Questions tagged [sign-languages]
Questions about languages that use visual transmitted sign patterns, mostly used by deaf people.
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What defines a language?
I'm reading around multimodal text and many of the readings I have come across (Kress, Halliday) seem to define language as spoken or written communication. That seems to exclude sign language and ...
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Is Nicaraguan Sign Language the only language born from nothing?
My interest in linguistics was sparked by John McWhorter's popular book The Power of Babel, which, in its section on creoles, includes a small piece on Nicaraguan Sign Language, which really sparked ...
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Do different languages use different sign language?
Or the concept of the word is what's being communicated through signs, but not the word itself?
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Can you rhyme words in sign language?
In spoken language, patterns of vowels, consonants, and stress are used to feel the similarity of form between two words and create rhymes.
Can you do the same in sign language?
Also, is there sign ...
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Do sign languages inflect?
I saw the statement a few times that sign languages inflect in the same way that spoken languages do, but all examples I came across refer to phenomena that I would classify as word formation rather ...
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Are there signed languages that have a case system?
In a prior question I asked whether word order in ASL has a special significance, which naturally lead to another question: do any signed languages, that is languages communicated mostly if not fully ...
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What is a phoneme in the context of a signed language?
A phoneme is the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.
SIL.
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Do two deaf persons from different countries understand each other? [duplicate]
While listening to this podcast about saving dying languages. A question came to my mind:
Does a deaf person from France understand a deaf person from Russia or any other country?
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Are there literate speech communities for Sign Languages?
I am aware of some systems of sign writing (e.g. Sutton SignWriting). They are used in dictionaries, teaching materials, or scientific documentation. But did some Sign Language speech communities ...
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Are there counterparts to phones and phonetics for signed languages?
Given that there is a difference between phonetics and phonology, and that in the study of signed languages cherology is the counterpart to phonology, are there also counterparts to phones and ...
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Would Saussure consider sign language as "parole"?
I wonder if sign language would be "parole" according to Saussurian linguistics. After all, parole can be denied as
the "concrete" use of the language, the actual utterances. It
is an external ...
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