FW: Encyclopedia of Linguistics

[Daisuke Sasaki]

At 10:01 AM +0200 00.9.12, Nobukatsu Minoura wrote:
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> I think more sign languages should be represented.  Chinese Sign Language
> for the whole Eastern Asia is not enough!  And also, can you think of
> linguistic phenomena idiosynchratic to sign languages?  Classifiers?  What
> else?  Who among the sign language linguists should be in the who's who?
> William Stokoe?<of course>  Who else?  Let us be contributors to the
> Encyclopedia of Linguistics.

Nobu, or Minoura-san, you seem to be so excited.  You had a
coffee at breakfast, didn't you? :-)

But, you will find that Nobu's anger is quite reasonable if
you look at the web pages of the Encyclopedia.  The first
page lists the articles covered in the Encyclopedia
alphabetically, and the second all the topics by subject:

        http://www.fitzroydearborn.com/chicago/lingentryalpha.htm
        http://www.fitzroydearborn.com/chicago/lingsubjectentry.htm

Caution: The second page is very heavy (280KB).

If you search those pages by a keyword like "sign," this
encyclopedia only covers the following topics related to
sign linguistics:

> LANGUAGES     Sign Languages
> American Sign Language        2000 words
> British Sign Language 2000 words
> Chinese Sign Language 2000 words
> Indian Sign Language  2000 words
> Signed Languages      3000 words
>
> TOPICS        Acquisition
> Acquisition: Acquisition of Sign Language     1000 words

How about Japanese Sign Language?  Thai Sign Language?
Korean Sign Language?  Hong Kong Sign Language?  Taiwan Sign
Language?  Other European sign languages than BSL?  Auslan?
NZSL?  Or whatever sign languages not listed above?  Does
this mean that they are not recognized?  I feel like
concluding that the editors would be linguists of spoken
languages and that they don't know much about sign languages.
This kind of thing happening AGAIN?  Alas!


Daisuke

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Daisuke Sasaki    mailto:daisuke at mail.com    http://www.daisuke.com/
Doctoral Student of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin
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