To clarify our misunderstanding earlier

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What I was going with is that the thing with being blind and being deaf is that if prevents you communicating in one way (say, verbally) but not the other (visually in that case). In the case of Braille, the idea seems to have been to simply replace the visual writing with something that was effectively identical but could be understood by blind people.

I had assumed that the same would have been true for sign language, but I'm now learning that my assumptions seem to be rather horribly flawed here. Considering that I'm slightly deaf and have already narrowly avoided becoming blind once, I wouldn't mind having my 'disablist' views corrected before it's too late... :D

Peter Monomorium antarcticum08:23, 12 February 2012

Braille is an alphabet. it's used in French, English, German, etc. And the systems of braille (a 6 celled form, you "punch" any or all of the dots) is used in most languages with their own system. ⠿ is the cells all blacked out. a is one dot, ⠗ is a P if i followed the chart correctly. (wikipedia has the chart and the unicodes). So you are seeing an exact representation of written english, or french or whatever other language. The person can hear, so they speak the native language and just need to learn to spell like the rest of us.

Deaf people, on the other hand, do not hear the language. So, early on, attempts were made to sign the spoken language. You had a sign for "hello", and a sign for "my" and a sign for "name" and of course a sign for "is", "am" "was" "will be", etc. But it was clutzy and didn't render well for people who had not acquired English, or german, or japanese.

Deaf people almost universally, sign languages that are visual, not temporal. It's just more efficient that way. So instead of knowing that "the first word in a sentence is the subject, and they you put the object" signed languages sign inside of the space. So you can put "bob" on your right side, and "chuck" on your left side. From there, instead of saying "bob is a business man", you sign in your right side "business man". and if bob and chuck have a meeting, you sign the verb "meet" from both your right and left sides and bring it together. When I sign that you used to have "long blond hair", i make the sign of "hair" (which is, in effect touching your hair), with a Y-hand for "yellow", and draw it down as long as your hair was. I single movement for the concept.

And given who introduced sign to whom, it's fun to know that American Sign Language is incomprehensible to Brits, but is mostly understandable to Japanese. (We introduced ASL to Japan, France introduced it to us, but the Brits and by extension, Aussi Sign, and NZ sign were independently developed).

If you read a deaf person's writing on a wiki, or on Youtube, or any other comment section, they usually sound like any other foreign speaker, making the kinds of small mistakes anyone who learned english as a second language makes. noun-verb agreement, correct use of past, and "a" vs. "the" for example.

It's a pretty cool language to learn. :-)

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina16:26, 12 February 2012

Braille is actually pretty awesome; but the signs we make with it are a bit of a mess sometimes: saw a phone number thing next to a phone that had the braille for the names of what the numbers called but not the actual numbers themselves.

il'Dictator Mikal (talk)16:30, 12 February 2012

What do you mean? I'm curious. It didn't say what numbers to call, just the name of the place?

Generally, it is a one to one rendering, so it doesn't take any more time to write in braille than in any other script.

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina16:34, 12 February 2012

yah, (this is one one of those "heres a helpful reminder if you are in an emergency and need these numbers" deals) there was the braille for "this is the place!" and the numbers are across, like you'd expect, only there wasn't any braille for the numbers, which sort of negates any benefits of having the first braille on the names

il'Dictator Mikal (talk)16:38, 12 February 2012

Excellent! I always wondered how the blind even found the braille on elevators, hotel rooms or something. I can only assume that there are standards about where the signs would be, so you knew / know to expect them?

Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina16:40, 12 February 2012