names of signed languages

[Don & Theresa G]

Angus-

I don't think the problem lies in when we are face-to-face, signing about
the countries signs.  In these situations, you are right, we can use the
sign for the country and add the sign SIGN(-LANGUAGE).  It is in those
situations when we are talking about these languages IN PRINT that I think
we all have a real major potential (already realized?) for confusion.

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?).

--Don Grushkin

-----Original Message-----
From: Angus B. Grieve-Smith <grvsmth at UNM.EDU>
To: SLLING-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA <SLLING-L at ADMIN.HUMBERC.ON.CA>
Date: Thursday, February 11, 1999 7:30 AM
Subject: Re: names of signed languages


>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