Tags
I am not, I see, the first dimensional traveler to exist in this body. But how can I make you understand the strangeness of your world to me?
Imagine, if you will, a world where everyone is illiterate. There are no books to read; TV shows do not have subtitles; if you want people to know the rules at your local pool, you have to hire a person to stand near the door and explain it to each of them individually. There are a few simple signs– a red octagon means STOP, a yellow triangle means YIELD– but it has never progressed beyond that stage.
But it is not that this world has not invented literacy. Indeed, there are many written languages. However, these are essentially only known by the mute, and those who work with them. Perhaps a child will learn to spell a few words as part of the disability acceptance unit at their school: their name, maybe “mother” and “father,” maybe their favorite color. But if you have the capacity to use speech, in this world, you do not read.
I speak, of course, of the fact that your world does not have sign.
“But we don’t need sign,” you might say. “We can speak.” Certainly! As long as you never go to a concert. Or want to talk during a movie. Or have dinner at a crowded restaurant. Or take care of a newborn who sleeps lightly and wakes up often. Or want to send a message to someone without other people overhearing. Or want to talk at the same time that another person is talking. Or have a migraine, or autism, or any of dozens of conditions that lead to a sensitivity to sound.
Since none of those things are true, in fact, you would benefit a good deal from sign. But inexplicably instead of learning it you all choose to yell at each other at bars. Why.
I can’t believe how rude people in this world are in public spaces. In my world, if you’re in a restaurant or coffeeshop or on a train or an airplane, you automatically switch to signing. That way, everyone can understand what other people are saying, and no one has to overhear random scraps of other people’s conversations, and if you prefer to focus on your book you can.
In my world, half of all people are deaf. There is an pandemic childhood disease– unfortunately, we have had no luck in developing a vaccine– that nearly everyone catches. It is quite harmless and mostly just gives you a few days off school, but a little more than half of all sufferers wind up losing their hearing.
We would never consider the deaf to be disabled. Deafness is an advantage in so many ways. You’d never hire a hearing person to work construction, or in a factory, or at a stadium in any position other than sound engineer: hearing people can’t focus when there are loud noises, and it can lead to hearing damage such as unpleasant ringing sounds. Deaf people have a huge advantage in focusing: they can simply turn off their cochlear implants and zone out. And deaf people can live in cities, where you can hear sounds of construction and cars and your neighbors upstairs. Hearing people find cities very stressful.
And even if there’s not a specific advantage to being deaf, deafness is just… normal. Sure, deaf people have to go to different concerts than hearing people. (At deaf concerts, the music is loud enough to make a hearing person go deaf, because they usually like the vibrations.) Sure, they have to buy TTY devices if they want to use the phone. I have to spend ten minutes looking for my glasses every morning and you wouldn’t call me disabled about it. Some things are genuinely disabling, like chronic pain or using a wheelchair. But you people take an ordinary part of human variation– one that, as many variations do, has both advantages and disadvantages– refuse to accommodate it, and consider it a disability.
In your world, deaf children are often deprived of language in their critical period, because their parents don’t sign. In my world, this never happens. Is the problem deafness, or is the problem the fact that no one uses sign for no reason I can understand?
It’s a petty example, but think about video games. In my world, many first-person shooters include extra information through sound, but also include loud, distracting or unpleasant noises. (You know, the way that it actually happens during wars?) That way, the experience is fair for both deaf and hearing gamers. Your world refuses to make games that deaf players can play on an even field, and then claims that it’s their fault for not being able to hear!
Or think about movies. You CAN put subtitles in movie theaters. I have seen it. Why don’t you put subtitles routinely? Or cars honking. Why do cars honk? You can hear! It is unpleasant for you too! Replacing it with a flashing bright light, as we do, minimizes the effect on innocent bystanders.
Of course, not everything in our society accommodates deaf and hearing people equally. For example, our world’s musicals are traditionally signed and sung at the same time: the singing is what the characters are saying to each other, while the sign conveys their underlying emotions and thoughts. Of course all musicals have subtitles, but the experience is not at all the same.
In general, dance for us is much closer to song than to the abstract artform of your world. The distinction between dance and poetry, in particular, is often not clear: much poetry is intended to be signed, as poetry in your world is often intended to be read aloud. And this reminds me of the complexities of written sign! The way even fiction in written speech uses written sign to talk about what gestures people make, the various ways people have come up with to indicate a shaky hand or an abortive movement, the meaning of whether you use written sign or written speech or switching between them…
This is a tangent and I intend primarily to complain about your universe’s poor design. I have complained about subtitles and video game design, but above all you need to learn sign. I propose an intensive program of education in the nation’s elementary schools: full immersion in ASL from the moment they step into kindergarten. After a generation’s investment, all hearing people will be able to use both speech and sign, and your world will be tremendously improved.
Please ask me any questions you have and I’ll be sure to answer them over the course of today! I hope I will be able to convince you all of the necessity of learning sign and depathologizing deafness.
Kevin P said:
I completely agree that full immersion in a language from kindergarten is the best way to learn a language. But by making that language ASL rather than the local spoken language you’d be taking away a very valuable resource from immigrant families. Without that help children will find it much more difficult to develop the language skills they will need as adults.
(I’m being a bit selfish here as I’m an immigrant and have a child in primary school – but lots of other people are in the same situation, it’s not some tiny niche interest-group)
Over time that part would become less important as ASL becomes the standard way everyone communicates. But then you could start over from the beginning and write a similar article about the problems with sign-only language (limited to line-of-sight, basically impossible when you’re driving, not matching the written language, makes blindness even more disabling etc)
LikeLiked by 1 person
ozymandias said:
I’m not suggesting that people should only use sign! That would be limiting for exactly the reasons you suggest. (Except for not matching the written language: written sign is a thing in my world, and the only reason it isn’t a thing in your world is that no one knows sign.)
I realize there is a cost for immigrant children, but it is temporary, and there might be some benefits as well: all (hearing) children would be starting off equally unfamiliar with the language of instruction, so immigrant children might be less lost.
LikeLike
Daniel H said:
I’m sure you’ve looked into this in the past year (or two? I don’t remember one of these for last year, were you here longer?), but we do have *some* methods of writing sign language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language#Written_forms). It looks like most of them are more akin to IPA than regular scripts, but I don’t know much about them.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Orual said:
I learned a bit of sign when my brother was very young and the doctor thought he might never learn to speak, but might be able to sign. I wish I’d expanded that knowledge at some point, but I lack the impetus to, since I don’t have anybody to sign with. In the end, my brother gained some speech and proved to have motor difficulties that preclude him from using American Sign Language without significant modifications. He can communicate in more detail by typing on a keyboard, though it is very slow.
I’m actually very curious how resilient ASL is to malformed signs. My brother’s speech often is missing a lot of sounds, but is still comprehensible, especially if you’re around him at all frequently. Does sign have the same characteristics, where you can work out what was said from a small subset of the “correct” sounds and the context? If so, my brother might have found sign useful even with his motor problems.
Also, I can imagine blindness being a much greater disability in this world. In ours, I myself would actually rather be blind than deaf, since cochlear implants do not really allow you to appreciate most music and the music that I enjoy all falls under that umbrella. My ability to design electronic circuits would be limited by my blindness, but my programming ability would not, particularly if I stuck to Visual Studio, which has excellent accessibility thanks to the efforts of blind software engineers at Microsoft.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
In my world, sign is redundant the same way that spoken language is. That way you can still follow it if you got distracted and looked away for a second, or zoned out for a bit, or are using a shitty video connection. I can’t, of course, speak to the ASL of your world: my homeworld’s language is different and, as my predecessors never learned ASL, I don’t know it either. But I imagine that would be true of every language.
Blindness is very difficult in my homeworld, but we do accommodate: for example, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, blind people and those accompanying them are allowed to use speech in restaurants without being asked to be quiet by waitstaff. Detailed audio descriptions of television shows aimed at the blind exist in my world as in yours, and I don’t think the experience is that much different if some of the dialogue is signed. (Most TV shows don’t make much sense if you can only hear the audio.)
LikeLike
Tracy W said:
How about people who have difficulty signing, e.g they have arthritis in their hands, or who have a learning disability? Speech therapists in our world are quite effective but not 100%, and even if the disability is learnable it seems rather hard on a kid with a learning disability to oblige them to work far harder to master two languages, instead of one. The waitstaff in your world seem to be very officious.
LikeLiked by 1 person
tcheasdfjkl said:
I don’t know specifically how resilient ASL is to basically speech impediments, but possibly some evidence that it’s at least nonzero so is that it is at least resilient to one-handed signing, according to my ASL teacher from last year – apparently if you’re holding a drink or something you just sign with your free hand, doing the parts of the signs that that hand would normally be doing and leaving the rest of it unsigned basically. So you at least don’t need perfect and full signs in order to be understood. (Though it might be a problem if one’s speech-impediment-equivalent prevents one from making distinctions between importantly different morphemes; not sure if this is more of a problem than it also is in English?)
LikeLike
NormalAnomaly said:
It sounds like half deaf world has better cochlear implants than Earth, which makes sense since so many more people produce and use them. Does this dimension traveler have an opinion on Deaf parents not wanting their kids to learn spoken language because it might interfere with learning sign?
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
I don’t know about cochlear implants in your world, but there are firm limitations on how good they are in our world: it is difficult for deaf people to understand speech without lip-reading and they usually don’t enjoy music aimed at hearing people as much as music aimed at the deaf.
It’s at all useful for deaf people to learn spoken language, but even with a cochlear implant it’s rare for deaf people to reach the level of fluency with speech that a hearing person can with sign. Certainly there is no sense emphasizing speech before a child is really solid on sign (if you happen to have a child who caught the disease young): children are supposed to be learning how to communicate and how language works, and it is a truly unnecessary barrier for them to additionally be straining to distinguish sounds. But once they’re a little older deaf children typically go to lip-reading and speaking class, and I have no problems with that. (Certainly when I was a child I preferred lip-reading class to Extra P.E.!)
LikeLike
Rowan said:
From what I know of it, sign language is a whole other language; on an individual level, while I might like to know sign language someday, I’m more interested in foreign languages. What I’m actually learning is Japanese, although I’ve been stalled out due to executive function and only theoretically am I still “learning” the language. If I were to list other languages I might want to learn one day, I might put sign around 10th.
On a societal level, while I can understand a society where a random half of all people turn out deaf having everyone learn sign and English, that’s an extreme circumstance, and it takes circumstances that extreme to make a whole population bilingual. If the average person can get by knowing just the one language, they will. And if it’s imposed top-down, well, circling back to the individual level, I’m Welsh, and I had to learn the Welsh language from age 4 to 16 in school. My opinion then was that it was pointless, Wales isn’t even a proper country, and everyone in Wales speaks English anyway; I’m less derisive of the value of learning Welsh today, but I still couldn’t hold a conversation with someone who spoke Welsh and no English. I expect most students, if they’re made to learn sign but their friend group doesn’t have a deaf person in it, would be similarly unmotivated.
Also some points about entertainment; a videogame like that sounds horrible, in that it would literally sound horrible. While a lot of unpleasant and distracting noise could add some verisimilitude, outside of games going for a “gritty realism” tone you’re just talking about making the experience of one audience worse for the benefit of another audience. In a population that’s randomly split 50/50 into hearing and deaf, that makes sense and is reasonable, but in a population more like ours it’d be a game that trades away all its mainstream appeal for disabled accessibility.
And subtitles make movies worse. It’s not huge, but it is a non-zero cost to impose on hearing audiences to have subtitles. I would agree that the way things are now is prioritising hearing people over deaf people a bit too much, but if a theatre gave a choice between a subtitled screening and a subtitle-less screening of a movie, I’d take the latter (assuming the movie’s in English, of course; I always choose subs over dubs).
LikeLiked by 1 person
ozymandias said:
How do subtitles make movies worse? You can just ignore them if you happen to not like subtitles. You are not used to subtitles, but I think that is a different thing; I found it very strange and uncomfortable to watch movies without any subtitles.
I’m not very big into video games, but I understand that most people enjoy them fine? There’s the added challenge of not startling at the sudden noises, which a lot of people find interesting. Your horror movies have “jump scares,” don’t they?
It is true that it is difficult to convince people to use a language unless there is some use for it. But there is a use for sign! Children have a lot of reasons to want to talk quietly in a language their parents don’t speak.
LikeLike
Rowan said:
It’s something getting in the way of the screen, giving you a less full view of what’s happening and reminding you of the artificiality of it. I’d compare to having a crack in your phone screen and trying to watch a film on that; yes, I can ignore the crack, and if I’ve had a cracked screen for months I can get used to it, but that doesn’t mean it would not be better for the crack to be gone. I’m used to watching anime with subtitles – I probably watch more of that than English-language films – but that doesn’t make me any more inclined to turn them on when I don’t need them.
I can imagine people enjoying games fine, because at worst people can just turn the sound off if it’s unpleasant enough (modulo the competitive scene where it’s not about having fun), so it can’t be any worse than playing a game on mute – but if the sound design’s goal is in part to nerf any advantage from audio cues down to zero, it can’t be as good in that department as a game whose sound design is just built around giving those who can hear it a good experience. What I’m imagining is just one of the radios issued by the handicapper general in Harrison Bergeron, added to Doom or some other game I really like the soundscape of; probably what you actually have in your world isn’t as bad as what I’m imagining there, but I struggle to imagine a version that would actually improve on the status quo for me. I’m familiar with jump scares, but as I understand it they’re regarded as a cheap tactic to make weak horror writing stronger – it’s certainly not something I’d enjoy having added to some non-horror media.
That sounds like a good reason for a particularly intelligent and driven child to learn sign on their own initiative if they can convince other similar kids to do so, but not something a teacher trying to convince kids to pay attention in class during a nationwide drive to teach everyone sign would be likely to suggest; for one, if the parents know sign then that use is torpedoed.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
I was just talking about the first generation of sign users, where the parents don’t know it; once everyone knows sign, the use case of sign is obvious!
Unfortunately, I don’t play video games that much and I was deaf in my homeworld, so my ability to describe what’s going on is pretty limited in multiple ways. 🙂 But I think that increased constraints can actually make people more creative to work out how to fit within them: compare sonnets to free verse, for example. A lot of people appreciate the challenge element of separating important and unimportant noises, not getting distracted at exactly the wrong moment, and maintaining flow when the environment is trying to stop them from doing so.
For me, subtitles just wind up blending in the background like any other artificiality.
LikeLike
Daniel H said:
I can hear perfectly well, and in fact have some vision issues, but I prefer having subtitles. They sound especially good at movie theaters, where they can probably be easily set up to not show on the main screen and not block part of the picture.
LikeLike
tcheasdfjkl said:
It’s actually not at all uncommon crossculturally for bilingualism to be standard in a population! I believe the most common form this takes is diglossia, where people use one language for formal situations and another for everyday life. Here’s a pretty extensive list of diglossic regions; while most of these are cases where the H (“high”) and L (“low”) varieties are related languages (or sometimes dialects of the same language, though tbh in a lot of cases this is mostly considered to be so for political reasons while the two dialects are in fact different enough that it’d be reasonable to call them different langauges), there are also quite a few cases where mostly due to colonial history the H and L languages are totally unrelated.
There are also cases where bilingualism is common for other reasons, such as the presence of many small linguistic communities that need to interface with each other (so people know their small community’s language and the regional lingua franca); Wikipedia says “Linguist Ekkehard Wolff estimates that 50% of the population of Africa is multilingual.”
Also!! In looking through those links I found this:
It looks like you don’t even need to get anywhere near 50%! (To be fair this just says “many hearing members” of the community use ABSL, rather than all of them, and I can’t find any info on how many “many” is.)
LikeLike
tcheasdfjkl said:
Oops @ my overgrown link there.
But also! Adamorobe Sign Language:
It also says “40 deaf (2012)”, “Many of the 3,500 hearing villagers (2012) sign to varying degrees”. If we assume (maybe questionably but whatever) that between 2003 and 2012 the deaf & hearing populations grew at the same rates and the language distribution didn’t change, that would mean about 52% of hearing villagers signed?
Also Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language, some of which made it into ASL:
and allegedly
So it seems like even well below 10% deafness is enough to make sign languages common in a population!
LikeLike
Doug S. said:
I’ve heard that infants can learn sign language a little bit sooner than they learn spoken language. Is that true?
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Yes! In my homeworld children usually begin signing as much as four or five months before they talk. (Have you seen a child babble in sign? It’s incredibly cute.)
LikeLike
Lambert said:
Have sign languages evolved in the same way that spoken ones do?
(I now want someone to flesh out/conlang this world to tolkienesque levels.)
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Of course they have, they’re languages.
(OOC: Thank you! 🙂 )
LikeLiked by 1 person
Daniel H said:
I definitely agree that more people should know sign. I *almost* took some introductory ASL classes recently but had a last-minute scheduling conflict; if I knew other people I could actually sign with I would have tried harder to make that work.
In our world, ASL is an entirely different language than English, and I think it’s actually more closely related to Spanish. Does that happen in your world, where the predominant sign and spoken languages are fairly distinct? Or with most people able to both sign and speak, were they kept similar, more like alternate forms of expressing the same language?
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Sign and speech are still very distinct. The natural grammar of a signed language is very different from the natural grammar of a spoken language. Sign takes advantage of location in space, bodily position, speed, and facial expressions in a way that’s more difficult in speech. You do, however, get mixed sign/speech very often in regular conversation: as an example, lots of people use an exaggerated facial expression during speech to mean “very”, as one would use it in sign.
LikeLike
loving-not-heyting said:
I’m very interested in writing from your world.
What is written sign language like? In our world it is, alas, fairly underdeveloped. A few more particular questions:
* Does it have its own script? What does a character in the script correspond to in signed speech?
* How much more difficult to learn is sign literacy than English literacy, and what differences are there in status and cultural connotations between the two writing systems?
* In our world, facial expression is semantically significant in standard sign languages; it can, for example, serve to determine the grammatical mood of a signed sentence, or whether the sentence is being negated. Is this true in your world? If so, how is this expressed in writing?
* In our world, sign languages are known, even when they develop independently, to express the subject-verb relation by signing the verb in a spatial region designating the subject. Assuming this trend holds in your world (and if not I am curious how you express the subject-verb relation!), how is this expressed in writing?
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
Written sign is essentially a very stylized human body: usually only the “face” and “hands” are drawn (hand location is indicated by drawing it in various places relative to the face). There are glyphs (like letters) which indicate various basic hand orientations, positions, movements, etc. as well as basic facial expressions. (The facial expression glyphs resemble your emoji.)
Some children find written sign easier, while some children find written speech easier. The advantage of written sign is that the symbols are far less arbitrary; it is easier to remember that a smiley face is a smile than it is to remember that an “a” makes the aaaaaah sound. The advantage of written speech is that it has far fewer morphemes than written sign does. And of course many children are more comfortable with one language than another, and deaf children may be entirely unfamiliar with speech and have to learn written speech by rote.
Deaf people are often better at written sign than written speech, so things that are intended to be generally inclusive are in written sign. Difficulty, of course, is a sign of status, so academic works and nonfiction with pretensions are usually written in written speech. Literary fiction is usually in written speech, while genre fiction is usually in written sign; however, it’s not at all uncommon for an author to have a favorite language they always use. And of course a lot of texts mix the two: you would use written speech to describe sounds, and written sign to describe bodily movements or people signing.
LikeLike
Doug S. said:
I wonder if this video might make you feel more at home? Even I can appreciate the sign language interpreter’s performance.
LikeLike