Nonsense. Linguistic nonsense.
Navajo has numerous irregular verbs and it is a tonal language. Grammatically, it is hard to learn due to the irregularities and the gutteral consonants. However, grammatically it is more similar to English than say to Filippino or Chinese.
In ASL you have one verb and by changing the sign make it past or future. In Navaho, the irregular verb changes drastically to make it past or past perfect or far past. It is true that you add an ending to change a sentence to a question. That's about the only similarity to ASL. But since you do that in Zulu also, and sometimes in English (you want that, Right? would be an example) it means that the writer is not familiar with linguistics, but only using Navajo as a politically correct example.
American sign language is not the same as signed English. It's grammar is closer to Pidgen than to English. It does not go subject predicate object. For example, you might sign: There I fast fast. Translation I'm going there as quickly as I can. Very similar to Gullah and West African pidgen English.
Since ASL comes from France, via Martha's Vinyard, it is not intelligible to those who learned sign in England.
In summary, making "written" ASL may help kids who are deaf and raised in deaf families (most non deaf parents raising deaf children use ASL poorly, more often they used signed English).
ON the other hand, as all listeners to Rush Limbaugh know, cochlear implants are improving and in another ten years these kids will be getting implants and learning English.
Thank you for all the information. I've got a lot to learn and you've given me a good start.
I've only listened to Rush about a total of an hour in the last 4 years, so I no real idea of what is going on with cochlear implants. Medicine sure is providing many answers to problems which have plagued mankind for millennia. It's an exciting time to live.
My husband pointed out the Times article to my second oldest daughter and that's how I noticed it.
Several years ago our daughter used a simple version of sign language to communicate with autistic persons and she recently "ghost-wrote" a book on sign language. My youngest daughter is taking her third year of sign language in High School. My brother-in-law lip reads, since he was not taught sign language. His cousin learned sign language, but her parents never learned it, so they couldn't communicate with her that way. .
You can see why I have some interest in communication among the deaf, but I know nothing about sign language, so I'm not in a position to judge the merits of the system, (except to notice that it seems some people are being helped by it at this time).