Re: ASL translation?


Harold Weissman wrote:
On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 11:17:48 -0700, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

On Sep 10, 2:13 pm, Harold Weissman <Harold...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is the process of communicating through ASL analogous to a
translation? Let me give you an example.

No, it _is_ translation.

Assume that I have a text T in English. A person A, conversant
in
ASL, reads the text and communicates it to another person B on the fly
in ASL. B commits it to writing in English, producing a text T'.

My question is, How similar are T and T' likely to be? If we do
the same thing with, say, English and Russian, the final English text
can comically differ from the original English text - I guess you guys
are familiar with the story (apocryphal, but illustrative anyway) about
"The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak" being changed into "The
vodka is good but the meat is rotten" after following the English ->
Russian -> English route.

Is something like that possible in English -> ASL -> English?

Certainly. English and ASL are grammatically about as different as
languages can get -- they're practically at the extreme ends of various
typological continua.

So, a person who uses ASL for communicating, instead of ordinary
speech, but who writes and reads in English, is effectively using two
different languages?

Yes. But don't use "effectively". ASL and English are two different
languages. They have different grammars, different ways of expressing
things, different idiomatic expressions. Different cultural background
too, because ASL is mostly used among the deaf, who are, well, _deaf_
and have for that reason a culture that is very different from that of
hearing people.


If I speak English and write in English, I am using the same
language, right? How come that ASL is a totally different language?

Because ASL has developed among deaf people independently. It is not a
code for English, in the sense that written English is a kind of code
for spoken English.

Would
it not have been possible to map written English on to some sign system,
just as it is done with spoken English?

Of course it would have been possible, and such schemes have been
devised. In Finland, for example, we do have something that is called
"viitottu suomi", i.e. "signed Finnish". This is not the same as the
Finnish sign language, but a sign-language shorthand for spoken
Finnish, which follows the word order and grammar of Finnish.
According to the information I have had access to, it is perceived as
a stilted and unnatural language, but understood by deaf people
familiar with the Finnish sign language and having some knowledge of
Finnish. However, it is very different from the Finnish sign language
as used in spontaneous utterances among Finnish deaf people. In this
pure and native form, the Finnish sign language is entirely
independent of the Finnish language and not related to it at all.

(Update: such schemes as "viitottu suomi" are technically called
"manually coded languages" in English. And yes, there are manually
coded forms for English, too.)

I know that the mapping is in the
reverse direction (spoken language precedes written language) but since
ASL is an artificial language, I wonder why the mapping as not done?

You are so wrong. ASL is not an artificial language. It is a natural
language which evolves naturally. It originated in a school for deaf
which was founded by Thomas H. Gallaudet, an American clergyman and a
pioneer educator of the deaf in the United States. His school taught
the French sign language as a standard sign language for all the deaf,
because Gallaudet had some sort of French connections. When all the
spontaneously originated sign languages that were brought by the
pupils from all around the United States were mixed with the French
sign language, a new sign language, the ASL, was created. This was a
spontaneous process and there is nothing whatsoever that is artificial
about it.

ASL is still to some extent mutually intelligible with the French sign
language. On the other hand, ASL is entirely unrelated to the British
Sign Language.

Is
there something in speech vs. signs that prevents it?

No, there is something in one language vs. another language that
prevents it. ASL and English are different languages. A manually coded
English is essentially not the same language as ASL proper.

.

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