Florida: Calling All Deaf Advocates!

[Mark A. Mandel]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Alysse Rasmussen quoted Dan Parvaz as saying:

#Even though there is no linguistics department at UCF, there is a minor
#administered through the English department, as well as other folks in
#Anthropology and Education who have appropriate backgrounds. Most
#linguists accept the status of signed languages as languages in their
#own right. Has anyone contacted these folks?
#
#In my experience, legislation of capital-T Truth tends to make
#academics dig in their heels. They don't like the used car salesmen in
#the the legislature dictating what is a language any more than they
#would like to be told that they had to teach creation science. It's
#impinging on academic freedom. The way to do this is though rational
#persuasion. Has the faculty senate or the Provost given a reason that
#can be argued against?

>From previous posts in this thread, I thought the objection was not "It
isn't a language", but rather "It isn't foreign". If that *is* in fact
the (stated) grounds of opposition, arguing "It *is* a language" will
not be useful.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania