Sign Language
 

How often do you see people signing when you fly?
In all my 20 years of flying for business/pleasure, I've never seen anyone sign.

How often has another signer (is this the expression?) 'explained' things to you; or, to airline personnel?

I'm asking because when I was in college, I took a course and was able to sign. A local community college is offering ASL. Will sign language come back to me (like riding a bike) :D, or do you think I'll be starting from scratch?

I still remember a couple of signs, and one of them is not nice. :D

Recent thread on TravelBuzz concerning the first part of your post:
Have you seen a Deaf person on a plane before?

I guess you are talking about American Sign Language. (EDIT TO ADD - sorry! Just noticed you mentioned ASL)

Each country's is different. Even if I knew British Sign Language, I'm not very sure I'd be able to communicate very well this way with, say, DeafFlyer. How different are these two langauges?

They're very different. I'm still learning the British Sign Language. I know ASL plus Danish Sign Language, and pretty good at the International one, but not fluent.

To the OP: It won't all come back after year of no use. That's what I see from others in your situation. However, I would guess that learning it again would be easier than last time. Try to learn some good signs though.

Also, I see signing from others almost every time I travel. :D

We see people using ASL when we fly often. But, it is only when we are with our clients. There are not many Deaf business travelers, some, but not many. I am sure DeafFlyer comes in contact with them more often than we do since they are on the east coast, and here in the midwest our deaf people are the kind that only fly to Disney once every 4 years.

If you go back and start learning Sign Language again, it might be totally different from what you learned the first time. There are three different "sign languages" used here in the US, and while they are similar, parts of them are VERY different.

Actually, after flying over 700,000 miles... I've come across VERY few. I'm usually with a friend who signs so we're pretty obvious and that'd cause another deaf person to approach us.

The odds of coming across a deaf person on the same flight is almost similar to encountering a two-headed ballerina milking a cow in Miltonvale, Kansas. In simpler terms, 1 out of 4,000 according to my calculations.

Have seen very few signers while in transit but when I do I enjoy "eaveswatching" since I'm conversationally fluent and don't have any other interaction with the deaf. One odd story is just before they restricted gate access to non-ticketed pax I was at LAX when someone handed me a "Please help, I'm deaf" card soliciting money with the deaf alphabet on the back. I signed back "What's your name?" -- he had no idea what I signed, grabbed the card out of my hand and moved on to someone else. Reported him to the gate agent as boarding was about to commence but don't think they cared.

I will gladly report ANY one of these scums of earth to the police.. deaf or not, I don't care.

On the NY subways, when one of those card people try to hand me a card, I use the sign for 'work'. It's your 2nd and 3rd fingers hitting your other hands 2nd and 3rd finger. You should see the look I get. Priceless. :D

I invited one to sit down with me and have a fast food lunch at JFK once. He was a nice guy. I bought lunch rather than one of those cards though.

One of the "deaf" people gave us the same card at ORD, when we started signing to him, he didnt want to chat at all!!!
My wife and I interpret on several of the cruise lines and last month on our way out of MCI to MIA on NW, the plane wouldnt start, so as I was working to get us re-booked we heard a call go out over the PA if anyone is fluent in ASL please go to the check in counter. I did, and helped a NW agent re-book a deaf college kid her flight home. That was kind of fun:) interpreting on the ship is much more fun tho!

If you don't mind, I'd like to ask a question here about Sign Languages.

Seems to me this is the start of a golden era for non-verbal languages. Technology is beggining to allow all kinds of 'literature' and records to exist in sign language's 'pure' form.

I'm hoping that one day I'll be able to take up the dominant International Sign Language and develop my knowledge of it with 'books', perhaps even 'magazines' where contemporary 'writing' is signed on a screen.

Are deaf 'writers' (in any language) able to bypass the writing down of their ideas and instead express them freely in sign yet?

It seems like it should be such an exciting time for these languages, and logically, International Sign Language seems a perfect tool for non-blind hearing people and non-hearing people alike - especially with tonal languages (like those used in China) coming to the fore.

Biodegradable circuits and screens are just around the corner and signed signage and wayfinding seems like it will be viable imminently.

Or am I just showing my ignorance here? I can't help but wonder if ISL is being overlooked because many hearing people haven't fully realised how modern technology can revolutionise how it is used. It seems to have so much more potential than Esperanto.

Quick, grab that trusty camcorder.

If I can view films of Gallaudetians signing from the 1930's... am I missing something?

The "International Sign Language" is not dominant.

There are all kinds of ways technology is useful to those who sign. Videos have been in existance for a long time, as pointed out by Wiggums. We have video phones, and many other things now. The Bible is being translated to sign and put on DVD by multiple countries. Other things are being recorded. There is vlogs (video blogs), etc.... In a way you're right, this is a golden age for sign.

An index and a portable screen, perhaps? What I was implying was that compiling (and storing) this kind of material into an accessible, inexpensive and easy to use, search and retrieve format is recent. Not the technology to record it.

As I said, I'm probably being very naive, but what I'd really love to see is an International Sign Language come to the fore and help bridge the gulf between Eastern tonal languages and those that use pictographs/phonemic 'alphabets' and Western langauges and their Alphabets and Scripts (besides that between hearing and non-hearing).

Speaking for myself, learning an accepted ISL to an intemediary level seems far less daunting than taking on an Eastern tonal language and learning the characters separately. I imagine that many non-native speakers of English from the East might feel the same way and feel more confident with this than with English.

What makes it different to the 1930s is that signage at an airport or other venue/transport network can now be done in sign - not just in pictographs, alphabets, scripts etc....

Once countries open their eyes to the opportunities offered by an ISL, not just to deaf people but to hearing people too, it could conceivably take off in a way that Esperanto didn't. In short, with the Chinese economy growing I can't help but suspect that the time will come soon when English will be rejected as an International language. (And as part of the motivation for this rejection could be political, a more neutral language, such as a version of ISL, could survive this process).

It seems to me that the time is ripe for an ISL. The end result might be widespread use of a pidgin version of the SL for the majority of users (rather than as a fully rounded language) but I can imagine many travellers and those working in the tourist industries happy to adopt it as a tool.

Being able to pick up some vocabulary from the PTV of an airline seat would also help.

I apologise for this hacked version of what's in my mind. I understand that this subject is much richer and more complicated than what I've been able to convey. My knowledge of Sign Languages is limited (obviously!) and the little I do know is based around what I learnt about how Nicaraguan Sign Language was introduced and how it then evolved.

What you're describing, Laplap, is a dream that will probably never come true. Parents of deaf children often can't be bothered to learn sign language, how are we going to get people all over the world to learn one? I just can't see it happening, although it is a nice dream. :)