names of signed languages

[Victor Brown]

Ulrike Zeshan wrote:
> So including the sign for countries doesn't help in this case.

This is getting into etymology and historical linguistics.

> 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.
{snip}

Like someone mentioned about the 'A' in ASL now stands for "American"
because of history, the same idea holds for the names of a language.
Where did it start first? Not, necessarily a country name, but a city or
a people group.

Start there, then get into the geo-political issues.

>  {snip} 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.

Your explanation is a good example of what I mean. In the paragraph
above, the central language is German, not Dutch, or Bavarian. This is
because "we" have given, German, that place in the "hierarchy".


> I would like to suggest to be cautious about assigning the name of a sign
>  language accordinng to the political country... {snip}

I agree.

>  {snip} But still we wouldn't want to assign different names to these dialects
 of
>  the same sign language on the basis of this variation {snip}

At first glance no. Following my current idea, if you can't find the
historical "start", then you may have to.

Regardless of this, I'm interested in seeing us agree that this is
difficult situation. And when whomever does coin a name, there is also a
good explanation about that language "A" and that it is indeed different
than language "B".

And then state that because of geo-political reasons, the name cannot be
"A" or "B" but instead "C". This way the rest of us will know what is
going on and when language "D" comes along, we can follow why it is or
is not related to the others.


In the past this had not always happened. Not by linguist per se, but by
"visitors" of a country. This is why for example the Ethnologue has many
languages (signed and spoken) listed that are really related.

> 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.

But, be careful here. There is the real situation where multiple
languages exist in a country. And then there is the "language policy" of
a country. Right?

Ulrike, in India, aren't there 8 official languages?

English in the US right? Well there are really are over 150 languages
here.

In Thailand the policy is, there is one language, Thai. But, there too
there ar many languages.

NZ list two; English and Maori, right?
etc.

But we know that these and other countries really have more than one
language.


Later,
Victor