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Comment by gus_massa | Hacker News Reader

The site is in Spanish, but the idea of the post is easy to understand anyway. [Hi from Argentina!]

If you hover your mouse over the menus, they expand and show the text in sing language in a gif. [It may be the local/latam/spanish version instad of the USA version. I don't know neither.]

Anyway, is this useful for deaf people? How many deaf can understand sign languages but not understand written language? I think there are a few gramar and idiom differences, but I don't expect that to be a problem. It may be useful for small children, but it's the site of the city of Bogotá, so I expect that all users are adults.

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> I think there are a few gramar and idiom differences

Sign languages are unrelated to spoken languages: they're not just sign representations of existing languages like English and Spanish, they are independent languages. But deaf people do learn to read spoken languages in school, essentially as a foreign language.

Not unrelated. Closely related, but different.

ASL and English are not closely related. Reason being that ASL was derived from French, not English.

Yeah, that is a confusing element to explain about sign languages. For example, Spanish Sign Language is called that because it's a language regional to Spain, not because it's related to Spanish.

sign languages are not universal, they are just a parallel set of languages. ASL isn't a blanket term for sign language, especially in the context of a non-English nexus.

Note my specific contrast of ASL vs English. General statements about sign languages (such as calling them "parallel" languages) are frequently inaccurate. The comment you responded to is a counterexample to a generalization.

Thats…. Ok. Convenient.

Nobody was talking about English before you except to illustrate how they dont map one to one in a variety of languages. But I can acknowledge your contribution to this thread.

No, they're unrelated in exactly the same way that the English language and Chinese language are unrelated. There may be lots of vocabulary overlap (in the form of finger-spellings) but the grammar and basic vocabulary have independent origins.

> anyway, is this useful for deaf people?

I’m speaking out of my expertise here, but my understanding is some deaf people don’t consider written English, Spanish, etc. to be their “native language”, like their variant of signing is.

As a non-deaf person (but with hearing loss), I find that to be a little excessive for a website (a something roughly equivalent to a book), but to each their own.

> my understanding is some deaf people don’t consider written English, Spanish, etc. to be their “native language”, like their variant of signing is

This is interesting and I wonder what their “native language” written version is. As a native English speaker, written English isn’t native to me either but it’s the written expression of my language. If someone learns ASL, isn’t English also the written representation of their “spoken” language?

> If someone learns ASL, isn’t English also the written representation of their “spoken” language?

No, because the grammar is completely different. In many cases it isn't possible to literally translate a sentence between ASL and English, so a trained interpreter would instead try to convey the general sentiment.

My partner often describes sign languages as a completely different modality; deaf people's dreams tend to be completely different than hearing people's dreams, for example.

What’s the written representation of ASL? Is it really a preference to use glyphs instead of letters?

I’m not sure what dreams has to do with written representations. I’m not hard of hearing and I don’t dream in writing and sounds are completely different in my dreams than waking life.

> What’s the written representation of ASL? Is it really a preference to use glyphs instead of letters?

That's the thing: unlike most spoken languages, sign languages don't have written equivalents. Deaf people often use the written language of their local community, however, someone who speaks Spanish Sign Language writing in Spanish has more to do with geography than linguistics.

> I’m not sure what dreams has to do with written representations. I’m not hard of hearing and I don’t dream in writing and sounds are completely different in my dreams than waking life.

My point was that their brains experience and process information differently than hearing people: it isn't just that sign languages are visual while spoken languages are audible. It's difficult to understand why and how deaf people's experiences differ without talking to an actual deaf person.

There are written equivalents for sign languages, although their use is controversial among some (but not all) Deaf people. Spoken language is essentially one-dimensional: it’s a series of phonemes (and tones, even in non-tonal language—consider the difference between “It’s here.” and “It’s here?") in a chronological order. The movements that make up sign language are a bit more difficult to represent in that one-dimensional sequence, although not impossible. I imagine that millennia ago when written languages were created, there was similar resistance to replacing sounds with marks on mud/bone/stone/bark/etc.

> There are written equivalents for sign languages, although their use is controversial among some (but not all) Deaf people.

Interesting, I haven't encountered any in my neck of the woods (albeit I am hearing and not really active in of deaf communities outside of family). Do you know what the most "popular" written equivalents would be?

I don't think it's impossible to represent sign languages in written form, either via existing languages like English or newly developed glyphs and symbols. However, people often don't seem to understand how complex deaf culture and languages are, likely because deaf communities can be quite insular (either by choice or because of discrimination/isolation), which makes it a difficult problem to discuss. Developing a fluent method of bidirectional communication between hearing an deaf people requires a fair bit of empathy, and I suspect the only people who really understand both deaf and hearing 'culture' are codas[0]; that said, I'd hope that raising awareness about common misconceptions would go a long way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_of_deaf_adult

The main one is Sutton SignWriting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting I first learned about its existence from a book by Doyald Young where he showed his design for the first font for SignWriting.

As a Hard of Hearing individual, the lack of empathy, let alone accommodation, for people with hearing loss is staggering.

I think it’s more useful at the opposite - introducing non-deaf people to sign language. It’s pretty neat as long as it’s unobtrusive.

This may be a dumb question, but could it be to help deaf people who know sign language but can't read/write?

Does this exist? I always assumed that sign language was taught after reading and writing. I wonder how common it is to have someone proficient in sign language but illiterate.

For children born deaf, sign language can be (and should be) their first language. It turns out, incidentally, that a baby’s ability to form signs comes earlier than their ability to vocalize, even for hearing children, so there are benefits for using sign language even with hearing children. My children learned some basic signs as infants (water, bathroom, more). I really need to get on the ball about learning ASL properly (and my family as well since they’ll need it just as much as me) since my cochleae are on an ineluctable road to deafness and at some point, maybe ten years, maybe thirty, maybe never, I will be unable to hear instead of being merely hearing impaired.

> I always assumed that sign language was taught after reading and writing.

Sign languages are often people's first language. If you're like me, you probably learned english as a toddler through magic and were later enrolled in school where you refined your spoken and written abilities. For many deaf children english is a second language.

> I always assumed that sign language was taught after reading and writing.

Basically, you're saying "I always assumed that speaking was taught after reading and writing." (which can happen, but is far from being the norm)

> Anyway, is this useful for deaf people? How many deaf can understand sign languages but not understand written language?

When I was doing accessibility work, I was told point-blank by a deaf person that the reading comprehension of the average deaf person was quite poor, because to a deaf person English is their second language. (Their first language being, of course, sign language.)

With that in mind, we should think of it like the average English-reader’s ability to correctly comprehend Bogotá’s web site: A few will be fluent, but large portion won’t be able to understand it at all.

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