Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

Over at Rolling Around in my Head, Dave Hingsburger is asking a question that tickles that special lexicography geek place in my heart (It's another "What's a lexical gap in English that you would like to see filled?" discussion). And since I have people in my circles that identify with various forms of queer- and/or Disability Pride, I thought I'd share it here:

Begin Quote:

Several years ago George Hislop, who was a close friend, told me the difference between someone who was 'gay' and someone who was 'homosexual.' He said that a 'homosexual' was someone who had sex with others of the same gender but who did not identify with their sexuality, denied it as often and as loudly as they could and who did nothing to support the political movement regarding the rights for sexual minorities. A gay person, on the other hand, was someone who also had sex with others of the same gender but had an affiliation to the movement to the rights of others to love as they will that went beyond sex. Gay people, he said, identified with their sexuality and with their community. He saw the difference as the same as the difference between shade and sun.

[Snip]

Begin Quote:

Like the woman I spoke to in Maryland who wanted to talk to me about accessibility in Toronto. When this happened it reminded me of being in a gay bar in Milwaukee and being asked how safe it was to be gay in Toronto. In both cases, it was more than strangers asking strangers tourist advice ... both were experiences of the best of community. Where strangers aren't so strange, and where questions are understood at the deepest level of their asking. Community is community but community requires an entrance fee - identity.

So... while I'll be working on other things, today, this question will be running in the background of my thoughts... I'll probably have more to say about it later.

[ETA: Oops! forgot the link to the full post -- here: http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com/2013/04/take-notes-theres-quiz-at-end.html ]

Freshly minted -- as of seven minutes ago -- the mold's barely been cracked.

I'll come back later and revise.

THE MONSTER CHALLENGE: OUT OF THE LABYRINTH

In looking down upon my naked self:
My lap, my scars, my hands, and crooked feet,
My posture's slant, my elbow's inner bend,
I sometimes wonder what it means to see.
This looking at myself from the where I am
Is not at all like looking at a rock.

Remembered words -- they echo in my thoughts --
In all the languages I've heard (or seen).
Like forest leaves, they sway in every breeze,
And cast their dappled shadows through my mind.
It's through this tangled forest I must go,
To find my truth, and know just what I am.
And then: one word amid ten thousand words
It catches, like a thorn, with sharp intent.
Although it stings, I trace the tendrils back,
And find a path, and there, the root:
That "monster," once, meant "warning from the gods."
The fear's unveiled. And like a ghost, it fades.
And here's the fruit: it's heavy -- rich with seeds.
I'll plant one for myself, and start anew.

A proposal for a definition of "Geek," which can exist independent of any particular cultural trend (e.g. video-games, comics, or spec. fic):

Noun:

Someone to whom the sentence: "You're over-thinking this," is inherently nonsensical.

Okay, so I've been posting a bunch under my "Signed Languages" filter, which most of you are not on, because it's a small subset of my circles... but twice, recently, under that filter, I claimed to have learned ASL from Dr. Larry Flesicher (who died in 2009). And then, today, I decided to Google the "ASL, S.U.N.Y. Stony Brook, 1991" to see what I could find about him.

...And it turns out, I learned ASL from Dr. Larry Forestal, who is still very much alive and kicking... Ooops? Um, in my defense, this was twenty years ago? and I don't think we called him by his last name anyway (since we were first year foreign language students, and clueless as all get out)? And I may have been reading the news of Dr. Flesicher's death online, without my glasses?

Anyway, Look what I found! ... I made it into The New York Times! (not by name... But I was one of the "more than 30 students [who] held a protest earlier [that] month," mentioned in the article). The full article is behind the cut. I'm posting this out-of-filter, because there are several teachers, former teachers, and soon-to-be-teachers in my circles, so the subject might appeal on those grounds.

( Campus Life: SUNY, Stony Brook; Sign Language: Foreign Or Merely an Easy A? (New York Times, May 26, 1991) )

I knew the anti-ASL argument was bogus at the time... I don't know how many students actually did get A's. But we were given work in that class... And no, we didn't "speak," but we were required to sign in class.

But now that I've followed along with people working as college and university instructors, I really know their argument was bogus:

"Too many students get A's!"

(actually, you counted wrong)

"Well, it's American Language... That's not foreign!"

(But Navajo is?)

"Well, it's only taught by Adjunct Professors! Everyone knows they're not real scholars."
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That last one is the kicker, ain't it? Especially since, I bet, every one of the tenured professors making that argument back then were Adjunct Professors, once upon a time...

Well I did threaten -- ahem -- promise to post a collage of Danny Kaye pics, didn't I? Here it is:


(Click to view larger)

After this immersion in his work, the thing that impresses me most is how fluidly energy flows through his body -- especially his hands and fingers.

Knowing how well his mind absorbed the rhythms and nuances of so many different languages, I can't help but fantasize about what he could have done if he'd ever been exposed to American Sign Language: Was his genius specifically aural, or was it generally linguistic? If it were the latter, I'd love to be able to go back in time to an alternate universe and see what he could have done with a "ABC Story" (a story where each sign and/or qualifer must be the letters of the ASL fingerspelling alphabet, in order from A to Z; I've often wondered, btw, if BSL and Auslan have similar genres -- anybody know?)*

Links to my sources, with total running time of each clip (so you can get a sense of bandwith before you decide whether or not to click):

Top center: Finale: "Happy Ending" On the Riviera (1951; copyright 20th Century Fox) 9:46 (Song starts at ~6:38)

-- the Ultimate YAY! shot, non?

Perimeter, counterclockwise (starting from top left):

'The Thinker' The Danny Kaye Show (1963-1967; copyright CBS) 6:08

Louis Armstrong and Kaye: "When the Saints go marching in" The Danny Kaye Show (1963-1967; copyright CBS) 4:06

"Triplets" The Danny Kaye Show (1963-1967; copyright CBS) 2:16

"The Maladjusted Jester" (Paramount Studios; 1955) 6:23

"Ballin' the Jack" The Danny Kaye Show (1963-1967) 0:42

-- Origin of the subject line. This was actually written in 1913; I was surprised to learn that "rock" was used as slang for "dance" as early as that.

"Gypsy" The Danny Kaye Show (1963-1967) 2:13

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*One of the best examples of an ABC story I could find online: "Checkmate": about two people sitting down and playing chess: "Checkmate" by Rob Nielson, 2008 1:47

This is one of my favorite heroes, ever. Even if the series is a spoof of the genre. It started on PBS's lineup about two and a half years ago.

Wordgirl Her powers are: flight, super strenghth, supersonic speed, and, (most important), always knowing the right word for any occasion. It's intended primary audience is kids aged 4-9, so it doesn't go into the realms of whether a word is a gerund or a verb, or dangling participle.

She's a ten and a half, and a girl. But she's not presented as a "deviation from the default." Nor is her superhero costume pink.

Here's the first clip the show producers created for the Web, in order to introduce the main character(s), and the show's tone. For some reason, lately, I've not been able to see embedded content, even though I can watch just fine on YouTube... So, this is also a test:

(and keep an eye out for a very startled-looking giant squid near the end).

And, in case the vid is as invisible to you as it still seems to be to me, here's the url: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLw3ExL18r8

This is something I recently posted as a reply to trouble,*

(Quote) You know, this summer, when I started watching ASL vlogs on YouTube, it was mostly just to remind myself what basic signs looked like (did I remember the difference between "EXCUSE-ME" and "EASY," for example).** And what I stumbled upon instead was a veritable cultural revolustion. ...I've kind of gotten sucked in.

You see, there are these massive aggregate sites (or they were massive, earlier this year) for Deaf vlogs and blogs, called "DVTV" (Deaf Video TV) and DeafRead, both run by one guy. But, apparently, Deaf users were getting upset by the number of people coming on spouting audist (like racist for the ear) sentiments, and were asking this guy to put statements condemning audism, disablism and homophobia in his user guidelines (sound familiar? might be something in the air...). And so far, he's refused. So people are leaving, and just posting their stuff directly to YouTube.

So -- the Tube is full of discussions of what Deafhood is, and what Audism is (and I've been watching the switch from fingerspelling the latter to back and forth discussions on how that should be signed***). It's kind of like watching the Protestant revolution around the time the printing press became a viable means of communication. Rather exciting. (Unquote)

Anyway, I've also seen references to "Hearing culture," which is an aspect of my cultural view-point I'd not considered before. But now that it's been brought to my attention, I can't stop wondering about it.

The thing about (neurotypical) humans is: we think in language. And the thing about heard languages is that we can hear a sound, or receive a message, and have no idea where it's coming from. If someone shouts "Fire!" in a crowd, we run -- we don't care who's shouting, or why.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of lying awake in my bed at night, listening to my parents talking and laughing downstairs in the kitchen, and drifting off to sleep to that, comforted that I was not alone.

On the other hand, this weekend, I kept hearing an excited man's voice through my bedroom window, off in the distance. I couldn't make out what he was saying, whether he was close and unamplified, or speaking far away through a loudspeaker. I couldn't tell if he was simply enthusiastic, or furious at someone. And it kept going on. And it was making me nervous.

...And then, there are the proverbial "things that go bump in the night."

The thing about heard/spoken language is that:

A) it can come to us through the air in a "disembodied" way, and:

B) it travels directly to our emotional, limbic, centers of the brain (via the tone of voice, before the left temperal lobe gets down to work on it) -- reason is not strictly necessary.

But in seen/signed languages, the message is always embodied in the messenger -- to take part in a discourse, you must look the messenger in the eye.

So here're a couple of the questions that've been rattling 'round in my brain for the last week or so:

1) "If Plato had been Deaf, and a native signer, would he have come up with the doctrine of the Real Vs. Ideal?

2) "Is it the disembodied quality of speach (and thereby, thought) in "hearing culture", that has led to the whole mind/body dualism that dominates religious thought, and plagues our medical system?"

...Haven't come up with any answers, yet. But I think the questions are interesting.

(and one of the neighbor's dogs is barking hysterically... again).

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*Her post is here: I'm supposed to be marking more midterms

**No, I did not. EASY and ALMOST are closer to being a minimal pair than EASY and EXCUSE-ME, and I'd gotten the three of them switched around in my head -- Though to be fair to myself, all three use the same Bent B handshape.

***Which is an indication that it's shifting its position in the language from a piece of foreign-language-based jargon to having its own culturally-embedded meaning.

There's a common belief out there, even today, that signed languages are universal -- somehow closer to pantomime than spoken languages -- that native Deaf signers, and CODAs ([hearing] Children Of Deaf Adults), for whom sign is a first mode of communication, don't so much talk about things, in the abstract, as act them out. There's a facet of this meme that somehow, sign is more "natural," and speech is "cultural." If you are someone who idealizes the "natural state" and sees Culture as a corrupting influence, you are going to idealize sign language as "more romantic," and/or "pure" than spoken language, as Rousseau did in his essay On the Origin of Language (1781):

(quote)

Love, it is said, was the inventor of drawing. It might also have invented speech, but less happily. Not being very well pleased with it, it disdains it; it has livelier ways of expressing itself. How could she say things to her beloved, who traced his shadow with such pleasure! What sounds might she use to work such magic?

(unquote)

If you are of a school of thought that idealizes science and rational explanations for things, on the other hand, as the writers and producers of PBS' NovaScience Now do, you might grudgingly admit that sign is a "real" language, but you're likely to still demand that proof of higher-order thinking be expressed in properly controlled, vocal, communication, as this snippet of a transcript from a recent episode illustrates (July, 2009):

(quote)

ZIYA TONG: Most mammals make particular sounds only in reaction to a specific situation, like a dog that growls when it's threatened. Efforts to train apes and other land-dwelling mammals to control and modify the sounds they make have largely been unsuccessful.

LEAH COOMBS: Knock. Good. Knock, knock. [Walrus makes a knocking sound in his mouth] Good.

ZIYA TONG: A lot of animals obviously communicate through sound, so what's different about a walrus?

RONALD J. SCHUSTERMAN: What this training shows is they have incredible control over this, so that they can learn to produce these under certain occasions and inhibit them under other occasions.

(unquote)*
(you can watch the full video of the segment, or get a link to the full transcript, here).

The main point about signed languages that some people make to argue that spoken language is more logical and require higher-order thinking than signed languages is that signed languages are iconic -- that is, you can just make a picture of what you're talking about with your hands (tracing the shape of whiskers for CAT, for example), rather than assigning an arbitrary sound to the subject. So, the argument goes, signed languages don't really need as much thinking as spoken languages do.

But, frankly, I believe this "common knowledge" is really just a "common falsehood," and that actually, it's the other way around entirely: That it's vocalized speech that is primitive, with a more direct connection to our emotions than signed languages.** And it's really only the power and privilege that comes with being in the linguistic majority that convinces hearies otherwise.

Here's where I give you a bit about how I came to this belief:

When I was going to the State University of New York at Stony Brook, for my Masters in Creative Writing, I had the opportunity to sign up for formal classes in ASL as a foreign language. These classes were total emersion -- all nearly all communication was through sign, and/or reading messages on the blackboard from the teacher (Who was, himself, Deaf, and whose parents had been Deaf), from the very first minute of the very first class. They were Tuesday-Thursday classes, from 8:30 to 10:00 am. Being a college campus, the only students up and about at that hour were others going to that same class, and when we'd meet on the campus walkways, we'd sign to each other, as practice, instead of speaking. And in my case, being a graduate student, my next classes after that, where I'd have to switch back to English to do my work, wouldn't be until well after supper. So: On my "Sign Days," for three-month stints at a time, I'd start thinking about ASL at around 6 am, and wouldn't start thinking about English until at least noon.

It wasn't long before I switched, in my brain, from thinking about ASL to thinking in ASL, at least for some of the self-talk that goes on in my head.

And that's when the realization hit me: That, really, there's one thing -- and one thing, only -- that an auditory language can do that a visual language cannot:

Warn someone who cannot see you of impending danger, such as a falling rock, or a stalking sabre-tooth tiger. Period. That's it. And for that, all you need is a primal scream, really -- something to get someone's attention, so they'll look up from what they're focused on, see the danger for themselves, and run (or bung a rock at it). And really, when you think about it, even our modern, high-tech alarms and auditory warning signals are still little more than primal screams: the clanging of a fire alarm, the ringing of a telephone, the siren of a police car or an ambulance,*** the rantings of Rush Limbaugh...

This was vitally important to our survival as a species, yes, especially since we have binocular vision, and cannot see what's around us very well at all. But it's hardly the sine-qua-non of complex reasoning or the refined delights of civilization and fellowship.

Yes, human beings have evolved greatly since the days when life meant running from a sabre-tooth tiger, and our vocal-auditory mode of communication has evolved to a much more refined state than the primal: "AAuuuuGGhh!" Auditory communication has given us Homer, and Shakespeare, and Mozart. But its roots lie deep in the primative, instinctual parts of our brains, and sound is still used to manipulate our emotions without engaging our reason -- just think how an effective soundtrack to a movie can suck you in even when the script is tissue paper thin.

Now, about that "Iconic vs. Abstract" distinction, and why I wish it would just go away forever:

First: Spoken languages are more iconic than many people realize -- as Roy Blount Jr. points out in his introduction to Alphabet Juice (A book I borrowed from, and returned to, the library, so I can't cite pages) "Sphinx" and "Sphincter" come from the same Greek root word for "Strangle" (the way that the Sphinx killed her victims), and when we speak the 'inx' sound, our throats squeeze shut a little bit.

Second: Signed languages are less iconic than many people realize. I dare say that most of what we think of as iconic elements of signs are actually just mnemonic devices that we're taught after the fact, when we are learning a Sign Language as a second language.

Third: If signed languages are slightly more iconic than spoken languages, it's because they are three-dimensional languages working in a three-dimensional world and so they can be. If spoken languages can't, that's more to do with their weakness than their strength.

Finally: even highly iconic signs like CAT are far from pure icons -- distilling the entirety of cat-hood into a single attribute of whiskerness, is a symbolic abstraction, and further distilling that attribute into a single movement that can be made with one hand is another layer of abstraction.

So there.

So... when I did a poll about what I might post on this topic, a few of you on my LJ f'list said you kind of knew what ASL looks like from TV, but were not really that familiar with it. So I've been searching around for examples of ASL in use by native speakers, that wouldn't, at the same time, be overwhelming and just incomprehensible. I finally decided on this duo (The CODA brothers) -- they're native signers but they also do English voice-overs for their vlogs (video-blogs). Enjoy:

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*So... (I thought, as I watched this) you're saying that people who cannot control their voices, either because they are pre-lingually deaf, or have a condition like CP, or Tourrette's Syndrome, aren't as fully human as you are? How special for you!

**I actually believe they're equal (mostly). I'm just reversing the argument completely, to make a point

***Police and Ambulance sirens are actually more confusing than informative because we can't rely on the Doppler Effect to help us determine whether the sound is coming or going, or how fast its traveling. All they do is trigger our adrenyl glands

I found a website that's up as a student resource for a particular curriculum in ASL (American Sign Language). The teacher's put up some pretty interesting stuff, including this brief (and, imnsho, chilling) history of signed languages in education: The Language of the Deaf.

I think I may want to do more research on that Milan Convention... But only when I'm in a resolutely cheerful mood, because otherwise, I'll either want to kill people, or go to bed with the covers pulled up for .... oh, I don't know ... maybe a year or so.

Anyway... that timeline of Signed Languages reminds me that I was going to a camp for handicapped children, when a) D/deaf* children were starting to be reclassified as handicapped, by government and social agencies,** b) Total Communication was just beginning to replace strict oralism, and c) I was at the perfect age to pick up a second language naturally.

What I learned at Wagon Road Camp was not true Sign Language (even though all the grown-ups told me it was [damned liars!]). But the building blocks of a visually based language got lodged in my brain in the final four years before my language centers ossified. I didn't even start to tackle Latin until well after puberty, and I took one semester of Spanish as a freshman in college. So, even though I rarely use it (with other people -- I still occassionally fingerspell, count things, and sign brief phrases to myself), ASL is the closest thing I have to a second language. And that may be why I got upset, and started hunting down resources on the Web, when I realized I was forgetting it.

Over the last few nights, I've been thinking about my relationship with sign language, and my use of it, and my relationship with Deaf-
World. On the one hand, I will never be a part of that culture -- even if both my eardrums were shattered tomorrow, I'd still have grown up in the Hearing World, and I'd carry the remnants of that culture with me till the day I died. So I admit there's an element of exoticism and fascination going on, and that part of my psyche, I find embarrassing. On the other hand, even though the Deaf don't consider deafness to be a disability, much of the Hearing World still does; a Deaf university student, for example (unless she's going to a Deaf university, like Gallaudet) will need to go to the Disabled Student Services Office for an interpreter, instead of the Foreign Language Student Services Office (even though that same university may be teaching ASL under its Foreign Language Dept). So I am more likely to cross paths with her than my nondisabled Hearing peers.

So, um, yes.

I was going to post a second link from the same site about Signing Etiquette, to give examples of how Deafness is truly a distinct culture from the Hearing World.

But now that I've written this all out, I think that's a completely different topic, altogether.

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* Capital-D "Deaf" refers to the cultural group, and lowercase-d "deaf" refers to the simple inability to hear. You can be hearing and Deaf -- if you're a hearing child raised by Deaf parents, for example, and Sign is your first language. You can also be 'deaf as a post', and still be part of the Hearing world, and culture.

**The Deaf do not consider themselves to be a part of the Disability community, but part of a linguistic community, and culture (unless, of course, a Deaf person also has a disability -- it happens).