Oh dear god.

[conuly]

So, there's this four year old kid named Hunter. Hunter is deaf. He signs. His preschool has a, um, robust weapons policy. The kid's very own name-sign is, apparently, in violation of this policy. Because if you sign "Hunter" it looks kinda like you're making a finger gun, and you can't bring guns to school.

Is your head hurting as much as mine, because mine's sure hurting.

Comments

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Buh....? They're forbidding the letter H?!? *headdesk*

From what it says in the articles, it appears that the sign he's using for his name is an initialized sign for the word "hunter", which is a registered word in Signing Exact English. Initialized signs are a standard feature of SEE, especially for names - my own name-sign is J + 'yes' = Jess; my friend Wing makes a W while flapping her elbow like a wing.

Not everyone who signs is Deaf. There are a lot of folk whose hearing is fine, but whose central auditory processing doesn't cope well with spoken language. For such folk, SEE is more useful than ASL, because it's a literal translation. Listening to English while watching ASL is like watching a movie where the subtitles don't quite match the spoken dialogue- not so bad if one already knows English, but it's got to make learning it more difficult.

I think SEE ought to be taught right along with reading and writing to all children, whatever their hearing or processing is like. It's just useful for so many things - phonics, grammar, talking privately, or across a room - not to mention how handy it would be for the Deaf community if everybody understood manually coded language from early childhood on.