Posted on 06/24/2018 3:46:44 PM PDT by Hojczyk
Nice story.
It is a nice story, but how does a BLIND and DEAF person communicate with sign language? Doesn’t such a means of communications require sight? I am not trying to be rude
Via touch. Both participants use their hands. (Read the story.)
Signs can be done in the person’s hand or hands. In this case, the article indicated that the girl fingerspelled the words into his hand. Makes for a laborious conversation, but gets the job done. (ASL was my foreign language in college, and ironically enough, I have a brother who is blind!)
And, the 15 year old learned ASL because she is dyslexic.
I have argued for years why there isn't a GLOBAL SIGN LANGUAGE so that everyone COULD communicate with anyone on the planet if they knew it. WHY is there AMERICAN sign language?
He was spelling into her hand. Kind of like writing notes.
Thats how they taught Helen Keller.
There’s also Exact English, which is different from ASL.
But why wouldn’t there be “foreign” sign languages? The whole “hearing” world doesn’t speak the same language; why would the whole deaf/hard-of-hearing world? Globalism? No thanks.
After reading about the five kids to taunted a man while he drowned, we needed a story like this.
Thanks.
You’re kidding, right??? OMG!...it’s SIGN LANGUAGE! Of course we don’t SPEAK the same WORDS, but ACTIONS could be formed as universal.....sorry if “Global” triggered you....geesh...omg....what has happened here.
Did you ever watch The Miracle Worker? Signs into the hand.
First, this is a lovely incident of truly good action and all concerned should be applauded for their actions.
Having said this, your comments, while well intentioned, are ignorant of history. Deafness and the need to communicate with those afflicted has been with us since the start of humanity. Every society / language group has developed their version of the communication because at least ONE PARTICIPANT is speaking / signing in their language. Thus the historical development is with language specific signing languages. It has only been in recent times that there has been an interest in developing a more universal sign vocabulary.
There is a system for “signing” the words into the palm of the impaired person. Apparently the young lady was quite good at it.
Dr. John McWhorter, the well-known linguistics professor, tells a very interesting anecdote about a home for the deaf in Central America. (I don’t remember which country.) The residents had no instruction - they were simply housed and fed - but they independently developed their own version of sign language that was unique to that one facility.
She’s a keeper. I wish my son would bring home a girl as nice as this, although I have nothing but positive things to say about his current girlfriend. He’ll probably dump her for a floozy.
Because often the sign includes a letter from the word. For example, “water” is signed by making a W with your three middle fingers and bouncing it against your chin. That wouldn’t work in other languages - think “aqua”.
But it doesn’t HAVE to be in a universal sign language!!
90% of human communication is still non-verbal.
Even our closest relatives, the great apes can sign and human hand gestures where probably the primary means of human language long before spoken speech came along.
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