A Cat's Thoughts

   ASL in an English class

It was a fun day in class today - and I know I'm a geek for saying so. For those of you who don't know my moring class on Fridays is English Linguistics. Even most of my English major classmates think I'm a geek for how much I like that class. All I can say in my defense is "it's really cool to understand how we speak English, and to discover all the rules that we already know about this thing called language."

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On top of actually liking class, I was thrilled that we had a quiz first thing in class this morning (and I know that a whole bunch of you just got on the phone to have me reported to mental health officials - but hold on, let me explain). For some reason I managed to figure out this little thing called Phonology really quickly. Phonology is basically the study of how we put sounds together to form words. Well, it just made sense to me the first time teacher explained it. My classmates weren't so lucky. We spent 3 days going over the same concepts that I had understood from the first reading. So I was more than ready to take the quiz this morning.

I finished the quiz in about 10 minutes (I wrote slowly so that it would be legible). I checked it over and turned it in and was told by my teacher to take a break she didn't expect the rest of class to be finished for anouther 20 minutes so I could go take a break. One other student followed me out of the room and we sat in the lounge and chatted until it was time to go back.

But the class wasn't finished with the quiz. Some were, some weren't. So I returned to my seat, next to my friends from the ASL interpreting program. Since we were all finished with our quiz we decided to chat some more - only in ASL so as not to disturb those still working on the quiz. So there we sat discussing our upcoming weddings. We were being quiet so didn't think anything of it. Then we happened to notice that our teacher was staring at us. So we stopped. But she told us to continue, she couldn't understand a word of what we were saying, but it was fascinating all the same.

I can understand that. She is a PhD of linguistics, but has only ever studied vocal languages. While Deaf linguists use the same terms to discuss Signed Languages, there really isn't much in common between Vocal and Signed languages except those factors that make them all languages. For vocal languages there is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) with well over 10,000 characters that can be used to transcribe any vocal language. The IPA doesn't work for signed languages, and there isn't an equivolent standarized way to transcribe signed languages. Articulation in ASL has different factors that affect it than articulation in English.

Maybe I'll see more similarities when we move into Syntax - the study of how we put words together to form utterences.

Posted by Becca at November 5, 2004 03:37 PM