"Accent" & Nortel

[Don & Theresa G]

Bencie wrote:

> It's also somewhat striking that the initial comments about the
> advert seemed to represent a reflexive view that if the signing
> didn't look like ASL, it was somehow 'wrong'. I think if hearing
> people saw an advert in which people were speaking something
> unintelligible, the assumption would be that they were using a
> foreign spoken language, not that they were speaking 'wrong' English.

Bencie,

I think the only reason(s) I thought it was somehow "wrong" was that it was
(a) shown in the U.S, and you would normally expect to see ASL signing in an
U.S. Commercial,  (b) I thought the signs looked almost, but not quite ASL
("voice" for example, was recognizable to me...I would expect a different SL
to use a different and much less recognizable sign than what I saw, using
the V handshape and all) (c) due to the almost recognizability but some
decidedly incorrect handshapes (if she had been signing ASL), I was
suspicious that the girl had learned ASL from a book, and the company had
been taken in by a hearing person/non-native signer (a la Holly Daniel for
Saturn).   You can be sure if I saw signing and could not see any
similarities to ASL, I would pretty much assume it was a foreign SL.

My wife did suggest the possibility that she was signing a different SL.  I
decided to check it out with Nortel themselves, and after their response, I
went to you guys to double-check, rather than go screaming that Nortel was
doing "wrong" by the Deaf.  As it turned out, the girl was signing BSL, so I
am relieved on that issue.

It interests me, though, that the sign WANT in BSL goes outward from the
body, whereas in ASL it goes inward toward the body.  Wonder what that means
in terms of the cognitive models associated with those concepts in BSL and
ASL.

--Don Grushkin