The Covid Zoom Boom Is Reshaping Sign Language
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
1. ASL is not just English with each word replaced with a sign. It's an incredibly complex language with different grammatical rules, some of which don't have English equivalents.
2. It's incredibly flexible. Many core grammar components will remain consistent, but often if you drive to another city, many words/signs will be different. But signers adapt to these changes quickly.
Those two things make this article all the more interesting, because it's a great example of how the flexibility and unique properties of ASL allows for adaptation in circumstances like these strange times.
Source: three years, almost a minor, in ASL in University. I'm no expert, but I truly enjoy the language.
There are many sign languages and many more dialects.
That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself".
This is fascinating. Do you have an examples that stick out?
My deaf BSL instructor said that it was about being understood clearly, and just about deaf culture. If you're in a room of people signing everyone can see you're saying "who is the fat guy at the bar" so there's no point in being euphemistic. Might be a UK deaf culture thing.
Another reason ASL has fewer synonyms is that it’s not a horrible amalgamation of a ton of different languages like English is (English has a weirdly large vocabulary, like 3 times as large as some other languages). ASL is a direct descendant of French SL, no weird mixing. Moroccan SL, in contrast, is a descendent/hybrid of several languages and it, as an example, has like a million different handshapes for different kinds of insects.
Further, a word-sentence model is too limited to describe sign languages (I know this applies ASL and Moroccan SL, not sure about others). For example, a large set of concepts are expressed through classifiers. Classifiers are systems of hand-shapes, spatial locations (e.g. side of head vs in front of chest), and motions which can specify a objects (including its shape, size, and location) and also the objects’s verb and relationship with other objects. Some people mistakenly think classifiers are a form of pantomime, but classifier motions and hand shapes have specified and limited meanings (e.g. the flat rectangular object classifier is not making a rectangle shape, it’s more of a pinching motion). That’s just one example of how sign languages diverge from a word-sentence model, many more differences exist.
The main take away is that sign languages work differently from spoken languages, it’s not that easy to compare 1-to-1. There’s definitely no word that means “rotund” in ASL, but there are certainly grammar structures that let you express that.
Although you could, there’s no need to soften or euphemize physical characteristics in American Deaf culture. You can just sign “that fat person over there” and it’s not considered rude.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_Sign_Lan...
But I'm just speculating, I'd love to hear someone's firsthand experiences here.
Can you explain it one more time?
>>That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself".
That does sound like most languages though. So maybe sign language is a language and everything local is just a dialect? I'm sorry if I come of insensitive but I don't get it.
There is no one, universal sign language.
For example, there is Australian Sign Language (Auslan), American Sign Language (ASL), etc. They're all different languages.
I mean all spoken languages are just sounds, right? Sounds like one language to me, with multiple local dialects?
[Not Deaf, but I studied ASL and deaf culture for a few years at 2 colleges and in private lessons.]
The symbol for 1 in different orthographies, such as: 1 I ١ ― 𒐕 一 etc ...
The words for father/mother are often a bilabial and open syllable combination regardless of language family origin.
The point is that while the details of the languages (sign, oral, written) could be different, there are some human affinities that make provide commonality. Another meta-pattern might that common words in many languages are often monosyllabic, though this is less universal than the two examples I gave above AFAIK.
It's not perfect, but it does help resolve communication barriers at large world Deaf-culture events like the Deaf Olympics.
Which is too bad, sign language would be useful in later life. Unless there is a deaf person in the babies life though they will refuse to have anything to do with it once they can speak.
The way my friends have done this is to speak and sign, not just sign. I don't think any of them would've thought it was appropriate to only sign to a hearing child. The purpose was to teach them both the verbal language and a way to communicate back while they were still too young to verbalize (or, in one critical case, unable to speak due to a birth defect but were perfectly capable of hearing).
Babies do tend to learn a few signs...However as soon as they learn to talk they universally forget everything.
A ridiculous assertion.
My son knows quite a few signs and often uses them alongside speaking, which can really help when he's struggling to be as clear (e.g. when he's frustrated).
Her vocabulary is small (she's a dog), but we have gestures for e.g. "sit", "lie down", "stand back up", "stay", "come here", "go there", "be quiet", "show me what the problem is".
(She's a Siberian Husky)
My dog intuitively knows just about anything I could want her to do. She follows me (or my SO if they're home) rendering commands like "come" irrelevant. If I put on pants during the day, she idles back and forth between where I am getting ready and her kennel, finally opening the door herself when I'm ready to leave, then I latch the gate.
She has a pretty consistent schedule so most of the time, when we're doing something, she knows exactly what her role is. Another great example is treats. For the longest time we only made her sit to get treats, so now she basically does that. A few months ago, I wanted her to learn lie down but I paired it with sit first. So now if she hears the treat bag, she'll come over to me, wait for me to say one word, then she sits, then waits for another word, and then she lays down. However those words are meaningless to her. If I say, "Lay down" first, she sits. You get the idea!
That said, she's a great pup and very well behaved. :)
I think the biggest issue is that most languages including ASL have about the same informational density for a given unit of time. Whereas Cued Speech and Signed English have significantly lower informational density.
If you're a teacher or a police officer or someone who needs to talk to all people, including deaf people, wouldn't learning the eight cues be a useful tool, even if you're not going to fully-learn ASL?
Of course I can't claim any ability in ASL. When taking the baby sign language classes my teacher was very insistent that to the baby what sign you use doesn't matter, but we should use ASL signs because learning any other sign isn't any easier, and this way we have a few dozen signs that are actually useful after the baby grows up. Which is the point: if you learn some signs of ASL you can communicate better than pointing. When you learn something else your are just pointing and hoping you are understood.
So if you're saying "mat" "bat" or "pat" those all look the same to a lip-reader. With the cues, you have a small gesture that is distinct for /m/ /p/ /b/.
They combine together to make a total of about a dozen gestures that can be used to differentiate between any hard-to-understand English word.
So it's not a phrase book. It just allows you to say anything you want to say and be understood a little more clearly by a lip-reader.
The value proposition of CS is language accessibility to Deaf/HoH people while still using English.
ASL, which comes with its own body of literature, puns, jokes, culture, etc., wasn't designed in the sense that Cued Speech was, but offers something much more valuable, in my opinion.
"I love you", "Food?", "Tea?" (we're tea drinkers) are commonly used in my home.
Sign Language -> communicate with someone in a noisy room (across the room even)
Braille -> A friend of mine learned braille so he could "read" books after his parents said lights out. What a rebel.
I went to a high school where the drama department did at least one play a year in ASL. Brought in instructors from the local deaf community, and all the drama kids learned it.
This was also business genius, because it basically guaranteed ticket sales. A huge number of deaf people in the area would show up for every such play, year after year. Even parents with kids at the school generally stop coming to plays after their kids graduate, but this audience was loyal on the scale of decades.
It also meant that a significant chunk of the student body was now able to communicate in/across a noisy room. During assemblies and stuff, you'd see a dozen conversations in progress, not making a sound.
Or, communicate near-silently. Clothes rustle and certain signs involve patting, but neither of those sticks out the way voices do. Coordinating a prank behind the teacher's back....
Braille is just a writing system. Signed languages are generally not.
Noisy places, when I’m brushing my teeth, when I want to be more discrete in public, communicating across a room without yelling.
when I want to be more discrete in public ..
Which would have been handy at one point for me.
Like generally in public? Or when you're in a social group with others?
For the first scenario, I'd almost always speak a second language if I could, for privacy reasons. And also because it's less distracting to others IMO - people tune out unfamiliar languages as noise but not conversations they can understand. But yeah it's rude in the second scenario.
It is less of a big deal than when you're in a social group, where someone could feel that you are deliberately excluding them.
You can learn from YouTube, a sign dictionary (online ones have video) ... but yes, conversation is probably the best way.
A night class or MOOC?
Seriously, they haven't even tried to come up with a better system. Like.... pictures on the glass that you can point to? A form with checkboxes that you can hand over? Nope, we're going stick with yelling our lungs out.
Sign language is a real language you can learn the language. Or you can learn a few signs: there is a place for both, but know which place you are in and don't pretend more.
Did you ever get an actual answer? I'd guess yes, but it's a fair question
Another example, the notion that monkeys can "learn sign language". They can learn to use some signs, like a newborn can learn some words, but how would you feel as a French speaker if someone said "look, the monkey speaks French!" just because they taught the monkey some French words? It implies not that the monkey is smart, but that French is so simplistic that even monkeys can understand it.
My wife is learning Spanish right now because we are moving to Costa Rica. Her most used phrase is “de espacio, por favor” which means “slowly, please”. She’s able to understand much more of the language when folks slow down and annunciate clearly.
When I lived in Chile as a teen, I also asked people to do the same thing frequently until I became proficient. I still ask sometimes in other Spanish-speaking countries because their accent or dialect differs from what my ears are most used to.
Speaking slowly and clearly to anyone learning a language is incredibly useful and is not insulting in any way.
If I spoke to you in Klingon, and you don't understand Klingon. Would speaking to you in Klingon slower and louder help you? Undoubtedly, no, it would instead make me a rude person.
It's the same phenomenon as within language families. I don't know Ukrainian, but I can pick up words that share etymology with Polish words, assuming they speak slowly enough for me to isolate individual words. Similarly, I don't know much German, but I can route individual words through English.
These films (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and German) all clearly had posters at the theaters saying they were sub-titles and yet there was always someone demanding the movie be in English.
Also I think a number of people have poor/slow reading skills that they can't bluff about when someone uses signing.
You doubtless already use many signs. They may not be ASL but we do use a variety of hand gestures to convey very specific meanings.
We, the hearing community in my country (UK), use gestures too of course.
Could you give a few examples of signs hearing people use where you are that you consider "very specific"?
Flipping the bird. Pointing at things. Hand signals when driving (more a thing for motorcyclists). Then there are plenty of job-specific things. Crane operators have their own system of very specific hand gestures for directing crane operations. The military has a host of standardized gestures. DJs/audio techs/musicians have a set for talking in loud environments.
https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/safety_haz/materials_handlin...
https://armynavyoutdoors.com/blog/learn-military-hand-signal...
The little girl in this vid managed to convey a very specific meaning to a passing ship using only a gesture.
And it's SO specific that just reading that sentence, I knew exactly which meaning you meant, and which gesture. (Clicking the link to confirm was totally worth it though.) I've been on both ends of that gesture and it's always a hoot.
> DJs/audio techs/musicians have a set for talking in loud environments.
Whoah, really? I've improvised plenty, but I'm super curious if there's a standard set. You can always figure out "make louder", "make quieter", point at objects, mimic certain instruments. But it'd be nice to have more vocabulary beyond that.
http://www.preservationsound.com/2010/09/microphone-hand-sig...
https://www.cybercollege.com/hand_sigs.htm
And any orchestra can follow a conductor, baton or not.
Also re-reading this thread, I thought of the hand signals that every driver must learn in case their electrical turn signals go out, which are the same as bicyclist signals. Specific to the point of being enshrined in law.
I don't think "flipping the bird" is specific, it's either "I'm a jerk" or "I'm angry [with you]" but they both seem pretty wide ranging.
Pointing is really none specific, do you want it, want to look at it, want someone else to hold it, etc..
Military and crane operator signs seem like they're limited sign languages. Excellent example.
Driving is a good one, but it's 3 specific signs, and then pointing. I'm often annoyed that other drivers don't know BSL!
Thanks for illustrating the point, very helpful.
I rarely bump into deaf/mute people in Hong Kong. I once saw a guy holding his phone with one hand and doing sign language with the other because he was video chatting over the phone!
Of course, logically we don’t need the invention of mobile phone video chat to warrant the invention of one-handed sign language. You can just imagine some deaf/mute people holding groceries in one hand and still needing to talk. One shouldn’t have to expect them to drop the groceries on the floor in order to talk.
Nevertheless, it never occurred to me until I saw it.
Sign language only has a few (thousands) of signs. For the rest the signer finger spells the word they need, if they will use that word again they make up a new sign (often the first letter in a specific position). If a word is commonly used it will eventually enter the language in that city, and may or may not spread to other parts of the country/world. Obviously the finger spelling is the word in the spoken language not sign language.
Warning, don't make up words in sign language until you are somewhat an expert. I know of a novice who needed to talk about a person named Ryan, so they gave Ryan a sign - not realizing that sign was already used for retard.
I'm not sure where this information comes from, but doesn't quite seem correct. A sign is much more involved than simple vocabulary, and qualified signs exist outside the concept of a one-to-one, sign-to-word relationship.
There are five parameters to any sign: handshape, location, movement, palm orientation, and non-manual communication (e.g. grammar, tone, and emotion). These parameters are all in use for every signed vocab word you can think of, but they're also used in idioms, whole phrases, classifiers, depictions, and even lexicalized English words that have incorporated fingerspelling elements with other parameters to create complete, separate, non-vocabulary signs of their own (e.g. KILLED, PIZZA, BUZZ, COMMON).
Plausible deniability here.
And there can be disagreements in the Deaf community about, for lack of a better word, 'purity' of the language. Is it 'okay' to just sign English words with English grammar? Is there an ethical or moral imperative to maintain ASL as a language and not just a translation of another language? And then you have one person telling another person that there's something wrong with how they communicate their native language! Language overlapping with culture overlapping with disability (or different-ability?) overlapping with people being people.
There's no easy answers. But it's fascinating.
Like "I love you" as [love sign] -> [point at person you love].
Or for example that "very" might exist in a signed language, but isn't often used. Just substituted with a more physically animated/vigorous version of the adjective, or added facial expression.
Signed languages have a complex visual grammar. Words are inflected in many ways. I am a somewhat native speaker of the local signed language, and I sometimes discover that I uttered something I couldn't translate into German (the local oral language) without losing some meaning. This usually concerns dynamics, location and emotion. One example, I explained my son how to use the chairlift and how the chairlift will take off.
Linguists have discovered that this is not pantomime. I forgot how they named the complicated movements but I remember it is something like a cluster of micro utterances.
Your example of «I love you» is an example of inflection. You can vary this sign, to indicate a special dynamic, for example «for a long time», «slowly increasing in intensity», «and you, too, sincerely and deeply», and many others.
Here is a recent article that covers this in significant depth: https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.499/
The emergence of Nicaraguan Sign Language is a very revealing case is this regard: in much the same process as creolization, a sort of "pidgin" of home signs was transformed into a full sign language in a generation by "grammaticalizing" gestures and simple home signs from older children by the younger children. So it doesn't take long for a gesture to move right on Kendon's continuum until its fully "linguistic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_sign
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
This isn't unusual. Even in spoken languages the required grammar are often different. Even in English some areas there are some contexts where "the" is mandatory in some geographical areas and not others. Linguists can give you a Phd if you want to study this more.
You can't relate the two languages like this. Sorry, this doesn't make sense. For example, ASL doesn't have articles, English doesn't have location dependent pronouns for people.
That's why there are dozens of journals in things like linguistic typology and language variation and change. There are linguists whose entire careers have been generating a sort of conceptual mapping between the morphology, syntax and phonology of spoken languages to sign languages so that you can have sensible conversations about the typological relationship between a signed language and a spoken one.
See the research of eg Diane Brentari at Chicago or Diane Lillo-Martin at UConn or Wendy Sandler at UT Austin.
You look surprised => You look surprise
They came here recently => Recent they come
It's not about the order of words but that grandparent seems to have misunderstood something about glosses. He is thinking that grammar is simplified. It is difficult for written glosses to express the complete grammar spectrum of Signed Languages.
It's unfortunate and similar to the Blub paradox: some people will unavoidably believe that Signed Languages have a simple grammar similar to Chinese when looking at glosses.
Additionally, my local Signed Language (Swiss German Sign Language) has quite a free order. Often topic-comment is applied. An example:
[Concerning the] weather, [I] think [it's] quite fine.
As glosses: WEATHER THINK GOOD.
The word «quite» is omitted because it's an inflection. In SGSL I would make a slightly kissing mouth, lower the eyelids somewhat and make very small and fast nodding movements.
That's not Subject-Object-Verb order.
Additionally there is a slight shift between WEATHER and THINK, it's difficult to explain, but perhaps a colon after WEATHER would help. WEATHER: THINK FINE. This what I called «shift» is an inflection: it puts the word WEATHER in topic mode.
Caveat emptor: I am not a linguist, but always have been very interested in linguistics and talk SGSL every day.
Edit: many little things.
I appreciate your detailed response though.
As a point of note, Makaton is used at least a little at a lot of primary schools in Scotland (I would guess across the rest of the UK too), as a "supplementary language" for all kids.
It’s absolutely bonkers that two fairly different sign languages exist for the same base spoken language.
That said, BSL uses a lot of facial cues, not just hands and arms, to allow for a range expression. Eg puffing out your cheeks to accentuate certain words.
Historically speaking, it's because of British snobbery, allegedly. This is how my ASL professor told us it at least.
American Thomas Gallaudet went to the British school for the Deaf hoping to learn BSL, etc. But it was not long after the American Revolution and the British weren't very friendly and wouldn't help him. So he went to France and the French taught him (Old) French Sign Language. FSL became the basis of ASL, along with a number of local influences from Martha's Vineyard sign language (a small locally developed signed language).
Even then, a friend of mine from university who is very hard of hearing and mostly signs told me that on a trip to Britain he met some British Deaf people at a bar and by the end of the night was mostly fluent. There's enough overlap and enough shared experience between Deaf people that one can learn very quickly.
> That said, BSL uses a lot of facial cues, not just hands and arms, to allow for a range expression. Eg puffing out your cheeks to accentuate certain words.
This is 100% common to all Signed languages. Facial cues are huge in ASL. Before class, not joking, I would practice in the mirror to warm myself up. My first ASL prof described it by saying that in English, you could read off each word like a robot, with no inflection or tone- and that would be the same as signing with just your hands.
Sign languages are not based off of spoken languages. Sign languages are languages with their own grammar and vocabulary. They are not a method of encoding spoken language like writing is. The history of Nicaraguan Sign Language is a great example of this. In the 70s the government of Nicaragua set up a school for the deaf focused on teaching its students to fingerspell Spanish. Instead, the students spontaneously created their own sign language.
I've wondered this since I first saw a TV broadcast with a signer off to the side. Isn't that what closed captions are for? Surely it's faster to read text captions than the gestures of some low-res recording of a human stuck in a tiny box in the corner of the screen.
Video chat platforms like Zoom almost always have a text chat feature. Although at least for those I can see how it might be faster and more personable for many to sign than type.
Imagine the time where you knew something of a second language, but were not fluent yet (some of you may have never tried, but most people have done at least a little of a foreign language), watching a program in that language with subtitles in that language. That is what text subtitles are for a lot of deaf.
I suspect there are a few reason for that beyond the explanations you gave.
1) Speech is faster to produce than text. Professional captioners are among the few who can challenge that. For everyone else, it's usually faster to give a speech or say what's on your mind than to type it all out.
2) Speech frees up the eyes. My vision is usually in greater demand than my hearing, so I prefer to avoid committing it to a single activity for a long time if possible. Unfortunately, that's not an option for those without hearing.
3) Speech is easier to attribute to individuals. I can determine who said something with minimal effort just by listening to the sound of their voice.
4) Speech is more immersive for narrative content. Movies and TV shows feel more believable when characters are talking with each other face-to-face like they would in real life.
Unfortunately, a signer in the corner can't make up for any of those factors.
That's true so long as the speaker is the one signing, which is probably true in the context of video calls but probably not in the context of TV.
Think of how expressive language is. You can say the same sentence 3 different ways, where the real meaning is trapped in the tone, intonation, pitch, and emotion.
Think of how dynamic and expressive the word "fuck" is... Probably the most versatile and complex word in the English language.
Or just look at the [national anthem](https://www.today.com/popculture/asl-performer-steals-show-d...)
I'm not an expert, but I suppose that text is a foreign language to those born deaf. They might prefer to communicate in their native language.
(But if someone has lost their hearing after learning to read and write, then it would be different.)
These films (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French and German) all clearly had posters at the theaters saying they were sub-titles and yet there was always someone demanding the movie be in English.
Also I think a number of people have poor/slow reading skills that they can't bluff about when someone uses signing.
I recall seeing interpretters on TV during special broadcasts a lot, but then they were mostly replaced by open captions or (presumably) closed captions as captioning became generally available. I'd guess there's a bigger pool of skilled captioners than skilled interpretters, but it's also a lot easier to find someone on staff who can type fast to caption in a pinch.
All that said, I do see some very special events with interpretters still, and I apprechiate that, even though I don't sign.
"I ask you" and "I help you" can each be signed as a single entity, where the motion (starting at me, and moving in your direction) carries the information about the pronouns.
At the very least, the layout on each person's screen could be consistent so that person A is always at location 1, and so on. That might restore some sense of shared space.
This shows up as a pain-point even in a spoken-language setting. If everyone is introducing themselves, what order do they go in?
On team meetings, we usually go clockwise by the order of pictures on the screen of the PM. That order is both seemingly non-deterministic and persistent over weeks - we have a little in-joke where we try to game the sequence by joining early or late, aiming to be sorted last. We haven't been able to figure out a pattern for it, though; it seems MS Teams sorts pictures in whatever way it feels this month. So for instance, whether I join before or after our PM, this month, I'm the first in the standup queue. Last month, I was the but-last.
Personally, I'd love if there was a shared ordering assigned and windows were simply numbered, and the numbers were displayed on screen. Would help both sign and voice users.
The government version of Teams still does not have live subtitles last I checked.
https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6162278?visit_id=6...
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[0] - Examples abound; my favourite was the great many people who got banned after a YouTube livestreamer asked them to vote by typing in color emojis in the chat, and as they did so, YouTube spam detector banned their Google accounts.
Perhaps changing it to allow other emoticons ... ?
- a lot of trivial interuptions are "can you see this?" , "can you hear me" etc
There is one big downside of using generic video chat for signing - it’s usually optimized for clear audio, not clear video. When the connection gets weak, Zoom will drop frames but try to preserve audio. For the deaf, dropping audio is of course not a problem but dropping frames means they miss a key word in the sentence.
One example is WhatsApp providing an audio record button in the lower right corner of the screen. I always keep hitting the button by mistake. If I had a user script I would remove that button.
Another one is recording videos. If there were an embarrasing noise like a fart I would be obliviously send the video to someone hearing.
Meet maxes out at 720p (it's that or 320p) and what seems like a single-digit frame rate. Zoom doesn't seem much better.
I don't know sign language but I have a lot of bandwidth (and am wired) and I'm tired of calls optimized for 1-5mbps wifi. Even calls that are primarily for audio could benefit from higher resolution/framerate video, I feel.