I know that as a language ASL is reasonably complex and uses different syntax. I’m not talking about reading literature in one language and discussing it in ASL. I’m talking about art based on ASL. The closest thing I can think of is the current movie “A Quiet Place” curious about what else is out there.
No question it’s a useful language to know. It just doesn’t have hundreds of years of culture associated with it. Using google it looks like there is some stuff recorded on youtube. Who is the Homer of ASL?
There’s so much more out there than “A Quiet Place”, you’ve just never looked before. There’s a reason that the d/Deaf community is on the insular side, and a lot of it comes from how hearing persons tend to view their methods as less than. Sign has syntax, vocabulary, accents, dialects, visual literature, just like every other language. Sign slam poetry is fabulous. Instead of rhyme coming from sound, rhyme comes from similar forms. The Deaf West production of “Spring Awakening” was sooo good.
Saying that ASL doesn’t have a history and culture is dismissive and elitist. Sign languages have been in use in America for much longer than you think. Google “Martha’s Vineyard sign language” and you’ll see. You can’t say that a language is less valid for study because of its age compared to ancient Greek and Latin. If that’s your standard, then there’s a boatload of languages that don’t count, like Afrikaans, Creole, Quebequoise, Vietnamese, and many Eastern European languages.
@mathmom check out Harlan Lane:
The Deaf Experience:Classics in Language and Education
When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf
A Journey Into the Deaf World
Lance Morcan:
Silent Fear
Christopher Krentz (professor of English and ASL at University of Virginia:)
Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth Century American Literature
Editor of
A Mighty Change: An Anthology of Deaf American Writing, 1816 - 1864
Deaf culture is fascinating and there is Deaf poetry and deaf literature. ASL is about communicating as well as deaf culture and deaf arts and literature.
If having a very ancient literary tradition is a requirement for serious college-level study today, then the choices are going to be very limited. The only languages still written and spoken today that were written in Homer’s time of the Bronze Age are Greek, Hebrew, and Chinese. All other languages came along or developed writing much more recently than that.
ASL is not gestured English, It is a fully-complex language with its own history and grammar that is quite different from English. An example of just one of the many grammatical differences is that in ASL the word order in a sentence must correspond to the chronological order in which events occur. E,g, it would be ungrammatical in ASL to sign “I saw the sun come up.” for the simple reason that you cannot see the sun before it came up. In proper ASL you would sign “The sun came up and I saw it.” - the word order aligning with the order in which the events occurred.
Any college that would not allow ASL to count as a suitable second language is missing out on a rich and fascinating area of scholarship and learning that tells much more about the human capacity and creativity in developing and using language than simply learning one more spoken language could ever hope to do.
Obviously Homer is a bit of an exaggeration. I loved Children of a Lesser God.
I was always rather terrible at learning foreign languages, but did eventually learn to speak French and German pretty fluently through immersion. Problems of translation fascinate me. How we think due to how language is constructed is interesting. I remember a French friend of mine asking me didn’t the moon just seem feminine? (It amused me no end when I learned it was masculine in German.) And don’t even get me started on German word order! My son recently was telling me about adjective order in English compared to Arabic. I think his example was in English you say “The big green dragon” while in Arabic you would put the color first then the size, but not in Arabic.
I’m not really against ASL being taught as a foreign language. Really sort of trying to figure out what’s bothering me here, because I’m not sure I should be bothered.
OP here. Thank you all for your responses. It’s an interesting topic. I spoke with her yesterday more. She spent a day shadowing a student who was in ASL, and it was her favorite class of the day, so that’s why she wanted to take it. She likes that it’s “different”. Right now her dream is to go to CalArts and work at Disney/Pixar --and she’s determined to not work at “desk job”. I’m trying to make sure she’s balancing finding things she loves to do in high school and college admissions. She is open to taking another language, maybe over the summer. We’ve had German exchange students and she uses the Duolingo app to learn German for fun, so we’re going to look into ways to take that outside of school. I’m still wrapping my head around her starting high school!
@mathmom I certainly hope this discussion has opened your eyes a bit. Not only should you not be bothered by it , you should be bothered by the fact that some schools still are not accepting ASL as a foreign language. The fact that states are having to legislate this shows it’s a bigger problem with acceptance of the Deaf and deaf culture.
My daughter and a friend went to a special “open caption” movie screening of a recent blockbuster film. There were approximately 50-60 deaf patrons at the movie. They start the movie and no captioning. Stop the movie and work on it for 10 minutes and try again. After second try an employee of the theater enters the theater, stands in the back and yells out that they are having difficulties. No lights turned up, nobody to the front to look at their faces. Obviously the only two in the room who hears the announcement are my daughter and her friend. A few patrons start to leave. Cue in third try, still no captioning
The fourth effort they just leave the movie running. My daughter and her friend realize that they are just going to run the movie with sound and not tell anyone. They go out to the manager and ask if anyone is going to go in to inform the patrons and the manager says they weren’t going to. My daughter insists that they send someone in and give them all if there money back.
Now how insensitive is that. If even one employee had any thoughts of inclusiveness they would know you can’t scream in the back of a theater full of deaf people. If even one employee had taken any sign language they could have tried to help the situation.
@basil1 If your daughter wants to take sign language I would let her do it. Four years is a long time and hopefully more states will legislate the acceptance of ASL. Many universities already do. My children each only had 2 years of foreign language in high school. Many hear said that would harm them. It did not. They are both at great universities. Many schools recommend four years in high school but that’s actually to get out of taking it in college. They will accept less, they just may have to take more in college.