names of signed languages

[Mark Mandel]

(Don Grushkin) writes:

>>>>>
What if other countries used the second or other letters of their names for
their sign language.  Like Dan Parvaz said (tongue in cheek, I believe)
"Afrikaaner Sign Language".  Since ASL is already used, it could be AFSL?
Ulrike Zeshan came up with a nice solution for her situation that is
similar - IPSL.   the only problem with my solution that I can see is that
we Americans are going to be accused (yet again) of ethnocentrism -- (Why
should we lay claim to the A in ASL?).

<<<<<

In case anyone is really bothered by this, the answer is: priority. It has been
a principle of scientific terminology for, I guess, centuries, that the first
publication of a name for an entity establishes the scientific name of that
entity for ever. The alternative is chaos.

(I'm bcc-ing this to a friend who is a historian of science, asking him to check
my statement of the principle.)

-- Mark

       Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist : mark at dragonsys.com
    Dragon Systems, Inc. : speech recognition : +1 617 796-0267
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com/