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Comment on It can be harder to surveil private conversations if everyone just used sign language.

AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Sign language isn’t just another way of expressing English that can be picked up like learning a different alphabet or a secret code. It’s a full language with its own complete vocabulary, syntax, inflectional system, etc. that takes as long to learn as any other spoken language.

It would be great if more people knew it for the sake of communicating with the deaf, but as a means of foiling surveillance, there are many other approaches that would be more effective for less time investment.

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squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
At least for BSL there’s a “hybrid language” called Sign-assisted English.

That’s basically using BSL vocabulary with English grammar. You take your regular English sentence and do a 1:1 translation just replacing English words with BSL signs.

While Sign-assisted English isn’t nearly as expressive as full sign language, it’s super easy for an English speaker to get to a level where you can actually hold a conversation in it. It took me maybe 20h of practice to get to that point, which is much, much faster than I managed to in any other language. Because it’s not a new language to learn, you are just substituting words.

At the same time, Sign-assisted English is quite easy to understand for most sign-language speakers, since they usually already understand the spoken language of the land, even if it’s just so they can read, since most sign languages don’t have a written form.

So it ends up being some form of pidgin hybrid language that’s easy to learn and easy to understand for everyone involved.

If everyone would be able to use Sign-assisted spoken languages it would probably already be really helpful for everyone.

Funnyly enough, the group I started learning sign-assisted language with started using it even if no deaf person was part of the conversation, because at times sign language is much more useful than spoken languages. You can speak silently, you can easily communicate in noisy areas and it can be used over a much higher distance.

I think it would be really cool if sign-assisted spoken languages became a basic skill of everyone.

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gigachad@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
People usually think that sign language was artificially created to help the deaf people. This is of course very wrong, but tells a lot about how society perceives abledness. In this case we could even talk about being deaf is a disability, but that’s a topic for a other day.

Actually, sign language historically developed similarly to how spoken language developed. This means that even within one country, many different dialects are spoken. This can be easily seen for rather simple words - the word “Friday” for example can be vastly different in once city compared to the other.

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wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It also isn’t a single language. ASL is different than LSF, LSQ, or even LSFB, etc.

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- doingthestuff@lemy.lol ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah my daughter is studying ASL in college right now and have learned a lot about sign language recently.
  
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