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CiciMcGee45 t1_j4igkx9 wrote

Signed languages aren’t using gestures. They’re complete languages with all the requirements. There’s a general lack of knowledge about signed languages, as a lot of people think it’s simple gestures or coded English (or whatever language is natively spoken in the region) which isn’t the case. I don’t know of a single sign language that perfectly maps onto a spoken language. I know this isn’t like, the point of your essay, which overall I thought was interesting, I just studied ASL and thought maybe it was interesting to tell people that.

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rmadsen93 t1_j4jg7re wrote

Yes, ASL and other sign languages are full-fledged languages in their own right. I took an ASL class once and I don’t remember much but I do remember that it has different grammar from English.

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kRkthOr t1_j4k1lbg wrote

This isn't entirely related to what we're talking about but...

> Yes, ASL and other sign languages are full-fledged languages in their own right.

I don't have any mute/deaf friends so my only exposure to SL was random clips in movies/tv shows and signing in like the news or whatever. But the impression that those gave me was that SL is essentially a way to "say" words by signing them, little more than subtitles.

But I watched the latest season of The Circle and there's a deaf girl there and hooooooly shit is there a lot of emotion and mannerisms that can be delivered through SL. It's legit fascinating to see someone like her communicate that way. She has an interpreter with her that not only understands the words she's saying but also the way she's saying them and it's amazing but also kinda obvious like I don't know how I didn't realize this before? Of course a language that relies on hand gestures can be extremely animated.

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WeeabooHunter69 t1_j4l4rh7 wrote

Unfortunately deaf or hard of hearing or mute characters haven't gotten much attention for a very very long time, though that's been changing lately. Just the last couple years we had eternals and Hawkeye, which had at least one of each between them. A silent voice(koe no katachi) is a great movie with a deaf woman as the female lead and shows pretty great JSL.

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thenousman OP t1_j4lcqzd wrote

Yeah, I agree. That’s why I said non-verbal languages and didn’t specifically refer to Sign languages like ASL. I gave hand gestures as a kind of non-verbal language, which I think it is, and mostly for comedic effect with reference to G.E. Moore’s use of hand gestures in his argument against external world skepticism.

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