Shocking, isn't it?
Here, we use American Sign Language (ASL). There, they use British Sign Language (BSL). These facts seem to blow a lot of people's minds. Both countries speak the same language (well, roughly), so surely the sign language used should be essentially the same.
There's a fallacy in this reasoning. It presumes sign language is a visual-gestural representation of the spoken language. Not so. Sign languages are languages in their own right. If you get into the history of it, ASL has a lot of linguistic roots in French Sign Language (LSF).And in case you don't believe me, just try the alphabet. Many Americans know the ASL fingerspelling alphabet. All one-handed.
There are a variety of different sign languages used in the world. Chinese, Swedish, Thai, etc. Canada uses ASL, except in Quebec, where they use LSQ. Someday I'd like to learn some of another sign language, but I think for now I'll focus on keeping my ASL up to scratch.
4 comments:
Sadly, I actually knew this already, but it wasn't until I read your post that it hit me: 'Oh! That's why Hugh Grant's sign language looked so weird in Four Weddings and a Funeral.'
Holy crap, I actually had no idea. That's kind of fascinating. Were the two systems developed independently of each other?
You've blown my mind. Thank you :)
Leah, I've actually never seen that movie! (Even though it was the in-flight movie twice when I made a trip years ago...)
AM, always happy to blow another mind. Er, do we need a mop to clean that up? ;)
Mindy, yes, they were developed independently, for the most part. When the first school for the deaf in the U.S. was being planned, the man heading it up went to Europe to see how they educated their deaf. Stopped in England and wasn't really impressed. Went to France, got better info, and brought one of their teachers (a deaf man) back with him. There was also an unusually high percentage of deafness in Martha's Vineyard back then, so the community had developed the beginnings of their own sign language. Plus, there had been a small group of deaf children (I forget where) who were tutored by a man using British methods, and thus BSL.
So ASL formed as a merging of mostly LSF with a bit of the Martha's Vineyard language and BSL. Then over the couple hundred years since then, it's morphed and evolved as languages do.
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