Source: My degree in American Sign Language.
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...
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.
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?"
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.
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..
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.
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)
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!)
Honestly we never spelled it or wrote it down.
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.