Antw: Re: Florida: Calling All Deaf Advocates!

[Franz Dotter]

Dear colleagues,

One should not argue on "foreign" or not. Sign languages are simply
typologically so different to at least the European spoken languages
that everyone is legitimized to select them as a language which sheds
many new perspectives on "language", compared to English etc. This fact
is not suspended by the fact that all sign languages show many contact
phenomena concerning the spoken languages of their environment.

Franz Dotter

University of Klagenfurt
Center for Sign Language and Communication of the Hearing Impaired
Funded by: Provincial government of Carinthia, Bundessozialamt
Kaernten, European Social Fund
Head: Franz Dotter (hearing)
Collaborators: Elisabeth Bergmeister (deaf), Silke Bornholdt (deaf)
Christian Hausch (deaf), Marlene Hilzensauer (hearing), Klaudia Krammer
(hearing), Christine Kulterer (hearing), Anita Pirker (deaf), Andrea
Skant (hearing), Natalie Unterberger (deaf).
Homepage: http://www.uni-klu.ac.at/fzgs
Deaf server (in German): http://deaf.uni-klu.ac.at
Fax: ++43 (0)463 2700 2899
Phone: ++43 (0)463 2700 /2821 (Franz Dotter), /2822 (Andrea Skant),
/2823 (Marlene Hilzensauer), /2824 (Klaudia Krammer), /2829 (Christine
Kulterer)
Email addresses: firstname.lastname at uni-klu.ac.at



>From previous posts in this thread, I thought the objection was not
"It
isn't a language", but rather "It isn't foreign". If that *is* in fact
the (stated) grounds of opposition, arguing "It *is* a language" will
not be useful.

-- Mark A. Mandel
   Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania