Confederacy of a Dunce - Signing mania

Friday, February 17, 2006

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Like last week, this week has remained insanely busy at work. A couple of days have been mostly taken up by courses related to British Sign Language and communication strategies: both of these have required a very high level of concentration. I realize now that in normal conversations or everyday activities, my eyes wander a lot (perhaps related to my limited attention span, nervous energy, and all my other similar characteristics). But this just doesn't work when you're trying to communicate using sign language (and/or lipreading). After a day on the course I feel like my eyes are ready to bug out and my brain is ready to explode. The first few course meetings I found myself taking a lot of notes, but this was quite counterproductive as it's not really possible to watch the signs while writing, and it's not at all easy to summarize a signform in a concise manner (especially as my drawing skills don't extend beyond the logos for heavy metal bands). I found myself writing lots of things like this:

WHAT: RH, palm F index up, waggle "don't go there", make Q face. Which means...
For the sign "WHAT", using the Right Hand, palm forward, index finger pointing up, make a waggling motion ("don't go there" as the nearest approximation to the motion and location), while making a facial expression that signifies a question.

WORK: chest, LH palm R/in, thumb in base, RH same shape chop L on thumb base 2x. Which means...
The sign "WORK" is made near the chest: the left hand palm is halfway between pointing right and inward, with the thumb tucked in. This left hand provides the base for the sign. The right hand is formed in approximately the same shape, and makes two chopping motions against the base of the left thumb.

Needless to say, I can miss quite a few signed sentences while I'm writing even the most concise notes I can, and it's not so easy to interpret my notes later . Even assuming I've gotten all the details right, which is not always the case. BSL is flexible but there are certain phonological* requirements (hands may move in certain ways but not others; hand shapes may vary to some extent in some ways but not others, etc.). So I decided to stop taking notes, and suddenly I felt like I was picking up a lot more information (although maybe it was just more practice).

We've finally gotten to the stage where our instructors are weaning us off English syntactic structures: now that we have a small BSL vocabulary, it's time for us to start thinking about putting them into appropriate order for BSL. For example, English questions begin with a WH-word, while BSL questions (sentences too, for that matter) begin with the main topic, and have the WH-sign towards the end:
English: Where do you work?
BSL approximate equivalent: you work where you?

The multiple use of the pointing pronoun I've glossed as "you" in BSL is quite common, but differs in different expressions and different signers, in ways I don't have a clue about so far. It reminds me of reflexives ("sich" in German, erm, there's one in Italian too,...) but seems somehow different.

Fortunately, all of my other officemates (and the centre's senior researcher whose office is just around the corner) are BSL signers. Only one of them is deaf, so I will need to make a real effort to try and use sign as much as possible if I am to improve.

*The term "phonology" and its derivational variants are used in an analogical sense from spoken languages, in which "phonology" refers to the sound system of a particular language. For example, in English the -ng sound cannot appear at the beginning of a word; certain consonants don't (typically) appear in sequence (counterexamples for any pair of consonants can be found, but "phonologically illegal" combinations are quite unusual and often appear across the parts of a compound word, like HD which can be found in "BIRTHDAY"). These kinds of constraints are also present in sign languages, but rather than referring to sound, they refer to movement, position, handshape, and so on. But the term phonology is used even though there's nothing "phono" about them.

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Friday, February 17, 2006 1:22:14 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)