[Noisebridge-discuss] 1st ASL group meeting next Wednesday @ 8pm (with special bonus)

[Sai Emrys]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:01 PM, dpc<weasel at meer.net> wrote:
> plus there's the segue from french. (a while back, someone was telling
> me that asl has more in common w/ french sign language than w/ the
> british variant).

Correct; I briefly mentioned this in my 5MoF talk.

Basically, the guy who introduced manual education for signers in the
US was a Frenchy (the Brits were asked first but they didn't want
anyone to learn how they taught people - they were oral-only). He
(Gallaudet) was basically one of the top deaf students of a major
deaf-education person in France. So his sign language (native French)
combined with what was native to America at the time (a whole bunch of
various home signs, plus a little bit of pidgin in deaf schools),
creolized, and voilà, ASL.

British Sign Language is about as different from ASL as English is to
Mandarin. Ironic, eh?

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sign_Language#France for a
fuller story.

> multi-lingual smack talk.

Just wait 'till you see cross-linguistic puns. ><

- Sai