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From: James.Womack@f14.n300.z1.fidonet.org (James Womack)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: ASL
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Date: 15 Mar 91 05:28:53 GMT
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Index Number: 13983

[This is from the Silent Talk Conference]

Hey, Jay. You see that post referring to ASL as pig latin? I wonder
if the uninformed knows that Japanese and Chinese people consider English
a barbarians' noise pretending to be a language?

Too bad they don't avail themselves to the research showing the unique
character of ASL as a bona fide language. Dr. Sam Supalla and others
have recently added to this information. It appears ASL shares certain
characters with the vast majority of the languages of the world that
English does not. I will tryt o get a hold of that info later. One
of the biggest things appears to be word order and consistent gender
specific references. English is a hodge podge of of such references
and sometimes lack them at all in certain types of sentences. I other
words, English is inconsistent. It was an interesting collection of
facts regarding languages that fit the most frequent characteristics.
ASL was almost always sharing a column with a long list of languages
with the same characteristics that make a language a language. On several
ocassions, English stood alone. They suspected it might be due to English's
heavily borrowing from other languages and twisting the rules for their
use so that you get what is generally agreed about English anyway-a
mess. I think Dr. Supalla-if I recall right, as I am not sure-suggested
that perhaps English itself was not a true language. That was funny.

In any case, ASL has been knocked so much as not being a real language
that one must wonder how does it manage to remain in existence. I mean,
the classic language of latin is practically kaput and it was real
enough. I guess Veditz was right in that old film where he said:

"We love sign language. It is the noblest gift God gave to Deaf people

in all the world. We will preserve it, for as long as there deaf people
on the earth, there will be sign language."

Languages are the people who use it as much as it is a communication
tool of those same people. It is their essence, their doorway to their
hearts and souls. Whenever people outside of a culture belittle the
language of another people, they are belittling the people themselves.
A pity we Deaf people continue to endure such lump sum insults.

Well, I guess it is like that old Jew told that Nazi not long ago.
You tried to get rid of me, of us, my people. But you know what? We
are still here. We are still here and we will always be here. We are
all over the world. We won't go away.

--
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