Here's an article on the difference in ASL between blacks and whites

[conuly]

The origin (segregation!) isn't all that surprising.

The comments are the usual morass. Why is it that the less people know about a subject, the more they feel the rest of us should be hanging onto their every word?

Comments

[steorra]

Another interesting article about a sign language I just came across. This one's about British Sign Language and moving away from signs from groups of people that are now found to be offensive.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

Well, one presumes that these days, both black and white people are online, txt msging, part of their communities and their world through the wonders of the electronic keyboard - obviously cultural dialects in signing are going to reflect cultural dialects in writing and texting, which in their turn reflect cultural dialects in verbal speech.

IMHO dialects, patois, slang, neologism, regional and cultural variants and cross-overs all add flavor to language, and are to be encouraged, as long as that doesn't lead to mutual incomprehensibility. That's why we do need Standard English to exist and to be taught, even though that's not what students speak with their friends and family: because it's the language of the Establishment. Those who don't read, speak and write it well are going to be at a huge disadvantage, because there's no way to avoid dealing with the business, medical, legal and financial aspects of life.

For this reason, even though what I know is ASL, I'm very much in favor of Signing Exact English being taught in conjunction with reading, writing and 'rithmetic, while the brain is still plastic enough to take to bilinguality with relative ease, and the hearing kids ought to learn it too, the same way. Over time this would mean everybody could speak, write and sign Standard English, and then they could go home or get online and speak/write/sign whatever weird poetic variants they favored.

"Why is it?", you ask? Surely this is a rhetorical question. It's due to the ever-popular Dunning-Kruger effect.

[conuly]

I'd really rather we had a working auxlang that everybody would learn. Two, even - one signed, one spoken. And then we could give up this farce about any one dialect of any particular language being better than the others.

But the only viable options for aulangs appear to be Esperanto, Latin, and Klingon, and I think we can all see the problem with each of those three choices. *sigh*

As far as the Dunning-Kruger effect goes, maybe we can invent a better captcha that tests for knowledge of the subject at hand (at the bare minimum, reading of the article in question!) before the person or bot is allowed to post.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

A working global auxlang would certainly be best, but Esperanto is not really a contender, let alone the other two. Ha, can you picture what 'Signing Exact TlhIngan Hol' would look like?

Yo, check it out, the Esperanto cult classic 'Incubus' is all on YouTube! Here's the trailer:



'

[janewilliams20.livejournal.com]

You might like this captcha
http://captcha.civilrightsdefenders.org/
Brought to my attention in work, where we're seriously trying to find a new and more user-friendly captcha than the one we have at present. This, sadly, is not the answer.

[conuly]

Oooh, that IS nifty... but probably not all that useful for you guys.