br>method of communication amongst a group of individuals over two or three<br>
generations: if there's a competing method that's preferred to the<br>extent that it's used in most situations and for relating stories, then<br>the secondary mode will never develop into a full language.<br><br>
In these days of grammar and scientific linguistics making discourse<br>about languages seem an organised and categorisable affair, it's<br>important to remind ourselves that a "real" language is mostly a<br>
gigantic heap of idiom that takes a lifetime to learn. This sort of<br>thing doesn't develop without constant use in every situation<br>encountered.<br><br>There's another type of sign language known as "home sign" which is a
<br>way that isolated deaf people communicate with their families with<br>made-up signs, but this never develops into a full language. On smallish<br>islands where there's only one deaf person in a generation their home
<br>sign never goes beyond being able to name objects, since there are no<br>hearing people who have an interest in communicating by sign 24/7.<br><br>I would guess that the hunter language used to communicate with the<br>
isolated deaf person in the BUshmen's clan was much better than home<br>sign, but not nearly as good as a full language. They probably had low<br>expectations!<br></div><div style="direction: ltr;"><span class="q"><br>
> From: R. F. Hahn < <a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="mailto:sassisch@yahoo.com">sassisch@yahoo.com</a>><br>> Subject: Language varieties<br><br></span></div><div style="direction: ltr;">
<span class="q">> I go along with Sandy's basic premise that spoken ("verbal symbolism")<br>> began with onomatopoeia, focusing on both sound and sight. However,<br>> this goes back very far and is obscured by numerous strata of
<br>> abstraction and compounding, not to mention millenia of sound shifts.<br><br></span></div><div style="direction: ltr;">Though I just said there's a theory, I didn't say I believed it myself.<br>It's very difficult to see how the lip patterns Deaf signers make relate
<br>to anything. Why is it "vee" for "excellent", why "lum" for "vanished"?<br>Though of course those lip patterns themselves may have developed over<br>time.<br></div><div style="direction: ltr;">
<span class="q"><br>> Sandy:<br>><br>> > As for the ages of sign languages, well, judging by the some of the<br>> responses so far, I suppose you may be surprised to hear that there<br>> are<br>> fully-fledged, indeed highly-developed sign languages that are only
<br>> about 30 years old!<br>><br>> But tell me: Were these truly out-of-thin-air inventions or did they<br>> draw from pre-existing sign language varieties? I rather suspect the<br>> latter is the case. If so, this would be cases of new code
<br>> synthecization rather than of creating sign languages from scratch.<br><br></span></div><div style="direction: ltr;">In the case of Nicaraguan Sign Language, the tradition had been (as in<br>many societies), to keep deaf people within the confines of the home.
<br>After the revolution a school for the deaf was founded but the teachers<br>had no language because there was no sign language in the country. So<br>the nearest thing to sign language at first was the home sign that the
<br>students themselves brought. But these sets of signs were all unrelated,<br>of course, and home sign itself is "out of thin air", so to speak. So<br>Nicaraguan Sign Language developed amongst the children and is now
<br>moving out across the country, where the effects of the language vacuum<br>can still be seen in the phenomenon of "reverse fluency", younger people<br>and children having better language skills that the older people who use
<br>it.<br><br>Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language arose in an isolated village as a result<br>of a genetic feature resulting in deafness, which can be traced back to<br>a single person a few generations ago. This has developed in isolation
<br>and... well, I don't normally search the Web to write stuff on a<br>discussion group (it is about discussion rather than showing off what<br>you can find out, after all!), but since I had to search to remember the
<br>full name of the language, you might as well just read about it here:<br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Sayyid_Bedouin_Sign_Language
</a> :)<br></div><div style="direction: ltr;"><span class="q" id="q_11062eab2cdc6ef9_8"><br>Sandy Fleming<br><a onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)" href="http://scotstext.org/" target="_blank">http://scotstext.org/
</a><br></span></div><br>
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