Kinship terminology in SLs

[Ulrike Zeshan]

Hi, I think for kinship terms, sign language teaching materials and dictionaries are also a reasonable source, if you are interested in getting a broad idea across several languages rather than in-depth analysis (and if you are not too bothered about some possible omissions). 

There are some informative SL dictionaries out there, though many are not online. I am sure that kinship terms can readily be found, for example, in the following dictionaries that I just randomly remember:
Thai Sign Language (originally Suwanarat & Reilly, but has since been revised as a second edition)
Hong Kong Sign Language (Gladys Tang)
Auslan (Johnston et al)
Brazilian Sign Language (multilingual including English, I think Capovila may be one of the authors)

You can find full references to these and other dictionaries by searching here: www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/bibweb 

Many sign language teaching materials are now multimedia with videos, but they are mostly made only in the language of the respective country, e.g. German and German Sign Language in Germany, so they may be more difficult for you to access.

The Japanese Sign Language family has a very interesting gender marking system that also applies to kinship terms, are there any recent publications on kinship in particular?

Ulrike


P.S. What does the "parent" morpheme look like??




Prof. Ulrike Zeshan
Director, International Centre for Sign Languages and Deaf Studies
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
Livesey House, LH212
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR12HE, UK
uzeshan at uclan.ac.uk
Ph. +44-1772-893104

>>> <emaragreen at berkeley.edu> 02/12/08 9:04 PM >>>

Hello, all,

This is my first post so please accept my apologies if it is in any way
unclear!  By way of introduction, let me briefly say that I am a PhD
student in linguistic anthropology at UC Berkeley working in Nepal with
both Nepali Sign Language signers and home signers.

For a linguistics course I am currently taking, I am looking at kinship
terminology in Nepali Sign Language and thinking about its relationships
(semantically and morphologically) to other languages, including (spoken)
Nepali and signed languages with which Nepali signers have had substantial
contact.  My professor suggested that it would be of great help to gather
some cross-linguistic data on kinship terms/structure in other sign
languages, and I've had no luck either with articles or on-line SL
dictionaries (except for BSL and a few KSL signs).

Basically, in NSL, the distinctions made in kinship terminology (ie which
relationships are named) exactly parallel those made in spoken  Nepali
(the one article I found, on Argentinean Sign Language, indicated that
this isn't the case in Argentina, in relation to Spanish).  While Nepali
always distinguishes between male and female relatives, sometimes using
gender suffixes and sometimes using distinct lexical items, NSL
distinguishes between male and female by beginning all kinship terms (with
two exceptions) with the sign for female or the sign for male.  For
example, mother might be analyzed as "female + parent" and father as "male
+ parent," except that the morpheme glossed here as "parent" can never
stand alone.

If anyone has the time to point me towards articles or online
dictionaries, or to provide me with a brief description of these matters
in a sign language they know well, including a) the relationship between
the structure of kinship terminology in the SL and in the
relevant/dominant spoken language(s) and b) the morphological/compounding
structure used (if any) in the individual terms that would be fantastic.

Thank you and I look forward to being a part of this listserv!
Mara

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