jhall@ihlpm.att.com (John R Hall) (12/01/90)
Index Number: 12079 I think ASL is interesting - enough so that I'm going to start learning it in January. I think it's worth mentioning that here at my work location (AT&T Bell Labs in Illinois) we have a full time interpreter for the deaf on site. This must boost the productivity of HI employees here a lot. I've attended several interpreted meetings here and count the interpreter as one of my friends. Outside of work, I've volunteered some time at an agency which was the precursor to the Illinois Relay and was a relay operator. (The "mighty AT&T Relay" service provided to Illinois Bell has since replaced the volunteer organization.) Also, I've recently taken interest in a non-profit organization that promotes signed theater in the Chicago area - they are called Chicagoland Advocates for Signed Theater - C.A.S.T. These experiences as well as reading are where I've gotten my info and developed my opinions. One person asked about deaf vs. Deaf, and a good description of this is to be found in Padden & Humphries "Deaf in America" which came out in '88. It's interesting that the cultural identity of Deaf takes precedence over the lack of hearing in the definition of the term. P&H describe a hearing boy on a Deaf basketball team who was dis- qualified much to the protest of the Deaf teammates. The hearing boy was the child of Deaf parents and a native signer. P&H attribute John Woodward with coming up with the term in '72. Pidgin signed languages: From what I gather, that's mainly what's used here at work. The concept of pidgin being the words of one language expressed in the grammar of the other, in the case of Pidgin Signed languages this means ASL-type signs expressed in English word order. One advantage for an interpreter of PSE is that it can be signed while simultaneously speaking English, but I think only an advanced interpreter like ours is very good at it. Since ASL and English have different grammars, it's probably not possible to sign and speak them simultaneously (it would be like speaking English and French simultaneously if you had two mouths). As far as the origin of ASL, a degree of skepticism is in order when attributing the invention to the Abbe de L'Epee, or so say P&H. They suggest he used the already existing sign language of the deaf as a teaching tool to teach French, thereby imparting some French flavor to the language in the process I imagine. This does not make him any less of a significant person in my mind; I wouldn't want to belittle his accomplishments. I'm interested in discussing any of this. Other topics of interest to me are Alexander Graham Bell and his oralist views/deaf wife and mother, the student interpreter program I hear goes on at RIT, psycholinguistics such as the work of Ursula Bellugi, Stokoe's work at Gallaudet, that's about all I can think of! Cheers, --John Hall P.S. Thanks for the reply from James Womack who didn't know how to mail to me and to Bill McGarry for posting it - the article about "think-hearing".