Palestine sign

[Nobukatsu Minoura]

Dear Ulrike and other subscribers to the list,

Recently I attended a lecture by a teacher of a deaf school in Japan who
taught at Atfaluna School for the Deaf in Gaza Strip, Palestine for a year.
She said very little regarding Palestinian Sign Language (PSL), but she
mentioned that there is dictionary of PSL containing ca. 30,000 signs.  (Is
this a mistake of 3,000 signs??)  I wrote a short report of the lecture to a
couple of Japanese mailing lists on sign language linguistics and included
the URL of the webpage showing the dictionary, which Daisuke Sasaki saw
before posting to this list.

http://www.palestinercs.org/programs/publicat.htm#Books

I found a few more pages on PSL:

http://trident.mcs.kent.edu/~dhaher/psl.html

It says that Palestinian, Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese sign languages
have a common origin.

http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/3321/win1d.htm

It is about the Atfaluna school.  It says the Atfaluna school created PSL.
This probably was written by a writer who does not know much about sign
languages.....

http://www.geocities.com/~atfaluna/page13.html

This is a story told in PSL about how a sign interpreter should be, which
was interprated/translated into English by the principal of the Atfaluna
school, who is an American by origin and a Palestinian by marriage and
living there, Geraldine "Gerri" Shawa.

on 02.7.2 2:39 PM, Ulrike Zeshan at u.zeshan at latrobe.edu.au wrote:

> There is a sign language dictionary as well, on the same page (Qamus lugha
> al-ishara al-filastiniyya, Palestinian Sign Language dictionary). This is
> in Arabic, and it says something about cooperation with Spain. Anyone knows
> about this one??

I do not know anything other than what can be known from the webpages.
Anyway, the dictionary's publisher is Palestine Red Crescent Society, the
equivalent of Red Cross in Islamic countries.  I tried to e-mail them but it
bounced back.  I faxed them, which went through.  I am waiting for a reply.

Nobukatsu "Nobu" Minoura
Linguistics
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies
minoura at tufs.ac.jp, nobum at gol.com