Hacker News Reader

Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

I know an interpreter who is a CODA. Her first language was sign language, which I think helps a lot. I once asked her if she thought in English or ASL and she said ASL.

During the pandemic she’d get very frustrated by the ASL she saw on the news. Her mom and deaf friends couldn’t understand them. It wasn’t long before she was on the news regularly to make sure better information was going out. She kept getting COVID, because she refused to wear a mask while working, because coving up the face would make it more difficult to convey the message. I had to respect the dedication.

View on HN

During Covid, my son (who is deaf and attends a deaf school) has issued masks with transparent windows at the front, especially for assisting with lip-reading for deaf users. This is in Switzerland though - I don't know if this innovation reached across the Atlantic ;)

They did, but it wasn't like they were available in March of 2020 when the world was halting. When getting news and communication was important.

>I once asked her if she thought in English or ASL and she said ASL

It's common to think that we think in languages, but at a fundamental level, we simply don't. Ever have the experience of not being able to remember the word for something? you know exactly what you are thinking, but can't come up with the word. If you thought in your language, this wouldn't happen.

There are layers to thought, and the layer that is most conscious is, at least for me (and from what I hear a lot of other people), in my native language. Further, achieving fluency in a second language is often associated with skipping the intermediate step of translating from English, with thoughts materializing first in the second language.

You're correct that there does seem to be a layer lower than that—one that can materialize as either a native or a second language—but it's not inaccurate to talk about which language we "think" in because many of us actually do constantly materialize thoughts as language without any intention of speaking them.

you can talk to yourself in your head using your native language. But that's not evidence that you are thinking in your language, it's thinking of your language. when you do math, are you thinking in your language? when you drive a car or play a video game or a sport, or make love, are you thinking in your language? I'll answer for you, no, you aren't.

Do people who grow up without language (there have been plenty examples, deaf people for example) simply not think? do cats and dogs and chimpanzees not think?

I don't think we actually disagree on the facts so much as on the buckets we sort them into.

I very much count my internal English monologue as thinking in my language and would understand that to be what someone is asking about if they asked what language I think in. At the same time, I totally agree that there are layers to thought that never rise into the monologue.

Thinking is probably not a single unified process, but several simultaneous activities at different levels. Including the unconscious ones. So you might very well both be right, as we may be thinking sometimes simultaneously in language and in other ways (like when we talk and cook, when we write, etc.)

There are kinds of thought which are facilitated by language.

The other day I forgot the name of a street in my town, right as I was trying to tell someone to turn onto it.

I said, "I don't know the name of the street - It's the son of (CHARACTER) from (VIDEO GAME)" and then I remembered the name. I was completely right about the game character, apparently I'd remembered that mnemonic but temporarily forgotten the character's actual name.

It's often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. And there's no succinct picture that reliably convey that concept, at the same time. Human cognition must be simply cross-modal.

I got a insanely dumb question, that probably has an obvious answer: why is it so critically important to have ASL? It seems to me you could skip having someone to the side adding the layers of emoting imperfectly and just watch the anchor and captions? Note, I'm definitely the one missing something. When first met with a contradiction, check your premises, is my motto, not lecture on why they're wrong.

Think of it more like "why is it important to have Spanish as an option for captions in an area that knows it has a large audience of L1 Spanish speakers?". English/<insert dominant local language> is pretty much a foreign language to many signers. Their native language is ASL or whatever other sign language they know, and these languages aren't just 1:1 mappings of words in the local dominant language to hand signals. They have many dimensions of expression for encoding meaning like facial expression/body motions, speed of the sign, amount of times they repeat the sign that have grammatical meaning that spoken languages express with inflection (noun cases, different verb forms) or additional words. For example, where an English speaker would use words like "very" or "extremely" or choose adjectives with more intense connotations an ASL signer would repeat or exaggerate the sign they want to emphasize (often by signing it more quickly, but it frequently involves intensifying multiple parts of the sign like the entire motion or the facial expression as well).

> For example, where an English speaker would use words like "very" or "extremely" or choose adjectives with more intense connotations an ASL signer would repeat or exaggerate the sign they want to emphasize

小小比小更小

大大比大更大

If you search for "a big big guy", you'll find no end of English examples, either. I would be surprised if any language didn't use repetition for emphasis.

What captions? There’s no widely-used written form of ASL.

If you meant the English-language captions, well, it should be apparent why some people prefer content to be dubbed in their native language rather than reading subtitles in a different language that they understand less well.

Yes I meant $NATIVE_LANGUAGE_OF_VIEWER, and that example didn't help me I'm afraid, I'm quite a dense one! I appreciated you checking if I meant written ASL captions. :) The example of dubs left me confused because dubs brings in an extra sense that isn't applicable in the ASL case. There, in either case, we're watching someone who isn't the character. I can't square that with the existential fervor the woman in OP felt

> Yes I meant $NATIVE_LANGUAGE_OF_VIEWER

Right, the native language of most ASL users isn’t English. It’s ASL. And there is no such thing as captions in ASL (because it has no widely-used written form), which is why you have interpretation.

Most sign language users are functionally illiterate.

https://academic.oup.com/jdsde/article/17/1/1/359085

Reply on news.ycombinator.com