Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/To clarify our misunderstanding earlier/reply (14)

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. :-)