[sw-l] Hello! I'm from Poland.

[Lucyna Dlugolecka]

Hello List!

My name is Lucyna Dlugolecka. I am a deaf doctoral student of descriptive linguistic at the University of Warsaw (graduated with M.Ed. from the Krakow Pedagogical University). Some time ago Valerie Sutton gave here a link to my article on SignWriting, written in Polish. I have been reading the List ever since.

I was "keeping quiet" as I have nothing to do with SignWriting. I like the idea very much and my article was the first one on SignWriting published in Poland. However, a few lectures on it were given last year by my colleagues Danuta Mikulska (doctoral student of descriptive linguistics) and Romuald Szurik (Deaf student of Polish) at the University of Warsaw. Most of Polish teachers of the Deaf and the Polish Deaf themselves have no idea of SignWriting.

It would be great if SignWriting was used in Poland but the reality is far from perfect. The problem is that teachers of the Deaf in Poland use Signed Polish, not the Polish Sign Language (PJM). And most Deaf, including Deaf teachers have no idea these are two different languages. They tend to think the language of the Deaf (PJM) is a variant of Polish. So, it would be very hard to implement the idea of SignWriting as it should be based on PJM.

What induced me to get out from the shadow?

The discussion on working languages.

It's great we have English to communicate at an international level. But it takes so many years to learn a natural language! Especially if the language is from another linguistic group than the mother tongue. Whereas, Esperanto is very easy to learn for everyone!

But that does not mean we should learn Gestuno. What grammar is to be used with Gestuno? Is there any grammar for this 'language'?

 

Cheers,

Lucy
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