names of signed languages

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Ulrike Zeshan wrote:

> P.S. The idea of transcribing the signs used by deaf communities for
> their languages does not seem practicable to me (even if there were a
> good notation system) because in this case a number of (maybe many) sign
> languages would have the same name.  SIGN in Indopakistan Sign Language
> looks very much like the German Sign Language SIGN, and probably also
> like the Thai one, as far as I could tell from the description.

        This is a good point, Ulrike, but we don't need to borrow the word
for "sign."  I'm sure the signs for "India" and "Pakistan" are different
from the DGS sign for "Germany" and the Thai Sign Language sign for
"Thailand."  In spoken languages, we already have names for all the
countries, so we can borrow the country names from their respective signed
languages to refer to the languages without worrying about ambiguity.  How
does that sound to people?


                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
                                Linguistics Department
                                The University of New Mexico
                                grvsmth at unm.edu