LL-L "Deaf cultures" 2004.06.22 (03) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

======================================================================
L O W L A N D S - L * 22.JUN.2004 (03) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
http://www.lowlands-l.net * lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net
Rules & Guidelines: http://www.lowlands-l.net/index.php?page=rules
Posting: lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org or lowlands-l at lowlands-l.net
Server Manual: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/1.8c/userindex.html
Archives: http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/lowlands-l.html
Encoding: Unicode (UTF-8) [Please switch your view mode to it.]
=======================================================================
You have received this because you have been subscribed upon request.
To unsubscribe, please send the command "signoff lowlands-l" as message
text from the same account to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or
sign off at http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
=======================================================================
A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
=======================================================================

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: "Deaf Culture" [E]

Since it's quiet I thought I'd say a bit more about sign language and deaf
culture, which isn't to say that I necessarily disturb the silence when I
speak :)

This time I'm writing about how poetry is performed (or, these days, even
written) in sign languages.

As with oral poetry, there's nothing terribly clever about signed prosody,
it's how you put things together that make the poem.

While there are effects like rhythm in signed poetry, it seems to me that
fluidity is often considered more important. There are a few ways in which a
poet can make their signing more fluid and continuous.

One is by using signs such that the second starts with the hands in the same
position as the first ended. For example, the sign for "darkness falls" is
two flat hands raised in front of the face being brought in and down to
horizontal, while the sign for "bat" is two flat hands used as wings flying
diagonally upwards. So in her poem "Evening", we see Dot Miles using the
line, "...darkness falls, a bat..." with no repositioning between the signs.

Another way of increasing fluidity is to keep all the signing moving in one
direction. For example, "flower" is normally signed as a left-to-right
movement under the nose. If a poet wants start a line on her right side and
end it on the left, and the sign "flower" occurs in the middle, you might
find she signs "flower" in the wrong direction, just to keep all the
movement connected.

It's not hard to see how rhyme can be done in sign - just as some words have
a minimal phnoneme difference, so some signs have minimal feature
differences (there's a certain difference of level between signed and oral
languages in my opinion - in signed languages the "feature" level is more
obvious than in oral languages). Thus the signs for "nervousness" and
"heartbeat" are exactly the same, other than being made on slightly
different parts of the body.

While spoken languages are mostly confined to one channel (the mouth, unless
you also include gestural information), signed languages use three
channels - two hands and the face. This doesn't mean you can speak about
three different things at the same time, because the "left" or non-dominant
hand is usually much less active than the dominant hand, and the face is
also used mostly for supplementary information.

However, sign language poets tend to make better use of the three channels,
sometimes developing special classifiers (cf Navajo?) such as for flying
birds, swimming octopuses and suchlike, so that they can sign about one
character in their narrative with one hand, another with another, and a
third with the face. An example is a poem by Dot Miles where she describes
taking her dog for a walk and a bird joins them in the park. There are
places where all three are spoken about at the same time.

There's a sense in which translating poetry between any two languages could
be said to be a lost cause - not that it's not worth doing but that
languages, especially in poetic forms, don't map easily onto one another.
The way sign language poetry can make use of three channels (even in
writing) shows one very difficult translation problem, but I think even more
problematic is the fact that in oral language, vocabulary tends to be
discrete, where as in signed languages it tends to be continuous.

For example, in English an angry person might be described as "annoyed",
"angry" or "furious", but in BSL there's only one sign for all these, and
the intensity of the emotion is shown by the intensity of the movement,
handshape and facial expression, amongst other things. This sort of
continuity applies to all sorts of things - facial expression being used not
literally but in a more abstract way.

An example of this in poetry is the famous BSL poem "Loss" (at least, I
think it's a poem - it's certainly inspiring!) where at the start we see an
aeroplane accelerating down a runway. It's hard to think how you could put
the idea of the plane _gradually_ moving faster and faster (the trick to
doing this while standing still is to use the active hand as the runway and
the passive hand as the plane) into an oral language without either using
music or just completely losing the original effect. And then again, we see
the plane soaring _gradually_ though higher and higher layers of cirrus. And
then we see a multi-channel dogfight...!

I think we need translators who really like a challenge - though I'm not
saying it couldn't be done!

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Deaf culture

Thanks for sharing the interesting information about signing, Sandy!

I am particularly fascinated by signed poetry and song.  The few times I
watched the Seattle Men's Chorus (http://www.seattlemenschorus.org/) perform
I was more focused on the choir's sign language interpreter than on the
choir itself.  He seemed to be doing just what you described: creating
fluidity of signs, and at the same time marked the songs' rhythms with his
arms and torso.  I thought that was a formidable feat.

> However, sign language poets tend to make better use of the three
channels,
> sometimes developing special classifiers (cf Navajo?)

This is something I've long thought offered itself to sign language, as to
non-phonal written languages like Chinese.  In Chinese, there is a certain
set of classifying glyphs (214 in most systems), known as "radicals," that
can be used as characters in their own right but in conjunction with other
glyphs (denoting sound or semantic hints) can make up new characters.  For
example, the character for 'fish' (魚) may serve as a classifier for all
names of fish and other aquatic animals (e.g., 魷 'squid', 鮑 'abalone', 饅
'eel', 鱈 'cod') and also things associated with these (e.g., 鰭 'fin') or are
considered similar (e.g., 鱷 'crocodile').  All the above have phonological
information added to the radical, though the right-hand part of the
character for 'abalone' may be both phonological and semantic, denoting
'envelop' or 'encapsule', as does 鰈 for 'flounder': an ancient phone as well
as the meaning 'leaf' (= 'flat').  Using this method, you can create some
sort of visual semantic theme that strikes the reader right away and sets
the tone, so to speak.  I can imagine that this would lend itself
excellently to signing.

The linguistic term "classifier" tends to be used more with regard to
numeral classifiers that are used with numbers and are determined by groups
and types of nouns, similar to "14 head of cattle," "three sheets of paper,"
"a pride of lions," "a piece of fruit," etc., except that their consistent
use is mandatory in some languages, such as those of Eastern Asia and many
of the Americas.

The closest I can think of that is similar to written Chinese radicals and
the type of classifier/radical I thought of in the case of sign languages is
the prefix system in Bantu languages; e.g., Swahili m-/wa- for humans (e.g.,
mtu 'man', watu 'men' <- -tu), m-/mi- for plants (e.g., mgomba 'banana
plant', migomba 'banana plants' <- -gomba), n- for fruit, animals and
foreign loans (e.g., ndege 'bird' <- dege), and ki- for objects (e.g., kisu
'knife' <- -su).

In Germanic languages, as in all Indo-European languages, the closest
related thing might be noun compounds in which the modified second part is
the "primitive," "radical" or "classifier" component; e.g., lime-tree,
birchtree, oaktree, pinetree, mapletree, palmtree; hedgehog, wart-hog;
codfish, jelly-fish, shellfish, cuttle-fish.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

==============================END===================================
* Please submit postings to lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org.
* Postings will be displayed unedited in digest form.
* Please display only the relevant parts of quotes in your replies.
* Commands for automated functions (including "signoff lowlands-l") are
  to be sent to listserv at listserv.linguistlist.org or at
  http://linguistlist.org/subscribing/sub-lowlands-l.html.
=======================================================================