Is Sign Language a Language?

[Adrean Clark]

Paulette Caswell is infamous in the US signing community.  Brice Alden
refutes her Ph.D. on the following web site:

http://hometown.aol.com/Alair38/cbs.htm

My suggestion is to ask another linguist - ask around Gallaudet
University as well.

Adrean

On Saturday, May 3, 2003, at 10:49 AM, Angus B. Grieve-Smith wrote:

> On Sat, 3 May 2003, Philocophus wrote:
>
>> At present I am currently working on a project funded by the British
>> Government to create a higher exam course in Deaf History and one of
>> the
>> most important elements in Deaf History, is of course language. In my
>> quest to ensure that I obtain professional confirmation that sign
>> language is indeed and unarguably a language, I encountered one lady,
>> copies of whose correspondences with me I attach here.
>
>         Wow!  Did Stokoe kill this woman's family or something?  Where
> did
> she get this much venom?  She's clearly made her mind up based on a
> whole
> lot of outdated theories, and looks like she'll be very difficult to
> convince.
>
>         Does she have some authority to block recognition of BSL at
> some
> level?  If so, I'd want to find out how such a closed-minded person got
> into a position of power (not that I'm surprised).  If she just wants
> to
> vent, then you two can amuse yourselves for years this way.
>
>         I feel pretty comfortable with the idea that signed languages
> are
> languages, but I don't think it's very productive to quibble over
> terminology.  From a practical point of view, I feel that:
>
> - signed languages are an awful lot like spoken languages
> - it is very difficult for the vast majority of Deaf people to gain
> fluency in a spoken language and have a life as well
> - Deaf education is a lot like bilingual education
> - converting from a signed language to a spoken language via computer
> is
> an awful lot like machine translation
>
>         The two kinds of languages clearly have differences, but the
> similarities are very important, for purely practical reasons.
>
>                                         -Angus B. Grieve-Smith
>                                         Linguistics Department
>                                         University of New Mexico
>                                         grvsmth at unm.edu
>                                         grvsmth at panix.com
>