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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
Are the "signs" used by the deaf in sign language "symbols" or "words"? Or are they "word symbols"?
Let me put it this way. ASL (American sign language) is a language that uses gestures rather than speech for its utterances. It is nowhere near a siomple mapping of English to gesture (though there is a signing system called exact signed English which most deaf people I've met disdain).
I've studied a little ASL. I've read linguistics papers about ASL. I've discussed ASL with fluent and native speakers, both hearing and deaf.
Hard to say if ASL gestures are words or symbols. Are these two mutually exclusive? But I can definitely say the ASL is not English, spoken or otherwisa.
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
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>spoken or otherwisa
what about typos? are they words, or merely (mis)representations of words?
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Joined: May 2004
Posts: 89
journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: May 2004
Posts: 89 |
Great input, jheem, tell us; how effectively does the information transfer of sign language compare with spoken English? Is the transfer of content as effective as the spoken word without the use of prepositions, conjunctions, and the myriad nuances of English?
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journeyman
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journeyman
Joined: May 2004
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>spoken or otherwisa
what about typos? are they words, or merely (mis)representations of wordsTypos, tswum, as you very well know, are many times the words of tomorrow. 
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Joined: Oct 2001
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enthusiast
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enthusiast
Joined: Oct 2001
Posts: 247 |
re "words built the pyramids" ...it follows that words are as dynamic and concrete as bricks in altering the make up of the future. Right?
Can a brick be "dynamic", Amemeba?
A brick, like a word, is only as "dynamic" as the mind which wields it.
Words didn't build the pyramids or send mankind to the moon, Amemeba. Ideas did that.
A brick separated from an idea is just a dead weight. Ditto a word.
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old hand
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old hand
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,027 |
Words didn't build the pyramids or send mankind to the moon, Amemeba. Ideas did that. O, Oooh..! This audacious statement brings to the fore that, underlying the present dispute we have the classic deep rift between idealists and realists. Only an attempt to bridge the gap can advance our understanding. Ideas, by themselves, are about as powerless to build a pyramid, as the DNA is to grow a baby.
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stranger
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stranger
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 19 |
Are words not simply symbolic just like the bricks that built the pyramids and like the red light. The word *love* whether written or spoken (or shot out of a cannon for that matter) symbolises different things to everybody. People only percieve these symbols as suits their needs to an extent. Sorry to get back to the red light example but, the majority of people know that this means stop. THerefore when they see a red light they stop. There is no forcefield to make them, nor will they fall of the earth if they don't stop. But most people will. All because of how they interperate the symbol they have been given. Stopping in a concious decision based on the percieved meaning of the symbol.
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
Is the transfer of content as effective as the spoken word without the use of prepositions, conjunctions, and the myriad nuances of English?
But ASL has pretty much the same parts of speech (syntactic categories) that English or Russian has. Signers say that English lacks some of the finesse that ASL has! It's like trying to argue whether French or Farsi is the more expressive language. ASL is pretty much its own language. (You can even tell which region of the US an ASLer learned their language in based on regionalisms or dialectal differentiation.) You cannot translate English word for word and expect to be signing grammatical ASL. One thing that is quite interesting is that the pronominal system allows for more "persons" than we have based on physical location in front of the signer. You can sign for different people (there names or a description of them) and then merely store them in a location relative to you and simply point to one of these locations to refer to that person as a subject or object of a verb in a sentence. Just holds for that conversation.
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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
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what about typos? are they words, or merely (mis)representations of words?
You might want to count them as word variants. So, is a spoken word less of a representation than a written word? How does one misreepresent a word? In a court of semantics? Luckily we have a lot of inherent redundancy in English words, so an a mistakenly wrought for an e has little impact meaningwise, but humor, ah, that's another thing.
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Joined: Jan 2004
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veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475 |
Words didn't build the pyramids or send mankind to the moon, Amemeba. Ideas did that.
But did ideas predate words? or vice versa? Please refrain from using words to explain your ideas on this. Thanks.
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