Acronyms [abbreviations] for SL

[Lancz Edina]

What if a community does not use any acronym to refer to its own sign
language? This is the case in Hungary where both Deaf and hearing people use
simply 'jelnyelv', which means 'sign language'. We do the same with other
sign languages, adding only their 'nationalities' like in 'brit jelnyelv'
(BSL).

So if you make it a rule that local abbreviations should be used, we'll be
in trouble :-) And there is another problem with this. If a Hungarian
abbreviation were still introduced internationally for HSL, it would be
MJNy, which might be tricky for most foreigners to pronounce properly. Or
would you pronounce it in English? That would be really strange... I guess
it would be the same probem with several other languages so sticking to the
English acronyms seems to be a better option for me.

Greetings to all,

Edina Lancz






-----Original Message-----
From: slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
[mailto:slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu]On Behalf Of Shane
Gilchrist O hEorpa
Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2007 11:31 PM
To: A list for linguists interested in signed languages
Subject: Re: [SLLING-L] Re: Acronyms [abbreviations] for SL


fair enough Mark :-)

however, liking it or not, the deaf community in Ireland will stay
with ISL - they won't give a damn about other places that use ISL as
well :-D

politics for ye!

Shane

On 04/09/07, Mark A. Mandel <mamandel at ldc.upenn.edu> wrote:
> "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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