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Comment by Robtech23 | Hacker News Reader

This looks like a good idea. What is the difference between sign language and subtitles?

Subtitles (like sms or twitter) don't convey tone very well, so in a classic voice over just having the subtitles makes it hard to convey things like sarcasm or innuendo or emphasis or emotion. Sign language has ways to convey all of this.

Think about this sentence:

That's cool.

It's one of those sentences that exists only to convey a tone. Depending on tone it can mean:

* that is in fact cool

* that is in fact NOT cool

* i acknowledge that you have said something

* i agree to your suggestion

and plenty more in contexts where you only know which it means because you can hear the tone of the person.

Many deaf people have poor grammar because American Sign Language (ASL) greatly simplifies and, in some cases, omits things that are not really needed to convey an idea. To a deaf person subtitles are is overly verbose and the word order is strange (for example, subtitles has "running," which is the word "run" followed by a sign for "ing." ASL does away with "ing" because it is obvious in context).

So deaf people can't read books?

....what? How do you read what they wrote and come up with that question?

the part where it says "the word order is strange" is implying that they don't know how to read properly

That is because American Sign Language has a different sentence structure and grammar from English. It's a rather understandable result of a person being raised to communicate in one language "verbally" and a different language to communicate in text.

To give one example, ASL puts negation and inquisition at the end of sentences. If I want to ask, "What is this?" in ASL I would point to the thing I am curious about and then sign, "What?"

i acknowledge that ASL is different from english, but i refuse to believe that deaf people can't read

A Deaf person reading English and thinking that "the word order is strange" is what I am talking about and it's explained by the differences between ASL and English. I did not mean to imply that Deaf people can't read.

I'm sorry but, I don't know how it's possible to read that and interpret it to imply that deaf people can't read. It's a strange question to ask. Maybe it's the word order that throws them off.

Read the other replies to the question and educate yourself.

Not sure why you feel the need to respond with that sort of hasty, passive aggressive suggestion.

The way I read their comments is that it's akin to hearing that someone learned Spanish (which has different ordering than english) as their first language and asking, "So you can't read a book?". It comes off as wildly naive, with a flavor of offensiveness that you seem to be accusing me of.

You still don't understand. Deaf people have a hard time reading, for good reasons. Your example makes no sense, since Spanish is a written language.

Friend, I think you're really stretching to be angry towards me and in the process you're deeply and ironically completely missing the point I was originally attempting to make.

At no point did I even say whether I believe they do or whether I believe they don't have a hard time reading. I genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, don't understand how you're interpreting my words as if I'm incapable understanding that barriers exist. You're effectively implying that I'm a bigot for thinking no challenges exist, when that's not a position I've even remotely taken. Like, of course challenges exist and I'm stunned that anyone would even begin to consider that challenges wouldn't exist!

Word for word, the question I responded to is, "So deaf people can't read books?"

My question was in response to the asinine, bordering offensive, question of whether deaf people hold the intellectual capacity to learn how to read. They did not ask if it's difficult for deaf people to read, nor did they ask any question about what challenges there are. Their question was whether it's an impossibility for deaf people to read, fullstop.

Good grief..

Learning to read is a lot harder for deaf people, yes. For deaf people sign language is their native language, not the spoken equivalent, so imagine speaking one language and having to learn to read another.

Many deaf people can read. But, people often find it easier to communicate in their first language. ASL is not English, it's a different language.

It’s more that English isn’t necessarily their native language, at least if born deaf. ASL is not signed English, it’s roots are French, and as far as I understand that wouldn’t make French their native language either. ASL is their native language, and it has no written form (afaik).

Well and French Sign Language is very different from ASL.

I had a friend who grew up a hearing child of Deaf parents, with two hearing older siblings, so he learned ASL and (American) English in tandem.

By the time I knew him, he also spoke French and French Sign Language because he'd been living in France for several years, and he had fun explaining and showing us some of the differences with his Deaf French friends.

Some of the best technical writers I've met were classmates from the NTID, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at Rochester Institute of Technology. But I think it was that english was in some ways a "foreign" language that made them so good; They went out of their way to be clear to the point of verbose, probably because it was unnatural and they felt it.

I don't want to sound judgemental, but I learned a little bit of sign language at the time, and the conversations I and friends had in sign seemed... Slangy. ASL is a language that has to deal with it's bandwidth limitations and the fact that it's not quite as broadcast as shouting is. Deaf culture involves a lot of physically reaching out and "Grabbing" the audiences attention; Tapping someone on the shoulder is an attention grabber of last resort for the hearing, while it's the obvious and only way of grabbing the attention of someone who's looking the other direction to the Deaf. Perhaps for that reason I always felt like Deaf people had no concept of personal space (Though my personal intuition is that it's actually literally about the little sounds your movement makes - I've encountered the same lack of personal space at Gun Ranges, where everyone is wearing hearing protection and you'd think that people would want to be separated)

Hearing people have no concept of personal distance :-) They will yell at you from across a room!

With ASL, you can yell across a highway!

I think this is a good question, because I had always thought of American Sign Language (ASL) as a transcription of English.

But I learned that ASL is a language all of its own, grammar and syntax are not always the same.

In college, I learned a bit of a sign language- "C Sign" - that is actually an adaptation of English. At the time, C Sign was the thing that hearing, native English speakers were taught as a way to interact with non-hearing ASL signers. That was thirty years ago, so things might well be different now.

I don't have any direct experience, but some of my extended family are native speakers of Apache or Navajo. These are different languages, but "mutually intelligible" - speaking one can be understood if you know the other. And I traveled in Finland and Estonia - mutually intelligible (utterly impossible for me to use either of them).

I think C Sign might be more of a "pidgin": a simplification of English and ESL that is not used natively, but can be used to communicate.

So, yeah -- it's not wrong to wonder if ASL signers are using English, or are able to read it. I believe the answers to these questions are "not really" and "yes, fluently".

(Perhaps the question was posed in a blunt manner. But that's written, online communication for you -- it's an approximation of spoken interaction, and often lacking in body language or tone. So it's often taken in a way that wasn't exactly the intention... :-) Yay, Language!)

I think you mean SEE, not C? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signing_Exact_English

Ah, yes. My mistake.

Honestly we never spelled it or wrote it down.

Uh, no. Sign languages, like American Sign Language, are not "simplistic" versions of spoken languages. They are complete, complex languages with their own robust syntax and grammatical structures. A better way to explain this is that it's like an adult who is natively fluent in one language trying to read subtitles in a second language with which they don't have working fluency and rarely, if ever, speak.

Source: My degree in American Sign Language.

To expand on this, it's commonly believed that sign languages are simplified versions of the local spoken language. Indeed, it wasn't until ~1960[0] that these languages were seriously studied as "real" languages.

At least part of the reason a Deaf person might have poor grammar in a spoken language is because said spoken language is almost always at least their second language.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stokoe#Sign_language_r...

Sign language is more like watching a movie than listening to radio. It's extremely spatial, with space around the body used to indicate grammatical elements and their relation to each other.

Spoken languages are far more similar to each other than to sign languages.

Subtitles are like watching a movie with the green screen instead of the scenery filled in.

How could you have made the website and not understand what sign language is?

Your description of ASL here is a red flag. Temporal aspect and grammar are not encoded in specific signs, and the sentence structure is derived from French. I can read some truths into your words here, but it's a damn stretch.

As a hearing person with knowledge of the language and friends in the community, you sound like an barely-informed hearing person with a capitalist-savior complex. If that isn't you, be transparent about who you are and why you're in the business.

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