Names of signed languages

[Victor Brown]

Actually from a message with a subject of "RE: Respecting
indigenous/local sign
languages"

> Mike wrote:
> {many snips}

> As for Sign Language names, I would disagree with the person that said some
 sign
> languages don't have signs for LANGUAGE. What do you think the SIGN means?
>

Vic here. I think the context Mike is referring to was from something I
said. I believe other people have pointed out that the lexical item
"language" does not exist in other languages as well. Maybe not as part
of this "Names of signed languages" discussion, but none the less...

Let me be clear here; I am in no way "flaming" Mike. He was actually
discussing something more related to the 'indigenous' subject. I have
'snipped' out this one bit from his message to avoid any misconception
from going forward. You never know when someone will jump in on these
discussions.

-----
Mike, before I, or any one could comment on what SIGN means, we would
have to know what is meant by SIGN. I think you were asking about Polish
Sign's SIGN. If we could see it even better.

With an ASL sentence like, "YOU SIGN MEXICO SIGN LANGUAGE, YOU?" the
gloss SIGN showed up twice. (Go with me on this above example. It isn't
very real, but I think you'll be able to follow me.) In ASL, we tend to
say they are the same sign. And they probably are homonyms. That is at
least what I thinking for this discussion. In a dictionary this would be
SIGN1 and SIGN2, etc.

So, ASL has three signs (lexemes) that often are used for the English
"American Sign Language". We gloss them AMERICA, SIGN, and LANGUAGE.

I agree that in this kind of sentence, LANGUAGE, can be dropped and the
second SIGN will infer both the concept of "sign or signing" and that
MEXICO is a "language" vs a code of sorts. Like morse code, or a pidgin.
But, the first SIGN only acts as a verb. ANd yet a third SIGN (not
shown) only as a noun, similar to "word" in English. As I said above,
these three SIGN's are homonyms.

Now to when I said, "...does not have a sign for 'language'". When I
said this I was referring specifically to Thai Sign. And by extension
saying that there are probably others out there as well that do not have
a lexeme for the concept "language".

For example, in spoken Thai, you would say, 'paasaa meu thay' [language
manual Thai]. The word 'paasaa' is obligatory in spoken Thai by the way.
I mentioned that before too.

In Thai Sign however, you sign, 'MEU THAY'.
There is no lexeme for the concept of 'paasaa' [language], so it cannot
be signed.

ASIDE: A spoken language would be signed something like; 'PHUUT ANGKRIT'
[converse England].

I said all this during the discussion about naming and acronyms to point
out that some acronyms are from the spoken language word choice and word
order. I am not saying,
nor do I believe that any Deaf community doesn't know what a language
is, they just haven't felt a need for a separate lexical item.

ASIDE: Thai Deaf use 'MEU' and 'PHUUT' to distinguish signed and spoken
languages. And they can and do distinguish the two concepts of England
and English by way of syntactical means even though the two signs are
homonyms.

Hum??? I hope I've cleared that up.

To flip it over, think about this. The Thai Deaf have signs for mango,
papaya, pineapple and one for a sliced-pineapple-ready-to-eat. In ASL
there is PINEAPPLE. So, perhaps ASL is the inferior language (in the
fruit area anyway). ;)

Smile,
Vic