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Comment by thepete2 | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of unrelated, but I wonder if a small amount (say 100 signs or so) of sign language (ASL or local equivalent) wouldn't be useful for hearing people in their day-to-day lives. I'm very interested in sign-language, but language being what it is you can't do it alone ...

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You know what signing is amazing for? Teaching babies to communicate before they have proper vocal control (preverbal is the term I think). We're talking useful communication at under a year. Something like 9-12 months.

Somewhat. Babies do tend to learn a few signs, and it is useful when they can indicate what they need. However as soon as they learn to talk they universally forget everything. I know people fluent in sign (a large part of their job is working with the deaf), and when they sign to babies the babies are like "you idiot: I just heard you talking to someone else so don't insult my intelligence by not talking to me" The babies can't say something so complex, but you can tell from their reaction that is about what they are thinking.

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.

> I know people fluent in sign (a large part of their job is working with the deaf), and when they sign to babies the babies are like "you idiot: I just heard you talking to someone else so don't insult my intelligence by not talking to me"

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.

This was our experience with our young child. It helped to be able to say "more" and sometimes "please" and eventually "all done" but eventually spoken words replaced this communication form. My wife and I have two semesters worth of education under Deaf teachers but have no plans of pressing further on this as a second language for our son.

> 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).

I use signs (not ASL) to communicate with my dog. When she was a puppy, she was having trouble learning verbal commands, so I started pairing them with unique gestures, which worked much better. Eventually, I mostly dropped the verbal part and now we just use gestures.

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)

I suspect that at least some dog owners who think they've verbally trained their dogs have actually trained them (and the dog has trained the owner in return) based on body language and gestures they don't consciously know they are making, or at best through intonation rather than actual spoken command words.

This is evidenced by the reaction a dog has when you say anything with the, "who's a good boy?!" tone. You could be saying the dog is a dork or dumb and they're just as excited. The tone and body language play a huge role.

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. :)

One great life pro tip is to reward Good Dog paired with a sign, e.g. "jazz hands", so if they start going deaf, they still know they are being praised.

Check out Cued Speech (one-handed phonetic signing). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jn4e9V3oigs It's a different modality of the local spoken language, not a separate language like ASL. You can learn it in a weekend. IMO it should be taught to everyone in the 2nd grade to help with phonological awareness, which is helpful for visual literacy. But it'd also be useful in a lot of noisy situations throughout life.

I feel like the alphabet + literacy does a decent job at creating phonological awareness already.

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.

From my recollection cued speech and signed English both are controversial in the Deaf community. They are seen as clunky and forced on them by the hearing community.

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.

Isn't the purpose of cued speech not to replace ASL/other sign languages, but to add some support for a person who does not know ASL to speak clearly to a deaf person?

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?

Maybe, but I don't see the point. Speaking with your hands is weird no matter what you are doing. Learning ASL signs instead of something else is that much harder, and ASL is a lot richer than either.

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.

If the signs are just small set of cues for the most common phrases a police officer needs to convey, then why not just teach this as an ASL subset?

Did you watch the video on Cued Speech? It's not a set of signs for common phrases at all. It's simply a small set of gestures that accompany some of the hard-to-lip-read sounds, like /m/ /p/ /b/.

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.

Sure, but if you're not deaf then the tradeoffs might be quite different

Without knowing anything about deaf attitudes in general, I've learned to not mistake the loudest and angriest voices in a group as representative of all of it.

My wife and I learned under a Deaf school teacher (for a Deaf school) for a semester where she taught ASL and a little about Deaf culture. She was very sincere in her description that there is a lot of pride in Deaf culture. Now I have also heard the story of a hard-of-hearing woman who, having hearing parents, was greatly conflicted in going all in on ASL vs. learning Cued Speech. The Deaf community she was learning from spoke very intensely that she should not go that route and instead stick with ASL; partly I think because of this pride they feel in the culture and arts surrounding the language. There was shame and guilt in her story but she found a way to be connected to both the Deaf ASL community and the hearing community with Cued Speech.

They are handy! Especially if one person is on a call and can't talk, or you're trying to be quiet.

"I love you", "Food?", "Tea?" (we're tea drinkers) are commonly used in my home.

That's exactly what I mean. Great use haha

Super powers

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.

A risky habit: signing with other deaf drivers on the motorway. I've done it...

I've seen people doing that on the highway, too! It appears to generally be one gesture, and occasionally the horn is used for greater emphasis.

To the extent that these are related, it's because of disability.

Braille is just a writing system. Signed languages are generally not.

Isn't that what flashlights are for?

Way easier to hide. If you were brave enough, you could literally read braille under the covers with your eyes closed while your parent had their head stuck through the door to check on you.

Yes, super powers!

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....

god this sounds awesome

Braille books are quite expensive though, aren't they? Did they already have braille books around the house for someone else?

They might have checked them out from a public library.

I’m heading but learned ASL at work. Ever since, I’ve tried to get my wife to learn because I’m always noticing times when it would be handy (pun not intended).

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 ..

I think there is an unkindness here, though I do not think your intentions are unkind. I had very close Brazilian-internationals while a freshman in college who very deliberately chose not to speak their native tongue around Americans due to them thinking it unkind. My wife and I frequently do use some simple signs across the room, like "ready to go" (we are both hearing but have two semesters of ASL education).

In general, using a language those around you don't speak can be rude, but I was imagining more along the lines of "Come rescue me from this conspiracy theorist."

Which would have been handy at one point for me.

> using a language those around you don't speak can be rude,

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.

The downside in public is that the people who notice you're speaking another language will assume that you're talking about them and don't want to be overheard by the victim.

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.

Oh. I agree. I meant more like on public transit.

Absolutely, my wife and I did basic BSL as a night class. Not only is it fascinating to get to know more of deaf culture but it's also really useful.

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?

It would be awfully useful if both sandwich-eaters and sandwich-makers could learn the signs for, for example, spinach, chipotle, mustard, mayo, wrap, ciabatta, red onion, and so on. At my favorite sandwich counter, a full year into the pandemic, people are still communicating with the staff by yelling at them from 3 feet away from a plexiglass barrier, while everyone is wearing masks and everyone else in the store is yelling as well.

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.

I was at a (seated) concert once, and the large family next to me would sign to each other to communicate without making noise. Signing has some nice advantages over whispering: you can sign to an entire group at once, but you can only whisper to one person at a time.

It can be useful to have some signs, but don't confuse a few signs with a language. One like going to a foreign country and knowing how to ask where the bathroom is, and understanding because more their pointing than their words vs going to the country and getting into a discussion of something weird with a stranger that you just happen to meet.

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.

Why do I always sense anger seething below the surface of any conversation about sign language?

I think this occurs more in some countries than others, with low sign language awareness. Maybe the US especially due to monolinguality. It seems people love to assume things about other languages that are false and can be insulting. Like when you say an English sentence to a Mexican who doesn't understand it, and you respond by saying the same thing again but louder and slower. It looks like you think they're dense.

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.

> Like when you say an English sentence to a Mexican who doesn't understand it, and you respond by saying the same thing again but louder and slower. It looks like you think they're dense.

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.

Yea, but speaking slowly and clearly is _only_ useful to anyone learning the language.

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.

Depends. English is somewhat special in that it's the current lingua franca, so almost everyone has some exposure to it - and at the same time, it's a hodge-podge of words from different language families, so it's quite likely that an English speaker can pick out some words they understand from another language, if spoken slowly ("false friends" notwithstanding). So whether you're speaking English so someone who doesn't know it, or someone is speaking a language you don't know to you-the-English-speaker, there's stochastic benefit in slowing down.

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.

I had a similar experience while learning German. Berliners talk very quickly and I'd frequently request "Sprechen Sie langsam, bitte" aka speak slowly please. Unfortunately they'd usually switch to English after that, but when the speaker would stick it out with me I'd come away feeling like I'd gotten a little better with the language.

I know exactly what you mean. My gf works at a school for the deaf and we're both hearing.... and I'm sensitive to this pensiveness you mention. Three reasons: there is so much bad info out there, asl and deaf culture are evolving as we observe, and hardly anyone is cataloging or curating the info. There are no ambassadors. It parallels health information imo. I guess I should add the contemporary attitude of self-righteousness on the u.s. when ppl learn sth abt any other group they tend to shove it others' faces. E.g. knowing that it was Illegal to drive a car with headphones on, I once dared to ask if deaf ppl were allowed to drive. Instead if a simple yes, I got chewed out by a hearing person for my ignorance.

> knowing that it was Illegal to drive a car with headphones on, I once dared to ask if deaf ppl were allowed to drive.

Did you ever get an actual answer? I'd guess yes, but it's a fair question

If I were to try to come up with a rationale, I guess it would be if you are able to hear, you have a duty to make your hearing available to increase safety. But, we won't automatically remove the right to drive from someone who can't hear as well or at all.

Because I have gone to see films in a number of languages I do not understand but they were sub-titled. I can't remember going to one that was not anime, and then not hearing someone complaining about having to read the dialogue.

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.

>> useful for hearing people in their day-to-day lives.

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.

I'm not sure on the "very specific" part. We use some general, non-specific signs ("OK", "good" [thumbs up, depending on your cultural background and situation]).

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"?

>>> 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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETrWMvicKps

> 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.

https://blog.sonicbids.com/8-jam-session-hand-signals-musici...

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.

Very cool, thank you!

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.

Cool, thanks.

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.

Depends on context. A lot of workplaces have specific signs for use when hearing protection is worn: things like turn the machine off now, or I'm good to go. Airport ground control has a whole set of signs. Traffic cops also have their signs that everyone knows.

One way to distinguish between something like ASL and something like whatever system is used by e.g. scuba divers and airport staff is compositionality. (Developed) Natural language has many pieces that are "productive" to produce meaning from smaller meaningful units.

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