@flawr This reddit thread made me think of you and all of your fascinating English questions ^
Also, if you google define run there really are waaaay too many definitions. I tried to take a screenshot of them, but even at 25% zoom it wouldn't fit on one page
@DJMcMayhem Likely due to all the examples but yeah, 12 verb and 13 noun definitions is a lot.
@DJMcMayhem I quite like this. I often use "run a race", "nose running", and "run for president" as examples of English phrases with different ASL signs, and if I could remember that entire paragraph, that'd be an incredible example. I think I just did about 8-10 different signs for that.
@DJMcMayhem Haha yeah. :) I've been decently fluent in it since summer of 2011 and I've only kept my skill after graduating from RIT because I have a deaf wife.
@NathanMerrill I'm fully deaf but I have cochlear implants and I can hear very well for a deaf person.
@NathanMerrill English is my primary language (to the point that an interpreter would usually be harder to understand than the speaker), but I'm fairly fluent in PSE (Pidgin Signed English). Actual ASL with all the grammar and syntax it employs is hard for me to understand, but my wife has no problem with it.
She's actually worked as a deaf interpreter a few times now. That is, she interprets between the hearing interpreter and the deaf client, who may e.g. not have good language skills.
That's kinda bizarre to me. Like, I never really realized how much language proficiency can vary in deaf people because I had always assumed ASL is just English with your hands rather than a different language with it's own grammar and everything
I didn't even know PSE was a thing. I've only heard the term Pidgin apply to spoken languages
And it doesn't help that the only deaf person I know (El'endia) is obviously very proficient in written English
@DJMcMayhem Yeah, very common assumption. ASL's history involves a French teacher of the deaf and a sign language that was developed in Martha's Vineyard, so it doesn't derive from English. And my wife told me recently that its grammar and syntax is actually quite close to Japanese, of all languages. (I had thought/learned it was French before.)
@DJMcMayhem That's where you're generally gonna see it used, yeah. PSE for me is ASL signs + English grammar and syntax.
@DJMcMayhem Haha yeah, I'm pretty sure that most people I meet don't know I'm deaf, and many don't even notice my cochlear implants.
Nicaraguan Sign Language (ISN; Spanish: Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua) is a sign language that was largely spontaneously developed by deaf children in a number of schools in western Nicaragua in the 1970s and 1980s. It is of particular interest to the linguists who study it, because it offers a unique opportunity to study what they believe to be the birth of a new language.
== History ==
Before the 1970s, there was no deaf community in Nicaragua. Deaf people were largely isolated from each other and mostly used simple home sign systems and gesture ('mímicas') to communicate with their families and...
My wife knows some Japanese. It's sooo different from English, and it's really interesting to see how much culture shines through in a language. Like, I've picked up bits and pieces of Japanese from her and from the few animes we've watched, and there are elements of the language that purely exist because of the culture that are totally foreign to me
Tl;dr: previously-isolated deaf children in Nicaragua were brought together in a school for the deaf and they spontaneously created a language from scratch that is being refined to this day and acquiring more complex grammatical constructs.
@El'endiaStarman This reminds me of a ruler from history who conducted "experiments" on babies by completely isolating them to find the "purest" human language
Like, I've always thought, if you're a native English speaker and you learn a different language, genders are kinda weird. It seems odd to me that inanimate objects can have genders. Something similar that's weird to me about Japanese is how much words vary depending on how much you respect the person you're talking to or who's in a position of authority over the other, or whatever
@El'endiaStarman not just that: As they did intelligence tests on students, they found that as language has advanced, so did their ability to comprehend more advanced concepts
@Quintec This is the linguist's dream and also an ethical horror. It's probably fun to bring up the idea to a linguist and watch them vacillate between "that would be so cool/instructive" and "that would be really really bad".
@Quintec Reminds me of a story I read about a Russian(?) orphanage where the babies were neglected and by the time they were toddlers, they invented a rudimentary language
@El'endiaStarman Such a thing is obviously not possible today, but if we had a time machine, I wonder if some would travel back to make that choice a few hundred/thousand years ago...
> and third-person pronouns like “she” and “he” and “they,” which stand for other people who aren’t participating in the conversation, like Bendandsnap Calldispatch
Also, I can't believe I didn't share this in here earlier, but here's a bunch of linguistic articles about internet language: https://gretchenmcculloch.com/
@El'endiaStarman the main differences are the dialects, but there are also a lot of different local traditions. And it is usally relatively easy to predict how the relative outcomes of votes. (e.g. which cantons are more conservative than others etc)
something that is becoming less and less relevant is the distinction of faith, which cantons are mainly protestant or catholic
and obviously the prejudices =P
a very important cultural border is where you use swiss german vs french cards for the Jass. :)