Acronyms [abbreviations] for SL

[Mark A. Mandel]

"Sonja Erlenkamp" <sonja.erlenkamp at hist.no> wrote
    >>>>>

 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.

 <<<<<

And "Shane Gilchrist O hEorpa" <shane.gilchrist.oheorpa at gmail.com> wrote 
similarly
    >>>>>

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.

 <<<<< 

To return to my point, "SVK" is fine when you're talking to or writing for
or signing/fingerspelling to a Suomi community -- sorry, I mean "Finnish" 
-- but unhelpful in English (or French or Russian or ...). I would have no 
problem with abbreviations like FlemSL and FrBelgSL. But the Flemish- and 
French-based abbreviations make sense in English only after they have been 
explained, and not fully even then. I can deduce that the "V" and "T" stand 
for "Vlaamse" and "Taal", if I've got them spelled right, but this is only 
one step better than an arbitrary code like "349". And it still doesn't 
answer the question of what to do if the name of some other sign language, 
in the spoken language of that region, also happens to abbreviate to "VGT".

    >>>>>[Shane continues:]

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.

 <<<<<

That argument holds within the country, and somewhat less strongly elsewhere 
among speakers of the same language -- in this case, English, the other 
official language of the Irish Republic -- but IMHO it loses almost all of 
its strength when we start talking about what to call a language IN ANOTHER 
LANGUAGE (that is not also a language of its homeland). See above re 
"Suomi".

    >>>>>[Shane again:]

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 :-)

 <<<<<

Yes, but that is an intra-language matter for case-by-case decision (if it 
comes up at all for a given SL), hardly bearing on this question in general.

-- Mark A. Mandel
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]


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