"Impoverished" signed languages

[Danial A. Parvaz]

If the members of the Deaf community feel the need to borrow signs from
ASL, well and good. Languages do that all time, and not just from dead
langauges... I think we can all go through our native spoken/written
langauges, we can identify plenty of borrowed elements (occasionally in
spite of well-funded, yet misguided efforts to keep the langauge "pure").

The real problem is when outsiders (peace corps volunteers, missionaries)
come in and decide they can do their work better if only they could use a
"richer" sign language. Witness the effects on Puerto Rican SL, etc. To
these folks, I would probably quote Jakobson when he said that langauges
may differ in what they *can* say, but not in what they *must* say.

In Jordan, Deaf people got together and made joint decisions on what signs
would be to accommodate their expanding worldview (as news broadcasts
became interpreted, etc.).  In pretty much every case, the Deaf came up
with signs that were a better "fit" than if they just borrowed a term from
ASL, or Israeli SL (has the abbreviation "Shasi" caught on?), or
whatever.

Cheers,

Dan.

On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, BARBARA GERNER DE GARCIA wrote:

> A colleague visiting from Brazil, met a hearing teacher of the deaf yesterday
>  from Mongolia. This teacher told her, among other things, that the local or
> indigenous sign language was very "poor" in terms of number of signs and
> that she believed the solution was to import signs from another signed
>  language,possibly ASL (or perhaps import another sign language).
>         My friend, I think, made a convincing argument against this. My
> question is, what does one say in this kind of situation. Some of us run into
> it often.
> Barbara Gerner de Garcia
> Gallaudet University
>