Acronyms for SL

Tue Sep 4 14:58:32 UTC 2007

And its political here - it is up to the regional/national Deaf
community to decide, not us linguistics - we cannot go and use fancy
codes etc - some Finns were very impressed when I was talking about
SVK, not FinSL - they said that I respect their language by using
their acronym.

Good example here - in Belgium, theres one signed language with two
main dialects but the deaf communities there chose to give separate
names - VGT in Dutch and LSFB in French to show that there are two
separate deaf communities (just like hearing communities - the Flemish
and the French speakers) but the community was always as one until
lately.

Thierry can give us some examples about how they got to name their language LSFB

It is not really for linguists to decide on the name of the language
(and the acronyms) - its the same with Irish - traditionally it is
known as Gaelic (even in the Irish language itself!) but the Irish
Government made it so that it is known as Irish, not Gaelic, just to
be used as a nation-building tool.

For instance, we could call ISL "Ireslan" but there were objections to
that (for political reasons) because the name Ireslan was promoted by
a hearing nun in Dublin and other reasons.

Its all about politics :-)

Shane

On 04/09/07, Mark A. Mandel <mamandel at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
> "Lorraine Leeson" <leesonl at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> >But why do the acronyms need to be transparent?? This doesn't seem to
> >be a necessary condition of naming!
>
> As someone else has said, codes are codes and don't need to be memorable.
> But there's a reason that, say, my university ID has a name form (mamandel)
> as well as a number. If you're reading a comparative paper on, say, namesign
> forms in SLs around the world, do you want to have to keep a cheat sheet
> handy to know which one each code refers to? I don't.
>
> And as for the other complaint, that these terms are English-based: We are
> writing here in English. If I read a Russian paper on spoken languages, I
> would have no right to complain that (transliterated) "nemeckii" doesn't
> resemble the English word "Hungarian" -- or, for that matter, the Hungarian
> word "Magyar" (acute accent on the 2nd "a"). Codes are not language-based,
> but names and abbreviations are. It would not be unfair for English-language
> abbreviations (NOT codes!) for SLs to be English-based.
>
> But it would be polite for writers to introduce the abbreviations on first
> use in a paper, as is typically done in biomedical text with abbreviations
> for genes, proteins, diseases, and so on.
>
> m a m
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On 04/09/07, Sonja Erlenkamp <sonja.erlenkamp at hist.no> wrote:
> The memorability of an acronym is IMHO (-> nice initialsm/acronym ;) based on convention and frequency of use. I doubt that most people would recognize NSL or (NTS for that matter ) as an abbreviation for Norwegian Sign Language since this is one of the signed languages that has been talked/written little about on this list (and other international meeting points). It is a totally different matter with ASL and BSL though.
>
> With regard to the "this is an English list"- argument, I wonder if this is actually a valid argument. In Norway we refer to ASL actually very often as ASL and not ATS (which would be the Norwegian abbreviation), at least not any more (older books sometimes used ATS, but our students consider it weird).When we use abbreviations to refer to signed languages as much as we do, they become entrenched as a name tags for the language.
>
> Furthermore, I think we all agree that English is a dominant (if not the most dominant) language in internasjonal relations and it takes over domains in other spoken language communities. In Norway this has become a huge issue, this is probably true for other spoken language communities too.
>
>  With regard to the issue at hand  the question is if the signed language communities tolerate these "name tags" to based on English abbreviations and what kind of role we researchers want to play in this.
>
> Sonja
>
>
>
> ________________________________
>
> Fra: slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu på vegne av Mark A. Mandel
> Sendt: ti 04.09.2007 16:27
> Til: slling-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
> Emne: [SLLING-L] Re: Research on Signed/Spoken Language Code switching
>
>
>
> "Lorraine Leeson" <leesonl at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
> >But why do the acronyms need to be transparent?? This doesn't seem to
> >be a necessary condition of naming!
>
> As someone else has said, codes are codes and don't need to be memorable.
> But there's a reason that, say, my university ID has a name form (mamandel)
> as well as a number. If you're reading a comparative paper on, say, namesign
> forms in SLs around the world, do you want to have to keep a cheat sheet
> handy to know which one each code refers to? I don't.
>
> And as for the other complaint, that these terms are English-based: We are
> writing here in English. If I read a Russian paper on spoken languages, I
> would have no right to complain that (transliterated) "nemeckii" doesn't
> resemble the English word "Hungarian" -- or, for that matter, the Hungarian
> word "Magyar" (acute accent on the 2nd "a"). Codes are not language-based,
> but names and abbreviations are. It would not be unfair for English-language
> abbreviations (NOT codes!) for SLs to be English-based.
>
> But it would be polite for writers to introduce the abbreviations on first
> use in a paper, as is typically done in biomedical text with abbreviations
> for genes, proteins, diseases, and so on.
>
> m a m
> _______________________________________________
> SLLING-L mailing list
> SLLING-L at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
> http://majordomo.valenciacc.edu/mailman/listinfo/slling-l
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> SLLING-L at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
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>
>
>

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