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Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

Very cool, especially for people who lose their hearing later in life. For other deaf people it's important to remember that written english is not a form of their native sign language¹, so this would be like (because it is) reading captions in a second language. Still potentially useful but with more limitations. Not that there's necessarily a technological way around those limitations either.

¹ Afaik this applies to all other sign languages outside english too. Signed Exact English exists and probably other-language equivalents too but I've never met a native speaker.

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It is true and something more people should understand that ASL is not a signed version English, but most ASL speakers are pretty much bilingual. They are taught to read English, and most places also encourage learning to speak English, generally with speech-language pathologists, though some in the community are understandably reluctant.

Right, which is why I'm pointing out the second language nature of it since a lot of people are bilingual and I think have an intuitive grasp of the difference in ease between captions in your native language and captions in your second.

"most" is an interesting choice of word here.

It's true. 70% of deaf children learn to read English [1]. But I don't think that's enough to consider it a safe assumption.

[1] https://www.handsandvoices.org/articles/education/advocacy/w...

Why isn't it more than 70%? I'm assuming this is in an english language majority language, so everyone that can should want to be able to read english.

Because learning written English isn't easy when the sounds it represents are not part of your sensory experience. It's more like learning Egyptian hieroglyphics. Plus many parents either can't or won't invest the effort/money to make it happen. Lots of parents never even learn ASL to communicate with their own kids. Met a mother in a beginner ASL class finally deciding to learn enough to communicate with her 20 year old daughter (Who was born deaf and illiterate FTR). It broke my heart when I met the daughter and found out she basically had no exposure to other signers too. Deaf all her life and she didn't have a name-sign.

There's "cognitive impairment" and then there's "nobody bothered to communicate enough for a kid to build communication skills."

That is massively sad. You'd think that the school system would put her in contact with others, but schools can fix everything that parents lack.

Oral vs. sign is a big ongoing debate in the deaf education world. Different schools have different schools of thought.

The problem with ASL compared to lip reading is that it's a form of self-segregation, limiting the deaf person to primarily communicating only with other people who know ASL. If these glasses are effective, it could help bridge that gap.

Why would you compare an entire language to a single technique like that? There is no "the problem" with ASL any more than there is "the problem" with english or any other language. Yes communicating across the barrier can be a challenge but that's just the nature of having more than one language in use.

Only being able to see ASL is different from speaking a different language – it's still English. Not being able to hear is more like not being able to read.

It's the same language you already know, but you're missing out on one of the primary ways people use it.

No, ASL is not English. ASL is a complete and distinct natural language in its own right.

Oh you should definitely look it up then because this is completely incorrect. Sign languages are fully distinct languages with their own histories and influences.

For example the sign languages spoken in the US and in the UK have different ancestries and are not mutually comprehensible, despite both countries using english as spoken languages.

ASL is based on French, so the structure is completely different.

ASL is not based on french either. It's related to LSF, the sign language used in france, but that also isn't based on french. The modern sign languages emerged among deaf populations and have completely different grammar and morphology from the spoken languages of the cultures surrounding their origins.

Thank you for correcting me. That's a deep rabbit hole

Spoken languages are linear. Sign languages are not. The grammar is very different.

Sign languages have multiple articulators: two hands, face, eye gaze direction, shoulders, trunk. These can all work together to show multiple things at the same time. Spoken languages can really do only one thing at a time (with a few minor suprasegmentals such as tone).

You can construct a signed version of a spoken language, which may be useful for things like quoting book titles and other cases where you need to represent the exact words of a spoken language in signed form, but it's not common to use that for everyday communication, because the hands move a lot slower than the small muscles of the mouth and throat.

(Linguistics is a fascination of mine. Sign language linguistics are especially interesting.)

> that's just the nature of having more than one language in use

Well, yeah. I guess my point is that ASL is pretty much a foreign language.

I'd compare it to the situation with the english language worldwide - since english is the lingua franca, so to speak, many countries around the world teach it as a second language. If you don't learn english, then (generally speaking) you're at a disadvantage because you can only communicate with a subset of your population.

I'm not saying there's a problem with deaf people, any more than there's a problem with anyone else who simply doesn't happen to know the languages of some of the people around them.

I suspect (and hope) you had no ill intent but this comment is really ignorant. There is a terrible history of Deaf people being discriminated against and forced to “lip read” rather than communicate through ASL. And by “forced” I mean they were more or less mentally and physically tortured into compliance.

Your comment not only perpetuates this totally false narrative that there’s a “problem” with ASL but it makes it sound like Deaf people have chosen only to socialize among themselves when the reality is that we have built a world that makes communication difficult for Deaf people. It doesn’t have to be that way: https://icyseas.org/2014/01/12/marthas-vineyard-deaf-people-...

You might find the Deaf mythology(?) of Eyeth interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/deaf-population-i...

I feel like you're making my comment out to be a lot more hostile than it was intended.

I don't see any "problem" with deaf people. I see ASL as, effectively, a foreign language; and it makes sense to me that in general, you're able to live more effectively when you can speak the same language as the people around you.

When I traveled overseas to a spanish-speaking country, I learned spanish so that I could communicate with the people there. It would be unreasonable for me to show up as the cliche american tourist and expect the spanish-speaking people there to learn english so that I could communicate with them.

I think you're misunderstanding the parent poster: You don't have to be intentionally hostile to perpetuate harmful and ignorant falsehoods. In fact the parent poster states they don't believe you're intentionally perpetuating ignorance. But, it's reasonable for someone to firmly rebut harmful ignorance in a manner, even if that level of firmness doesn't match your self-perception of your ignorance.

Which of us is ignorantly perpetuating a falsehood? It's important to maintain civil dialog until the truth is discovered.

Edit: got annoyed.

The poster in question said you were ignorant and linked to multiple places to give you more context.

edited: the below sections refers to something that has been edited out

I understand that it might feel harsh, but to me, it looks like you're just being corrected and rebutted just like you said you'd be open to.

I did read the links. And my response incorporated what I'd understood from those. I was actually kinda curious how the parent would respond to the analogy with foreign travel.

Rebuttals aren't just one-and-done. You have to be able to actually defend your position, and that requires a lot more than just one statement.

> Which of us is ignorantly perpetuating a falsehood?

lmao it is absolutely you that's what we're trying to tell you

That's the problem with logic; it works both ways. If you were the ignorant one perpetuating the falsehood, how would you know unless I told you?

Wait are you implying you think the main way people learn things is by spewing bullshit on the internet until someone contests it? Read a book ya dingus. wikipedia. christ.

That makes no sense. And I have less confidence than before that you know what you're talking about.

I’m not sure how you can read hostility into my comment when I plainly stated I didn’t think you were commenting with ill intent. Ignorance doesn’t require intent though.

ASL isn’t a “foreign” language. It’s an American language. In fact, it’s more “American” than English. People who communicate via ASL aren’t foreigners on holiday. They’re our friends and family and neighbors. You are absolutely correct in your assumption that being able to communicate with those around you is important!

Imagine if everyone around you just refused to engage with you verbally and would only communicate via text messages. If you’re speaking they completely ignore you until you write it down. If they’re speaking while you’re around it’s always in whispers so that you can really only get bits and pieces. How would you feel? Annoyed? Excluded? Like you’re not able to fully understand conversations?

Your travel analogy doesn’t hold water because (in addition to Deaf people not being foreigners or guests!) you seem unwilling or unable to understand that (1) hearing is a critical component of effective verbal communication and (2) Deaf people can’t hear. Again, I’ll chalk it up to ignorance rather than ill intent but your analogy as a whole is pretty gross to paint Deaf people as entitled, unreasonable, and demanding. Your analogy is akin to suggesting it’s unreasonable for me, a person who can walk, to rollerskate everywhere I go and it would be unreasonable for me to expect curb cuts just so I could rollerskate everywhere so therefore it’s unreasonable for people who use a wheelchair to expect curb cuts. If someone who uses a wheelchair wants to use the sidewalk they should just try fucking walking right? I don’t know why no one has thought of that!

That's fair. It's easy to read hostility where there isn't any.

> ASL isn’t a “foreign” language. It’s an American language.

Elsewhere in this thread you mentioned that "ASL is a complete and distinct natural language in its own right," and that's the sense I was trying to convey by calling it a "foreign" language. It's as hard to acquire as a foreign language, and carries the same benefits. And it fit the analogy.

I appreciate both of your analogies, but I think they aren't quite fair. Not going to the massive effort of learning a new language isn't really the same as 'refusing to engage'. And the analogies seem to understate the effort involved by everyone who is not deaf to learn ASL. It's just not as easy as installing curb cuts (I could probably do one of those in an afternoon...become conversational in ASL? not so much).

I guess, to me, it comes down to the level of effort being asked of me. I'm happy to be accommodating, up to a point. Let's engage in whatever medium is most suited. But asking me to put in the massive time and intellectual commitment of learning a new language is past that point. And I think that's the case for a lot of other people as well; maybe most.

> If someone who uses a wheelchair wants to use the sidewalk they should just try fucking walking right? I don’t know why no one has thought of that!

I had a relative who was deaf. An engineer. He learned to lip read, and that gave him more freedom to work with others and be effective in communities that did not know ASL.

Do you realize that “learn to lip read” isn’t feasible for a lot of people? That’s great that lip reading worked for the one Deaf person you know. But Deaf people, like the population at large, are all different people. It’s cruel and ridiculous to suggest all Deaf people should just learn to lip read.

I tried to explain the cruel history behind your callous remark.

I tried to give you an opportunity to empathize with how a Deaf might feel.

I tried to offer some perspective as to why the views you’ve expressed are narrow-minded.

I tried to educate you.

But you’re just here to argue. You don’t want to put in the effort so it’s the Deaf community’s fault they can’t effectively communicate with you and people like you? Spanish is easy enough to learn for your trip but ASL is too difficult to learn? You know one person who lip reads so everyone must be able to?

You’re not even willing to consider for a moment that your gut-opinion or the second-hand experience of the ONE person you know might not be universal. I don’t have anything else to say to you except that I hope you take a few minutes to read about ASL and Deaf culture and history and take a few minutes to reflect.

> But you’re just here to argue.

Or you're just here to educate, and if someone questions you, you scold them for moral inferiority.

>It’s cruel and ridiculous to suggest all Deaf people should just learn to lip read.

Yet you seem to think everyone is obligated to learn sign language...

>Spanish is easy enough to learn for your trip but ASL is too difficult to learn?

Spanish is NOT "easy enough to learn"; perhaps some basic phrases for tourists, but certainly not fluency. It takes years to master a new language for most people, if ever. Spanish is relatively easier for English speakers than many other languages, such as Japanese, but it's not something you're going to become conversational in quickly unless you're gifted at language learning.

The idea that people are somehow "cruel" and "narrow-minded" for not learning a particular language that isn't the dominant language in their region is the most ridiculous thing I've read all day, and that includes the comments from North Korea supporters here.

Unfortunately, there are very few Deaf people, so there is no world in which everyone learns ASL just in case they meet a Deaf person. It just doesn't scale, and so what you end up with is isolating them even further. The best approach is to bridge the gap: similar glasses can be used by hearing folks to translate sign language, and it theoretically generalizes to all foreign languages.

Check out that first link about Martha’s Vineyard ;)

Yeah that's what I'm replying to. Most of the country is not like that so ASL is not going to be a shared language, and expecting them to move is not feasible either.

There’s nothing inherent to the world we have built that’s stopping deaf people using the Internet in their own languages. Yet there’s no ASL Wikipedia. Why not?

There are many languages that don’t use a system of writing.

But there's not many that can't use a system of writing.

This is stupid and meaningless pedantry. Like when you ask your teacher if you can go to the bathroom and they say “I don’t know, can you?”

A system of writing can be used for any language. (Have you ever wondered why English, a Germanic language, or Vietnamese, an Austroasiatic language, use a writing system based on the Latin alphabet?) Any language that doesn’t use a system of writing can use a system of writing. It’s not like it’s some sort of existential impossibility.

You miss the point, and your aggressive tone is not conducive to civil discussion. As you say, any language can use a system of writing, so if one doesn't, it's not because its users can't write, but because they don't want to write. Writing is literal stone-age technology, after all.

There is in fact a test ASL Wikipedia on the Wikimedia Incubator, written in Sutton SignWriting. One of the issues is that Sutton SignWriting is not yet fully supported by Unicode.

> Not that there's necessarily a technological way around those limitations either.

I can see at some point here being able to wear AR glasses that overlay hand signing over the speaker

Folks that use ASL use fingerspelling which is of course just written english, no?

https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/fingerspelling/fingerspelli...

I have only basic ASL and am by no means an authority. But I think between native ASL speakers its use would be very rare, mostly just to clarify an exact spelling for something that was going to be written down in english.

Native ASL speakers who are completely illiterate in english certainly exist, and I'm not sure at all if they know or use finger spelling.

Fingerspelling is just a path for borrowing individual words from English. It is not a part of native ASL vocabulary or grammar; that is to say, ASL does not consist of fingerspelled English sentences.

No. Fingerspelled words are not written English, but literally spelled out English words.

For example, it would be like me saying, "'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'" instead of whatever translated 'hello' in ASL.

Nope. https://www.signingsavvy.com/article/45/The+difference+betwe...

Here's a fun example. ASL allows, maybe even requires, negation after the statement. An interpreter friend of mine was interpreting Wayne's World in a mixed crowd. The whole "<statement>... NOT!" joke gets laughs from the hearing audience and the Deaf audience doesn't understand why.

I think that could be interpreted. Statement + NO is the standard word order in ASL, but there would usually be a suprasegmental element. That is, the negation is also (or, sometimes, only) shown with a headshake which spreads over the entire length of the statement. Leaving out the suprasegmental, making it a flat statement, and then pausing before the NO might perhaps work. Maybe.

However, ASL also makes much, much heavier use of rhetorical questions than English does. You might even introduce yourself with "MY NAME WHAT? [NAME]" (i.e., "What is my name? [Name]"). So perhaps it would just look like you're doing that.

(Disclaimer: I don't know ASL. I know some Irish Sign Language, which is related, but dropped out before completing my interpreter training. I have a bit of a fascination with sign language linguistics, but I'm no expert.)

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