Le Pays des sourds (1992)
In the Land of the Deaf
En la tierra de los sordos, hay muchos que Uds. quieren cambiar, pero no pueden cambiar nada.
I finally got to watch the entire movie, rather than just a segment of it. My professor once said that the movie was sad because France was still relying on oralism with cued speech, and some schools in France ban the usage of your hands for communication by tying your hands behind your back.
It makes me glad that Gallaudet is there to demonstrate that sign language is supported as a means for communication between two people when people cannot avail themselves of their ears or voices. I would like to teach at Gallaudet at someday, not as a full-time professor, but maybe for a semester or two.
I noticed that the subtitles didn't follow exactly what the LSF (langue des signes française). Sometimes they had more information than what was signed, and sometimes they didn't put out anything, but I could understand some of the signs.
It's particularly interesting because ASL has perhaps 50% of its signs borrowed from LSF. I saw that the signs for "speaking" and "more" in LSF were signs for "hearing" and "again" in ASL, respectively. It makes sense that saying "more" would be closer in meaning to "again", while people who "speak" would be regarded as "hearing".
There was one short segment that I could see was ASL. A visitor from America was visiting France. She talked about her Japanese father, using the old sign for Japanese (now considered offensive by some Deaf people).
In the Power of Babel, the author explained that in some nomadic tribes, the language can change so much that children will barely understand their grandparents. Spoken English, French, possibly Chinese, and other languages change more slowly because the writing system helps stabilize them. I'm curious, because ASL doesn't have a writing system, if it also changes fast enough that grandparents will not know what their children are signing.
I believe that it's true that ASL is changing, because some signs I saw in ASL dictionaries were obsolete in some regions, and rarely seen.
However, I don't believe that ASL is changing that fast because ASL is standardized by the Signing Naturally curriculum developed in Vista. Whether this standardized ASL is taught to Deaf people is a different matter, because as far as I know, it's only taught to hearing people. Deaf people with hearing parents may not have the benefits of being exposed to ASL from an early age, and they might be influenced by Signed English.
I know, for example, some Deaf people use the classifier for "airplane" to say that a pencil "flew" in the air. The correct classifier would have been an index finger, shaped like number 1, to demonstrate the trajectory of the pencil, but not to say that it "flew."
En la tierra de los sordos, hay muchos que Uds. quieren cambiar, pero no pueden cambiar nada.
I finally got to watch the entire movie, rather than just a segment of it. My professor once said that the movie was sad because France was still relying on oralism with cued speech, and some schools in France ban the usage of your hands for communication by tying your hands behind your back.
It makes me glad that Gallaudet is there to demonstrate that sign language is supported as a means for communication between two people when people cannot avail themselves of their ears or voices. I would like to teach at Gallaudet at someday, not as a full-time professor, but maybe for a semester or two.
I noticed that the subtitles didn't follow exactly what the LSF (langue des signes française). Sometimes they had more information than what was signed, and sometimes they didn't put out anything, but I could understand some of the signs.
It's particularly interesting because ASL has perhaps 50% of its signs borrowed from LSF. I saw that the signs for "speaking" and "more" in LSF were signs for "hearing" and "again" in ASL, respectively. It makes sense that saying "more" would be closer in meaning to "again", while people who "speak" would be regarded as "hearing".
There was one short segment that I could see was ASL. A visitor from America was visiting France. She talked about her Japanese father, using the old sign for Japanese (now considered offensive by some Deaf people).
In the Power of Babel, the author explained that in some nomadic tribes, the language can change so much that children will barely understand their grandparents. Spoken English, French, possibly Chinese, and other languages change more slowly because the writing system helps stabilize them. I'm curious, because ASL doesn't have a writing system, if it also changes fast enough that grandparents will not know what their children are signing.
I believe that it's true that ASL is changing, because some signs I saw in ASL dictionaries were obsolete in some regions, and rarely seen.
However, I don't believe that ASL is changing that fast because ASL is standardized by the Signing Naturally curriculum developed in Vista. Whether this standardized ASL is taught to Deaf people is a different matter, because as far as I know, it's only taught to hearing people. Deaf people with hearing parents may not have the benefits of being exposed to ASL from an early age, and they might be influenced by Signed English.
I know, for example, some Deaf people use the classifier for "airplane" to say that a pencil "flew" in the air. The correct classifier would have been an index finger, shaped like number 1, to demonstrate the trajectory of the pencil, but not to say that it "flew."
Labels: asl
posted by Alan at January 21, 2006
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