Yesterday’s post about languages which lack one or more tenses brought a couple of interesting comments from Jules (of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog). Among the other talents and skills and enthusiasms on ample display at the “7 Imp” site, Jules has worked as what she sometimes refers to in terms like a “hand-flapper”: a signer, an interpreter of ASL.
Despite my own hearing impairment, I’ve never learned any form of sign language. So it fascinated me to read Jules’s description of what she called “simultaneous communication”:
There’s the sign for “day,” and there’s the sign for “three.” You can make the three handshape with one hand while, at the same time, signing day with the same hand to indicate “3 days.” Same for weeks, months, years, many other things. You can also use what are called classifiers in ASL [...], which show the movement, location, and appearance of a thing. After a signer indicates a person or thing, a classifier can be used in its place to show where and how it moves, what it looks like, and where it is located. So, the classifier for “car” can be signed, and you can show the car swerving, swerving while driving quickly, while simultaneously showing the driver falling asleep….all of that, of course, indicating, say, someone falling asleep at the wheel and swerving from the road.
This leaves me dizzy, frankly. And it doesn’t begin to scrape the surface of the other notion which Jules introduced to me in her comments, to wit, “ABC stories” (or poems). Here’s how the term is defined at About.com’s deafness site:
ABC stories use each letter of the sign alphabet to represent something. For example, the “A” handshape is used to “knock” on a door.
(For reference, that’s the “A” handshape in the image at the top left of this post. See? Knocking on a door.)
Now, you might think that this limits the ASL “speaker” of an ABC story or poem to 26 words, concepts, expressions. You would think wrong.
Jules also mentioned the video below, which she’d posted on the 7 Imp site in 2007. What it shows is an ABC story/poem, in ASL of course, about a Quidditch match in which Harry Potter participated. Remember the one where the Snitch he was Seeking ended up in his mouth — as he discovered when he crash-landed on the field and coughed it up? Remember the explosion of applause from the stands? It’s all here (the story begins as the signer says, “An ASL Poem: Harry Potter and Quidditch”):
(If you’re an HP fan, you got the significance of the “Z” sign at the end there.)
If you’re frustrated in watching that not to know what exactly is being said, it’s probably safe to say: now you know what it’s like to be a deaf person watching a film or TV show without captioning of any kind.
In that case, too, you might find this easier to swallow: a video of a signer discussing the favorite poem of Edward Miner Gallaudet — and then presenting the poem itself in the form of an ABC poem… all of it captioned for the ASL-impaired!
Twenty-six words or concepts? No freaking way. People able not only to speak in ASL, but to “hear” it, must possess nimble intellectual skills and planes of perception almost completely beyond the reach of the rest of us.
See what I get for being behind on blog-reading? I am just now seeing this.
ASL is fascinating. And beautiful. And complicated. And hard as hell to learn. It’s funny to me that a lot of people I meet *still* think that signing must be easy, that there’s an equivalent sign for every word, that signers are signing word-for-word what is said. In Signing Exact English, yes, but not ASL. If only it were that easy.
Now I’m off to watch that second video, which I don’t think I’ve seen. Thanks!
My God, that was great. Is there anything more beautiful than ASL poetry?
Jules: On a related but tamer note, people are also surprised at the difference between closed captions (the word-for-word transcript) and subtitles (more like the complete script, including sound effects and musical notes and such). One of the first subtitled TV programs The Missus and I watched was The X-Files. At a particularly suspenseful moment –of course, in the dark! — in one episode, Scully was by herself looking for, well, something. All of a sudden there was the subtitle:
[dripping]
Startled, I looked at The Missus. “Did you hear that?”
“No,” she confirmed — it had been inaudible to her, too. Made such a difference!
I’m still amazed by what sort of diverse mental faculties must be called into play, allatonce, in order for someone to do ASL at either the sending or receiving end.
Don’t captions usually get bungled pretty badly, while subtitles are super reliable?
Jules: Oh yeah. Not much with DVDs, but often with VHS and with TV/cable itself. It’s got something to do with the way the captioning track is carried on the underlying medium. Because tape is much less stable than disk — it stretches, wobbles, flutters — captions frequently come out looking like they’d been recorded on spaghetti. :)
With plain-old TV, broadcast, satellite, or even cable, you’ve got a huge distance (digitally speaking) over which the signal can suffer interference, from the point of transmission to the set itself.
Less often, there are well-functioning captions which one might prefer to do away with altogether. E.g. inane musical lyrics.
[...] A comment I left inspired a post about ASL over at JES’ (John’s) blog. How neat is that? And John found a lovely ASL poem [...]