![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trocheeSo She found out about this event at a local center for the deaf and hard of hearing. A professor from SCCC, who teaches ASL, was giving a talk presentation about two fascinating subjects:
- Nicaraguan Sign Language
- Language change in ASL
First neat detail: the entire lecture was given in sign, with interpreters speaking aloud for us non-signing audience members. All (save one) of the questions were in ASL as well.
The discussion of Nicaraguan Sign was fun. Though it didn't introduce any new linguistic concepts, Nicaraguan Sign is a good example of how in just a few generations a pidgin can become a creole, and then a fluent language. We saw footage of "first generation" adults, who were essentially signing pidgin, and even my untutored eye could see that they were doing a lot of gestures, hand-waving, and "acting it out", especially when we later saw four-year-old "fourth generation" signers doing their thing -- this kid was awesome. He was so clearly telling a story in fluent, fast NSL, where "acting it out" wasn't happening at all -- instead, this kid was clearly reacting to the story he was telling, just the way I might raise my eyebrows when I expect someone to laugh at my jokes.
The second half of the discussion was focused around language change in ASL. Most of the audience was at least basically competent in ASL, or so it seemed, and so the discussion of "word origin" and "sound changes" in ASL (though he didn't call it that) were easier for them. For the last half hour, we broke into small groups and were asked to discuss the possible meanings of signs we saw in very old films of ASL speakers from 1910 or so. I was really intimidated, though, because nearly everyone signs well. Luckily, a friendly hearing woman sitting near me took pity on me and served as my interpreter for the discussion. But I felt like some first-week ESL students must feel when thrown into a class of people discussing Chaucer: "I can't relate to the language of discussion, let alone the obscure and obsolete dialect you're talking about!" I hope I can keep this lesson in academic humility in hand as I proceed into graduate school...
I couldn't stop myself from noticing -- over and over -- the places where historical change in ASL is so similar to historical changes in, for example, English. The sign for "remember", for example, used to be two signs: "know" (hands above brows) "continuously" (thumbs together, gliding forwards). [I may be mauling the description -- I'm sure there's details that I forgot here!]. "Remember" is now a single sign, moving one thumb down off the temple onto the other, moving forward. The professor pointed out how the common tendency in these changes is for the connecting gesture, between the two compositional parts, to become the non-compositional representation of the previously composed meaning.
Another example: "Tomato" used to be "red" (index vertical before lips) followed by "slice" ("o" sign in base hand, free hand moves across it in slicing motion). Now "tomato" is the vertical index before lips, moving down to base-hand "o". Slicing motion is gone, so is "red". Doesn't this seem sort of like the sort of reanalysis that takes place at the boundaries between morphology and phonology?
These compositional/non-compositional changes remind me so much of bound- and free-morphemes, especially in Chinese. It actually seems to mesh really well with the complexities of bound, root, and free morphemes described in Packard's The Morphology of Chinese.
I wonder whether anybody's looking at morphophonology in ASL?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
small world!
Date: 2003-06-07 02:31 pm (UTC)And last night arrived Annie Senghas and a student (and more students to follow) from Barnard College... Annie has been doing the research on Nicaraguan sign language for the last 13 years! They are going to be here for a month and six days a week will be meeting with Nicaraguans who are deaf that they've had these long term relationships with (and new ones, too, I assume) here at Quaker House. Anyway, exterra posted that you were new, had a link to you, clicked on it, and there was Nicaraguan sign language! Freaky!
I take it that you are a linguistics person? I have become much more interested in linguistics as I painfully observe the process of my learning Spanish, more specifically, my struggle in trying to learn Spanish! I think I have a learning disability in it or something. But it fascinates to me note how my brain learns some language things but refuses to learn others, etc. Anyway, if you know about this, I would be really interested in learning more about it from you.
Nicetameetcha, Shannon
Re: small world!
Date: 2003-06-07 07:08 pm (UTC)Yes, I've spent nine of the last ten years doing various kinds of linguistics: four years of undergraduate study, then a year in Princeton Review purgatory, then five years of writing speech technology software (text-to-speech and speech-recognition).
Now (well, this fall) I'm going to grad school here at the University of Washington in the Linguistics department, but I hope to keep the computational focus.
it fascinates to me note how my brain learns some language things but refuses to learn others
There are some really interesting questions about second language learning, and very few of them have been properly addressed, as far as I know. While everybody seems to be able to pick up new languages before age five or so, some people seem to be able to pick up new languages almost as easily throughout their young life, and a small minority seem to be able to pick up new languages well into adulthood -- and even old age!
The rest of us are stuck with the ones we get before we're 16 or so, or we just muddle along. That's my plan -- I'll be studying Arabic in the fall, I hope, and I'm a little intimidated. I hope it's not harder than Chinese -- at least the writing system will be easier.