What's Deoxyribonucleotide in Sign Language?
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It is very possible to agree upon a language with your interpreters and colleagues who are also Deaf. So you create something not official but what works for you and your situation.
This approach often works fine for me: try to convey the meaning into movement and dynamics. Signed Languages are very powerful and are conceptually more capable to express something at its core instead giving it a name. Add to this "core" sign a few modifiers like fingerspell the first or the first few letters, and what works very well in Swiss German Sign Language, mouthing, i. e. move the mouth as if you would verbalize but don't make a sound. These mouthings are linguistically known as "mouth pictures". Exactly as loan words, and often the loaned words are mangled horribly but they are just an expedient for communication.
As a result, it was expected that if we traveled a few hundred km in any direction, the local signs might be dramatically different than the ones we're used to, and so we'd better learn to interpret context and ask what specific words meant.
The word "Blub Paradox" in itself is a good example of what Deaf people do if they encounter concepts they need to communicate. They make up words. Signed Languages are very productive in making up words.
So it is not just an idiom, slang or jargon, it is more than that.
I imagine a similar set of signs arising in different disciplines.
But at some stage your local vocabulary runs out, and you wonder whether you should just use English for everything in that domain to make it consistent.
I've run into this problem with a load of languages, I just don't know the right word for things like DNA or vector calculus, or it sounds wrong.
(In many languages it is deoxyribonucleic acid with first part not translated.)
I think you're missing the point. OP claimed that English is the language of science in most other languages. The parent showed, using an example from Spanish, that the actual language of science in most languages is Latin.
It is neither here nor there whether or not the language is latin-derived. And regardless, it's not possible to distinguish whether or not it is 'English' or 'Latin' from examples from non-latin-derived languages because English-speaking scientific establishments, up until the 1800s (and even to this day in some fields like botany, etc.) uses Latin nomenclature in scientific work. Most of the examples that you can find, the examples in the foreign language, English, and Latin are all going to match (I believe the exception is Medical German -- practitioners in Germany have to learn both the German and Latin versions) and it is difficult to prove without specific work into the foreign etymology, that in that case the foreign language is following Latin and not English!
In case I haven't made myself clear, it's trivial to take your Swahili question to demonstrate the point. According to Google Translate (I couldn't find a Wiktionary entry for it) in Swahili it is "asidi deoxyribonucleic". Now, is this because it follows the English form or the Latin form? You can't know without doing some digging into the Swahili Etymology.
But even for scientific writing, my dictionary translates DNA as 脱氧核糖核酸, where 脱 means peel off, 氧 means oxygen, and 核糖核酸 means RNA, so DNA = de-oxy-RNA. As for RNA, 核糖 means ribose and 核酸 means nucleic acid. And in 核酸, 核 means nucleus/core/pip and 酸 means sour/acid, so again the meaning of the characters joined together are simply the sum of their parts. That's always been the case in my limited experience with medical words in Mandarin.
Ask me anything.
The capitalized word is meant to highlight the cultural and social parts of living in a community with other Deaf people. You also would not write American in the lower case.
Being "deaf" is about the handicap, about the loss of hearing and other problems.
Being "Deaf" is about being a member of a community, about the keen visual sense, about communicating in a Signed Language, and so on.
Why not capitalize every Noun like in German
Did you see my careful use of the capital letter?
+it’s almost 100 degrees here
One example: my wife and I realized that we are a lot more able to read the mood of our children by just looking at them than hearing parents. We just "see through" our children.
Even in hearing people, I'm reminded of those who are not just big readers but are used to reading; those who can skim and still obtain 100% of the writer's meaning as opposed to others who aren't so comfortable, fluent, or quick readers — but are not uneducated, just not accustomed to the medium.
Of course the bookworms then have an easier access to education in written form (and that's why I am both a Dipl. Ing. FH in IT and a Bachelor of Law).
https://www.nad.org/resources/american-sign-language/communi...
Additionally in America up until recently the Deaf community was oppressed, told there was something wrong with them, and forced to use a communication system that doesn’t work as well for them. This led to lower education outcomes, depression, and other ills. This led to a strong Deaf culture and identity, so as to not allow the hearing to tell the Deaf that they are somehow damaged or not complete.
I don't know how widely accepted these signs are and it has a serious problem with spambots, but it was useful when I was tutoring a Deaf friend in programming.
Edit: So rather than being entirely uneducated on this topic, I'm googling it. There seems to be some disagreement between which is better, and it also appears to be a somewhat sensitive topic (according to non-deaf people who are writing articles about deaf people on the internet. So take that for what its worth)
Efficiency is only one spectrum in play. Sign languages are languages distinct and evolutionarily unique from spoken languages. Early attempts such as "Signed English" attempted to minimize the distinction between the spoken language and signed language, but living languages evolve to fit their medium, and sign languages evolved some truly unique grammars and even their own words that don't always reflect relatives in nearby spoken languages.
Even though sign languages for the most part haven't adopted their own written languages that better reflect their grammar and uniqueness (and there's really interesting arguments on both sides whether they should), there's an increasing difference between a sign language and its "written language neighbor". One particularly fun example is that American Sign Language (ASL) is much closer to French Sign Language (FSL) on the language family tree than ASL is to British Sign Language (BSL). Despite what you might presume from the spoken language "neighborhoods" of the sign languages, an ASL signer is going to have an easier conversation with an FSL signer than a BSL signer.
Which leads to the fact that there are even native speakers whose first and primary language in their lives is a sign language, and with a culture to match (Capital-D Deaf Culture). Written English will always be a foreign language to them, even if it is a second language they have a lot of reason to study from early in life.
So it's a quality of life question as much as or more than just an efficiency question. (Just as with most language issues, really. We could probably find a more efficient use of language for English medical/scientific jargon than smashing lots of random bits of Latin and Greek together. But we have what we have for a lot of familiarity and cultural reasons.)
Seriously though, thank you very much for sharing your perspective on this. It's awesome to ask a question (in an area where I have no domain knowledge) and get such a high quality responses.
The eternal cry of the hackernewser upon finding that other subjects as well as computer science exist.
(EDIT: To clarify, I'm not intending to dunk on the parent poster specifically, rather call out how many people in this community and in the hacker community continually ignore the fact that, not only do other subjects exist, but they also have a lot of knowledge that isn't necessarily self-evident, and the issue has different constraints and priorities. A lot of the posts on here feel like nobody learned anything from the idiots that set up Metamed).
As a bonus, the only thing that seems to be more common than someone on HN appearing out of touch with reality, is someone on HN trying to bring up how often HN appears out of touch. Be the change buddy :)
So, usually for social sciences it is a lot better to have a Signed Language interpreter. For hard science it depends on the lecturer. If I have someone droning on, a transcript would be easier on my nerves. If I however have a really good lecturer, a Signed Language is better in catching what is said.
You need to consider that lectures are only one part of what you use to study. Also very important are books and self-study. In this light transcripts are just something like a book and we all know that it is not a good idea to learn from books only.
I get that being clear/accurate/specific is important, but isn't this what slang/shortnames are used for?
Even in the most conservative engineering positions I've had, slang was used alot, since there are tons of things that have overly long/descriptive/technical terms which no one wants to use in everyday language/communication. The only time you would use them would be in documentation, and even then many times there is a glossary and the shortname would be used.
FYI - per HN guidelines, all comments should be taken as if posted in good faith, including yours :)
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Kinda how we use initialisms and other abbreviations in speech/writing.
For common topics you'd get local slang that might not even be valid a few towns away -- BSL being somewhat like British-English in that respect!
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