Re: ASL translation?


Harold Weissman wrote:
On Mon, 10 Sep 2007 14:07:11 -0700, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

On Sep 10, 2:59 pm, Harold Weissman <Harold...@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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?

No, they _are_ using two different languages.

OK, fair enough.

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 nothing to do with English. It developed out of French
Sign Language early in the 19th century. I don't know where French Sign
Language came from, but French isn't a candidate.

Well, I guess that my question could be reformulated in terms of
the FSL.

FSL was a natural growth among Parisian deaf. A pioneer of deaf
education, abbé Charles Michel de l'Épée, noted its existence and
started to teach it in his influential schools for the deaf. He seems
to have influenced the language to some extent, because he had his own
ideas about how to "refine" it into a cultural language, which
influenced the language to the extent that modern FSL is probably
somewhat different from the natural growth that was recorded by him.


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

When you "map" English into signing, you're doing something called
"SEE," Signing Effective English IIRC, which is sort of a pidgin of ASL
vocabulary and English grammar. I wonder whether it's even found any
more.

I don't know what distinction you're looking for in "mapping" written
vs. spoken English.

I am talking about the correspondence between written and spoken
language. There is one (more than one, in fact) for English, but none for
ASL (ASL is not written) right?

There is at least one writing system for ASL which has acquired some
popularity.

http://www.signwriting.org/

I know that the mapping is in the
reverse direction (spoken language precedes written language) but since
ASL is an artificial language,

What do you mean by "artificial language"?

One like Esperanto.

ASL is certainly not artificial in the sense Esperanto is. It was not
devised by a person or a committee, it was created by the community of
deaf people in America.

I wonder why the mapping as not done? Is there something in speech vs.
signs that prevents it?-

What mapping?

I meant "is not done." I was just wondering why they did not take
spoken English and mapped it on to some sort of hand sign-based alphabet?

It has been done, but it is a thing that is different from sign
language proper. Native "speakers" (or native signers) of ASL make use
of that sort of alphabet in order to insert English words into their
colloquial discourse very much in the same way as speakers of other
languages might use English or other outlandish words for special
effects. This sort of Anglicisms can then be telescoped into new
gestures, which will be "English loanwords" in ASL, or maybe slang
words.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: ASL translation?
    ... ASL, reads the text and communicates it to another person B on the fly ... B commits it to writing in English, ... How come that ASL is a totally different language? ... Finnish, which follows the word order and grammar of Finnish. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: ASL translation?
    ... ASL, reads the text and communicates it to another person B on ... the same thing with, say, English and Russian, the final English ... How come that ASL is a totally different language? ... just as it is done with spoken English? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: ASL translation?
    ... ASL, reads the text and communicates it to another person B on the ... B commits it to writing in English, ... How come that ASL is a totally different language? ... just as it is done with spoken English? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: accents
    ... >>misrepresentation of spoken English. ... written English is a visual ... >>language with no warts and a logical correspondance with meaning. ... function as a method of medieval sound recording, but spoken English ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: accents
    ... >always disagreed with people who merely see written English as a lo-fi ... >misrepresentation of spoken English. ... >language with no warts and a logical correspondance with meaning. ... Cannot spoken English be construed as a lo-fi ...
    (sci.lang)
Loading