names of signed languages

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, Ulrike Zeshan wrote:

> 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.

        That's close.  What I meant was to use a Roman-based transcription
system (like Newkirk '86) to transcribe the signs for "signing" and the
country/region/ethnicity (in the word order used in that signed language).
So ASL would be S-bluuwhie Si-giwrua (anyone more familiar with Newkirk
'86, please check that).  Now let me see if I can address your other
concerns...


> 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.

        This is an important point.  After all, even India and Pakistan
themselves are incredibly diverse countries, and the British just called
the whole thing "India."  Perhaps a compound like the English one you've
been using (India-Pakistan(-Bangladeshi-Nepalese-Sri Lankan) Sign
Language) would work; another expression I've heard in English is "South
Asian" (which, if we used English abbreviations, would clash with South
African Signed Language).


> 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. [...]

        I found out last spring that the opposite phenomenon of
"dialectization" occurs as well, which is why so many people think that
ASL is related to English, etc.  I think what linguists most often do is
to figure out whether the speakers of a language perceive their language
to be the same as another, and work accordingly.  Thus, even though (to my
knowledge) linguists agree that the dialect boundaries in Serbo-Croation
don't have any relationship to the boundaries of identification as
Serbian, Croatian or Muslim, they now speak of "Serbian and Croatian" so
as not to alienate nationalist speakers of these languages.


> 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...

        This is a hard one.  Although it's not unthinkable to have two
different spellings of the same name, depending on what dialect you're
closest to.  Another possibility is to deliberately "fudge" things, the
way that the word "American" is written consistently one way, but
pronounced in several different ways by the various hearing people in the
US.


> 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.

        It's not even the case in "our world," despite our perceptions.
Even with the ethnic cleansing of the '30s and '40s, there is still a
large population of German-speakers living outside Germany.  Similarly,
there are large indigenous populations in France that still do not speak
French natively, despite the best efforts of the French government at
coercion.  And the US is even more diverse.  That's not even considering
immigrant populations.

        I guess I still think a transcription solution would be best, with
some kind of "fudge factor" so that the Tamil Deaf don't try and blow up
the Marathi Deaf (or you) for providing the authoritative name for the
language or something.


                                -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
                                Linguistics Department
                                The University of New Mexico
                                grvsmth at unm.edu