names of signed languages

[Angus B. Grieve-Smith]

On Tue, 16 Feb 1999, Victor Brown wrote:

> Ulrike Zeshan wrote:

> > So including the sign for countries doesn't help in this case.
>
> This is getting into etymology and historical linguistics.

        The problem is that these political issues are still with us.
Many people in India and Pakistan are still trying to blow each other up,
and I can imagine that some Pakistanis would get very angry at the
suggestion that they speak "Indian Sign Language," and vice versa.

        If the names are arbitrary, and no longer transparently associated
with the country, then your argument holds.  But if the sign used for
"India" consists of a thumb marking a caste symbol on the forehead, then I
doubt many Pakistanis would go along with it.


> > {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.

        From what I understand, in India there is still a certain amount
of resentment between members of the various cultures.  If the sign used
by members of the Hindi culture for "sign" is adopted as part of the name,
others may resent this as another example of Hindi dominance.


> 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.

        Are you suggesting that this should be recorded somewhere?


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