names of signed languages

[Ulrike Zeshan]

I quite liked Angus' suggestion to use a local sign for the country together
 with the local sign for "signing" in order to
reduce ambiguity of the sign "signing" in various countries. If I have
 understood you correctly, than sign language in
India would be called BHARAT ISHARA "India Sign", which looks neat. But it still
 doesn't solve my main problem, namely that
the same sign language is used in Pakistan (PAKISTAN ISHARA?), probably also in
 Nepal, and maybe in Bangladesh. So including
the sign for countries doesn't help in this case.
I want to make a further point concerning language boundaries. Some of the
 examples mentioned in the discussion showed that
it is actually a problem to know whether, for example, NZSL, BSL, Auslan are
 separate languages or dialects. Note that there
is no theoretically satisfactory solution to this problem. The boundary between
 dialect and language is blurred, and often it
is a matter of geopolitical factors and convention whether two varieties are
 called languages or dialects. For example,
Germans living near the Dutch border and speaking one of the local dialects can
 understand Dutch much better than they can
understand the Southern German Bavarian dialect, yet they are said to speak a
 German, not a Dutch dialect.
I would like to suggest to be cautious about assigning the name of a sign
 language accordinng to the political country where
it is used, be it based on English (JoSL...) or on the local spoken language
 (LIU...) because it may turn out that the sign
language used in the neighboring country ot countries is the same. On the other
 hand, there may be regional dialectal
variation of the sign used to refer to sign language. For example, in some
 regions of India all five fingers are used for SIGN
whereas in other regions only three fingers are used in the otherwise identical
 sign. But still we wouldn't want to assign
different names to these dialects of the same sign language on the basis of this
 variation (which would happen if we were to
use a transcription of SIGN). The more I think about it, the more complexities
 arise...
And one word about ethnocentricity: this is an issue to some extent insofar as
 we (as "Westerners") assume a fairly homo-
geneous relationship between political country and spoken language: one
 country-one language (which is more or less the
case in "our world"). This kind of monolingualism is not the case at all in
 other continents.
Ulrike Zeshan