Acronyms [abbreviations] for SL

[Mark A. Mandel]

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

maybe the adoption of the acronyms in the written language the signed
language is in use reflects the sign language culture.

For instance, when I say ASL in Irish Sign Language, Northern Ireland
Sign Language or British Sign Language, I would use the ASL
fingerspelling - the same for when I say ISL, I ll use the Irish
fingerspelling etc - its also common with many signers too.

It would look very strange if I fingerspell ISL in the British
fingerspelling - I would sign "Irish Sign Language"

a penny for your thought?

<<<

Clearly IrishSL, NIrishSL, and BSL  (for short) have adopted the ASL 
fingerspelling a-s-l intact as a loan sign. This sign does NOT consist (in 
these languages) of the letters "a" + "s" + "l": if it were, it would be 
fingerspelled as such in their fingerspelling. So these are not examples of 
borrowing another SL's written abbreviation for itself.

And if, say, Indian or Israeli or Indonesian Sign Language have their own 
ways to fingerspell their own names, and if these are distinct from IrishSL 
fingerspelled i-s-l, then IrishSL signers could, if they wanted, adopt those 
foreign fingerspellings as loan signs for the names of those languages in 
the same way, and there'd be no ambiguity.

That's fine for these SLs as a borrowing mechanism. But when fingerspelling 
is transliterated into written letters, Irish and NIrish and British and 
American SLs share the same system with each other and with the spoken 
languages, and there's only one way to write "ISL" in the Roman alphabet. If 
we want to avoid ambiguity in writing (and in speech), we have to find 
another way, such as arbitrary codes (too awkward and hard to remember), or 
abbreviations based on the native spoken language (also arbitrary outside 
that language), or longer abbreviations in the borrowing language (here, 
English), such as possibly IsrSL, IrishSL, IndoSL, etc.

m a m


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