1.a body of words and the systems for their use common to a people who are of the same community or nation, the same geographical area, or the same cultural tradition: the two languages of Belgium; a Bantu language; the french language; the Yiddish language.
2.communication by voice in the distinctively human manner, using arbitrary sounds in conventional ways with conventional meanings; speech.
4.any set or system of such symbols as used in a more or less uniform fashion by a number of people, who are thus enabled to communicate intelligibly with one another.
5.any system of formalized symbols, signs, sounds, gestures, or the like used or conceived as a means of communicating thought, emotion, etc.: the language of mathematics; sign language.
6.the means of communication used by animals: the language of birds.
7.communication of meaning in any way; medium that is expressive, significant, etc.: the language of flowers; the language of art.
8.linguistics; the study of language.
9.the speech or phraseology peculiar to a class, profession, etc.; lexis; jargon.
10.a particular manner of verbal expression: flowery language.
11.choice of words or style of writing; diction: the language of poetry.
12.Computers . a set of characters and symbols and syntactic rules for their combination and use, by means of which a computer can be given directions: The language of many commercial application programs is COBOL.
13.a nation or people considered in terms of their speech.
14.Archaic . faculty or power of speech.
Again, I know this is just my bias from being in ASL for three years, two of such being from a woman with a strongly big "d" Deaf daughter, the other from an actual Deaf person, but it makes me angry. After all the studies people have gone through to be able to legally define American Sign as a Language, people still don't consider them to be literate, or able to form their own sort of "speech." For the longest time, Deaf people were thought to be brainless, unable to learn, even without souls, because they couldn't understand spoken language, which they couldn't hear. For the longest time, people didn't think Deaf people were smart enough to do anything, they were sent to mental asylums, (and back then, those pretty closely equated to torture chambers) they were sent away from families who couldn't bare the shame of having a "broken" child tainting their blessed family name. For the longest time, signing wasn't a language, because surely these savages couldn't form a thought, and surely you have to be able to verbally communicate something to define a language.
We learned about how a professor (forgive me, his name escapes me at the moment) went around and studied the gestures Deaf people made to make themselves understood, the things they did, what they meant; and he eventually found that it had a grammatical structure. He found they had words, they had idioms, they had syntactic rules, they had everything English had, everything French had, everything German had, they could express anything they wanted to, hearing people just didn't bother to understand what they were trying to get across. This man went and studied and studied until he could finally, legally prove, that ASL was indeed a language, by definition. And you bet he had to fight for it.
Hearing people have tried so hard just to make Deaf people the same as everyone else, they didn't give them a chance to learn. Didn't give them a chance to show that they could learn, that they were smart, they were brilliant. I remember Jak telling us about a while ago when proud asylums for the deaf (That's right, they were "asylums" before "institutes.") presented showcases of how they had miraculously taught the Deaf children. The two brightest students went before these people, these two children, a little boy and a little girl, went to show everything they had learned. The little girl went before this audience and signed a beautiful story, full of imagery and she painted the story in the air with her hands so perfectly. She stood up and everyone stared as she finished. No one clapped as she left. The little boy followed. He went before them, and his teacher wrote the word "ball" on a chalk board. He opened his mouth, and a strangled "baaall" emerged. People clapped. People cheered. People stood up, and were genuinely impressed with this little boy, for saying "ball," because he was Deaf. The little girl grew up to get a Ph.D, and the little boy grew up with mental issues. I firmly believe that not raising a child in a language they can pursue and understand is child abuse.
Anyway. This kind of got off track into a Deaf rights rant. Sorry. But the fact that language is "communication by voice in the distinctively human manner, using arbitrary sounds in conventional ways with conventional meanings; speech," and that Deaf people are not, in this person's mind, allowed to have their own language because they simply don't use their mouths to express it, is disturbing in my mind. It's everybody's information.
Again, side-tracked. Sorry. I think that's wrong, and I will be using definition number five. I apologize for the rant, but I firmly believe every word of it.
Thank you,
Lashy
Again, side-tracked. Sorry. I think that's wrong, and I will be using definition number five. I apologize for the rant, but I firmly believe every word of it.
Thank you,
Lashy
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