Thanks very much to Rikki for stepping in this week! I've wanted to tell a story like this for a long time, but given I can't even fingerspell in BSL, I'm really not qualified...
he's away; so channel automatically uploads one video every week. don't you think it's better to have one video per week against to having 4 videos in a row and nothing for next three weeks?
"Canada uses the same thing as the US because of proximity but Quebec uses something completely different from the rest of the world out of spite" the basis for Canadian culture
this is true. all of canadian culture is "we're a mixture of the US and england expect for quebec who does something completely different for some reason
Thing about different sign languages is that they're mostly cultural based. If I remember correctly, the sign for boy in ASL is that of grabbing the bill of a ball cap, closing the top fingers with the thumb near the forehead. But other cultures don't really wear/relate those with boys so it doesn't work.
Doesn't have to be though. Nothing about the word boy in spoken English is cultural. While the written English symbol for boy: ♂ represents a spear and shield, and is culturally meant to be masculine as a result but that would make sense in a culture where women were the spear wielders. A sign language can get away with being highly cultural or largely uncultural.
"While the written English symbol for boy: ♂ represents a spear and shield" Woah, really? I never knew that. I always assumed it was something phallic, hah. (It still is, regardless of whether it was intended or not!) And apparently the female symbol is supposed to be a bronze mirror and handle. Interesting. Though these seem to be derived from astrological symbols, so their original symbolic intentions were probably to represent the gods Mars and Venus.
Signs do not need to be iconic, or resemble their meaning in any way. Sign languages have a high percentage of iconic signs, just because it's fairly easy to portray an idea by moving your hands in space, but iconicity isn't necessary. Many signs bear no resemblance to their meanings, either because they were arbitrary at the start or because they lost their iconicity over time. It turns out that iconicity doesn't help you remember the sign, either; less iconic signs are remembered just as easily as highly iconic ones. It should make sense that iconicity isn't necessary. In spoken languages, the mapping between form and meaning is almost entirely arbitrary, and we manage just fine.
@@columbus8myhw I’m learning BSL and the name for my hometown is the sign for apple which is brilliant because we’re known for our orchards. I’ve noticed that as with most languages the names for places are normally iconic (that’s the right word?).
An important aspect of sign languages is that they are naturally occurring, just like spoken languages. The question "Why don't you just have one sign language?" is no different to "Why isn't there just one spoken language?"
Many signs wouldn't make sense in other languages. For example, the ASL sign for juice is the letter j near your mouth. In another language where Juice doesn't start with j, that wouldn't mean anything.
Sign languages are NOT 'naturally' occurring. They are all relatively recently created and they often have a single identifiable creator. They are more like Esperanto.
konskift Actually, not correct. I'll give two examples. In Nicaragua, in the late 1970s, schools for the deaf began to be established. The home signs used by the students at home gradually became combined into a creole, and each successive class took it to a higher cmplexity until it was a full language. This is a far more natural process than Esperanto, which was invented by one person on his own. Also, there are aboriginal sign languages which are very old indeed. The Aborigini of Australia have had various signed languages in use for different reasons for a long time.
Let me guess: ....................../´¯/) ....................,/¯../ .................../..../ ............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸ ........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\ ........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...') ..........................'...../ ..........''............. _.·´ ..........................( .............................. And with that, greetings from Germany :P
Is the ASL manual letter ‹F› being waved. Not sure why, but _English_ according to my ASL teacher looks like a person leaning with both their hands on top of a cane, while _Spanish_ looks like someone putting on a cape, as in a matador.
That might not work for someone who is fluent in ASL but not fluent in English. I don't know how common that is, but it doesn't seem implausible... This would be kind of like people in bilingual communities substituting a foreign word for a local word when they can't remember it.
Really nice video Rikki. This is something a lot of people, myself included are fairly uninformed about so thank you for teaching us just a little bit.
Thanks for doing this Tom and Rikki! There are so many misconceptions about disabled and deaf people, so channels like yours can do enormous good by putting the truth out there.
I knew that sign language was different across the world, but not that ASL is similar to French Sign Language. Interestingly, Braille is different across the world too.
It's like a language tree, the French sign is the root. It's interesting to see what languages are related here, when they aren't at all related as spoken languages: - Austro-Hungarian -- Czech -- Ukrainian -- Russian --- Bulgarian --- Estonian -- Slovak -- Slovenian -- Croatian -- Israeli - Belgian -- Flemish -- French Beligan - Dutch - Danish -- Malagasy -- Norwegian -- Icelandic - Latvian - Philippine - American -- Puerto Rican -- Thai -- Ghanaian -- Nigerian -- Kuala Lumpur -- Bolivian -- Moroccan -- Black American -- "Eskimo" (dubious) -- Quebec -- Greek - Italian -- Tunisian - Irish - Mexican - Algerian - Romanian - Catalan (dubious)
@@venus1813 As someone who reads braille, and have taken classes in ASL, I am aware of that. But braille and sign language have similarities in that they are accessable means of convaying a language and both change depending on the language of origin; American, French, ect. I only meant that it's cool have adaptible these methods of communication are.
For languages that use the Latin alphabet, the basic 26 letters and most of the punctuation is the same. They only differ in additional letters, abbreviations and some puncuation. Braille is, to a large extend, just the Latin alphabet made readable to blind people.
I Study Pedagogy in Brasil and one of the classes we need to take is LIBRAS (Brazil's Sign Language). My teacher explained that one of the reasons we had so many sign languages is the same reason we had so many languages and so many variations inside a single language; cultural differences. Slang in regions of the same country are diverse, and the language ends up expressing those differences.
I know this is a weird and probably difficult question but how different would you say LIBRAS is from say ASL? I mean I only just started learning ASL, but because I'm me, I've read about other Sign Languages and apparently LIBRAS is a language isolate (it has no known relatives), while ASL is of course related to LSF ( _langue des signes française_ ) and many of Europe's Sign Languages are also related to it, with one of the biggest exceptions being BSL (British Sign Language).
Thats a very difficult question indeed! hahahahaha I know that in around 1860, old LIBRAS and the French Sign Language mix themselves to form the New LIBRAS in Brazil. So i think they have a lot o similarities with ASL too.
+asturb Did they? Could you provide a link to that info? Is okay I also know Spanish and some _português!_ I haven't seen anything saying there was ever interaction between LIBRAS and any other SL, the closest thing I remember is that the genesis of LIBRAS was encouraged when news reached Brazil about deaf people being educated in sign language over in France was a viable way to educate such people, but never anything about LSF making its way to Brazil in anyway (perhaps books about it, but not teachers like it happened in the U.S.).
Cara o que eu não entendo é pq não ter uma só língua de sinais para todo mundo. Me pareçe que o pessoal do primeiro mundo quer se manter fechado no círculo social deles e deixar quem eles não gostam de fora.
Great informative video! I think having a universal sign language would be near impossible. It’d be like telling everyone they had to speak Esperanto. Sure it makes sense but all the different cultural variations and groups using it would either reject it or eventually result in significant variations over time anyway. When you have isolated groups of people using the same language they inevitably differentiate over time.
Yes, Esperanto was originally meant (and still is) to be learned as a second language! It was meant to be used as an alternative resource in case people didn't speak your language and you didn't speak theirs
I always thought it would be interesting if there was a movie with deaf characters from different countries, they would need translators and subtitles to translate the different sign languages
So glad you put out this video Tom. As a Koda (kid of deaf adult), I'm often clearing up a bunch of misconceptions about sign language and Deafness as a whole. And I enjoy doing so! But it's also awesome for two prominent creators to team up and show that sign language isn't all that different from spoken language. Thanks Rikki!
as a human being that can hear speak and talk i feel like if you cant speak a language of international circulation, as is english, then you are closed minded. and fighting for dialects when you cant even speak the language of the country you live in is also...not smart?... so taking that and applying it to a group of people that already are having a hard time being understood its just crazy. if its a "matter of preference, and of choosing how you want to express yourself when you only know one way to express yourself" then go ahead and only talk to your village.
Draganoiu, that completely disregards that the signing community within those countries is large enough to be self-sustaining. Rewind the clock a couple hundred years and come up with a universal program when deaf children were just getting to the point of not being immediately institutionalized for life and you might have a chance, but now that there are self-sustaining language groups you aren't going to be able to convert them to a universal sign system by fiat. Why would a deaf person in, say, the UK isolate themselves from the local signing community in order to better be able to sign with a larger signing community hundreds of miles away from them? The deaf already have to confront a world that is bilingual to them, and the vast majority of their surroundings doesn't bother to become bilingual with them. The language they speak with one another often has little to do with the written language they are surrounded by. Try teaching the concept of phonetics and "sounding out" difficult words to someone who is deaf! It's not an effective strategy for reading. In essence you are expressing an expectation that the deaf community should be fluent trilingually, when most of the world is monoglot, or maybe partially bilingual.
Interestingly, here in the Dominican Republic (native spoken language is Spanish) we use ASL, or a 'dialect' of it: Dominican Sign Language. Now in Haiti (native spoken language Creole) they also use ASL, specifically Haitian Sign Language. But both Dominican and Haitian SL are so close to ASL, Dominican and Haitian deaf can communicate without any problems, thus sharing one language. Which is not something the hearing from these nations can do...
Rikki Poynter made it to the guest videos! I've been following her for a while now and I highly recommend her channel. I was super excited for this one and now I can't wait for the musical one.
Yeah I learned Americans sign language and got schooled when I talked to a German. They didn't speak sign language, they just had better English then me and kept correcting my spelling
Okay, I knew that there were different sign languages because I knew about AUSLAN, ASL, and BSL. I did not know however there were over 300. It does make sense though, and of course, my immediate thought was "why *don't* we have a common sign language." But language affects interpretation. So a single sign language would stifle creativity. I hadn't thought down that path before this video so thanks you Rikki; this was really eye-opening. :)
Tom have you heard about that one sign language that apparently spontaneously arose in a school for deaf people in Nicaragua? I heard it is an interesting linguistic case study and there are still debates whether or not it has been "contaminated" by ASL...
"Contamination" exists in all languages. English is contaminated by French, Latin and Greek. Loanwords exist in all languages. If there's enough politics involved, a language can reject its foreign loanwords by coin its own words (something many languages had gone thru in the past, e.g. French, Romanian, Turkish).
That's not what I meant by that word. Some linguists argue that it did not originate *that* spontaneously after all and had some influence from bits and peaces of ASL in its creation...
One way to test that out would be to see if it had ASL-style grammar (word order, conjugation) rather than just looking for loanwords. I think, anyway. (I wonder if it has Spanish-inspired grammar, actually, because the kids were taught to lipread Spanish before they invented the sign language. Like, ISN prepositions mapping one-to-one onto Spanish prepositions. Do sign languages even have prepositions?)
It's not just different across borders, but also within them. There's three different sign languages here in Norway, each from three different teachers living in three different cities at the time when deaf schools were introduced.
Yes, spoken an sign have just about no structure in common, but that is probably also because the different schools have their origin elsewhere. It's been too long for me to remember all the details, but iirc they each come from England, France and Sweden.
Yeah, in Finland people use Finnish sign language, Finnish-Swedish and some Swedish. My friend works with deaf kids and says it can be complicated sometimes.
That made me think. Is it possible for deaf people to enjoy seeing certain visuals, e.g. certain sign language, just like we enjoy listening to sounds as featured in ASMR videos?
SandtC97 Now that is a bit of a stretch since sign language is just a visual help to transfer information. You can experience this ASMR visual pleasure by examining art for example, in complete silence. Unless you're that type of person that can get off 5+ syllable words, I believe that this theory is very unapplicable. It is possible, after all, I'm sure that there's at least one freak that is into this stuff. Each to their own, I guess...
Apologies if anything I say here is wrong, I'm not a linguist who specialises in sign language, but here is what I have learned whilst learning and using sign language in different locations around England to talk with deaf people. It seems to me that sign language emerged in a very natural way, with deaf people effectively doing charades to try to communicate with others. Naturally, deaf people clustered together, opening deaf clubs and bars and the like and forming relatively tight knit communities. Within these communities common expressions and signs specific to that community developed. This caused extremely strong dialects from town to town, and these dialects are preserved today, as the majority of deaf people are culturally deaf, which means that they do not learn formalised sigh language but instead learn how to sign from other local deaf people. Imagine what spoken English would be like if communities clustered together and most people did not learn formal English, the slang would be very strong, and here you are starting to understand just how different these dialects are from one another. It is genuinely extremely difficult to communicate with someone from a different town, and often feels closer to a different language with some common elements than a dialect. I would also like to point how sign language is still very Similar to charades, if someone's shirt has a square picture on it, you would do the sign for picture whilst doing a square around your chest. Most signs make sense, e.g the sign for climbing is to mimic climbing with your hands. And if you wanted to say climbing is very hard, you might scrunch your face up and breathe heavily, mimic climbing and wobble your arms and then sign hard. To me it seems that sign language is very similar to creole which developed as slaves from different countries having no way of communicating using onomatopoeia to communicate. For these reasons I think sign language is the most interesting way of communicating you can learn and reveals a lot about how humans would communicate before formalised education.
*Naturally, deaf people clustered together, opening death clubs.* Well... that escalated quickly! Might want to fix that typo. ;) Interesting points nonetheless. I always find it interesting to look into how languages developed. I also like how you don't really have to understand sign language in order to understand what they're saying. You just watch their expressions and you can often pick up what they're trying to say. Even in spoken languages, many still "talk with their hands" or use other body language to emphasize their point, and I think sometimes deaf people can pick up on what we're trying to say (unless they can lip read) on just our random gestures alone.
Niki Groeger yeah sorry autocorrect. On the body language/expression point, deaf people express themselves much more strongly than hearing people since strong facial expressions and body language is part of the language, and this results in some noticeable cultural differences I think. Imagine if when describing someone being cross we raised our voices and moved angrily and you get the picture.
Irish Sign Language is related to French Sign Language (for some reason) and apparently Northen Ireland Sign Language is a combo of BSL and ISL, also just like there are dialects of English all over Britain and Ireland, BSL and IRL have various dialects. In all it could be that in standard BSL there was a sign that is rude, but not in a dialect of BSL or something else altogether!
Here I turned on my soundoroof headphones, boosted the bass ready to watch some TH-cam and then found this. I knew very basic sign language at one point. ASL. We had a student in our class that was mute so he signed, so we learned to sign. The words I remember are yes, no, salad, soup, snake, thank you and I'm sorry.
Signed Query Language: There’s a guy standing at a wall of filing cabinets who is deaf. The only language he knows is Signed Query Language (SQL), which can only describe how he should organize, label, fill, and retrieve things from the filing cabinets.
This summer Deaflympics was held in my hometown, Samsun. I was so sad to not know IS, or any sign language. They inspired me to study sign language and now I am planning to study Linguistics in university next year.
It's really interesting how this has brought up the 'we should have a universal language' conversation once more. Language is something that is entwined with culture and they often reflect each other very strongly too. To get rid of a language would require getting rid of, or at least seriously changing, the culture it's a part of. In my opinion doing so would be a massive loss. I'm not at all surprised to find out that there's multiple sign languages too. What I'm more interested in is how they differ and how rooted they are in their country of origin. Thanks so much for this video. I guess I hadn't thought about it very much before but now I think I'm about to go on a Googling spree.
It's really a functional inevitability given the rate that the world is "getting smaller" so to speak. Throughout history at any given time there is always a dominant language, it used to be Latin, now it is English, in the future it might be Chinese. As education standards rise globally more and more people will speak the dominant language in addition to their native language, and eventually practically everyone will speak it. At that point it would be more efficient to print everything in just that language, think of all the instruction manuals you have seen that are 90% translations and then imagine all of that being gone. That would establish a feedback loop where only the dominant language gets used with any sort of regularity and the native languages slowly get out of practice then forgotten. Assuming AI doesn't make this all moot.
This is so helpful! I'm from the Philippines and we have our Filipino Sign Language (FSL) that is also used by my deaf sister. Unfortunately, resources to learn FSL is scarce here, so our mother tends to learn ASL. I always tell her to learn FSL because the signs are different and it might make it more difficult to communicate with my sister. I'm going to show her this video to let her realize why there are different sign languages around the world
I feel we missed a trick by not having a universal sign language, we could have had a language everyone in the world can use and it can be used across distances that cant you cannot speak across such as through a window.
hitforhelp a single sign language is absolutely not maintainable. even if you started out with one it would eventually diversify just like spoken languages. speakers of sign language make up new signs or use old signs in novel ways to facilitate their speech. this is why you can observe dialects even among the same sign language. given enough time those dialects would eventually become separate languages.
"We have different sign languages because it would be boring otherwise."(paraphrasing) A lot of human achievement is because people are easily bored, apparently.
"we were bored" is why we have Stonehenge and the great pyramids for the most part. No one who was busy with important things would have done such projects.
... Yes the ancient Egyptians did 0 important things. Your comment is so poorly thought out it's laughable. Nobody that achieved anything even remotely interesting said they did it because they were bored. The initial push might have been boredom, but that it is. They did it because they were passionate/greedy/desperate/curious/threatened... but never bored. Both of your examples, Stonehenge and the Pyramids were among the most important projects that said civilisation carried out, it might not seem it now but to them, these tasks were of monumental importance.
This was super interesting! I'm glad you keep doing these guest videos, since they allow me to learn about TH-camrs I probably wouldn't've found otherwise.
I really appreciated the sounds of the waves at the end there, really struck home how lucky I am to have the ability to hear! Great video, Rikki! You're just gained a subscriber!
(0:33) Not only do they think there's just one sign language of the world, a lot of people think it's the *American* sign language that is used across the world. The name should tip people off that something's wrong with the statement, but apparently not.
Perhaps very light music or something might help (because I agree, dead silence might be awkward) but for some people the sounds of hearing people smack their mouths, even very quietly, is surprisingly disturbing and it becomes the only thing their brain focuses on. I'm definitely one of those people and no matter how hard I try to ignore dry mouth smacking, my brain just zeros in on those sounds to the detriment of everything else. Interesting topic though. I've wondered about accents, and how often people throwing up gang signs are just spelling letters, or rappers in videos are accidentally saying something ridiculous.
Particular signs may even differ even from place to place. Group of people may naturally create their own sign for a word and newcomers into that group just adopt this sign. I was told that one school for deaf children had/have a bald headmaster, so their sign for "headmaster" became "head over top of your head".
This is very true, the dialects from town to town is very strong, and discovering why the signs are as they are like your bald headteacher example is like a fun puzzle and is a great source of conversation.
Ever since I started studying BSL about 9 months ago, whenever I mention it to someone, there's 2 reactions I'm extremely likely to get. 1) "Oh cool, you'll be able to travel the world with it!" 2) "Like the little guy in the corner of the tv!"
There will never be a proper universal sign language, for the same reason why there will never be a universal spoken or written language : dialects might not be always be originated from the place in which they are used, but they usually evolve to suit the culture of the people that speak (or in this case, sign) it. Sorry, Esperanto lovers, not gonna happen.
I agree Esperanto won't take, but knowing a common language becomes more and more convenient the more connected people are. English is already close to a universal spoken/written language. Sure, other countries still have their native languages. But so many also learn English. Culture has already been melding together due to increase connections and communication. And languages can easily take on words from other languages to accommodate lexical gaps. So I think it is quite likely we will end up with a single language, if we last long enough and the trends keep going. There will probably always be other languages, too, but there will be one that everyone is expected to understand.
Isn't someone asking, "Why can't there be one sign language wouldn't that be easier?" like someone asking, "Why can't there be one language wouldn't that be easier?"
In contrast to 'one spoken language' it seems that 'one sign language' is more achievable because it is a constructed language. So why not construct it the same everywhere?
A few things; Those that are deaf can't hear (mostly) spoken words, trying to find deaf and sign language videos on youtube means they have to type in English or what ever written language they know. For English, this means they're going to get a mix of american and british sign language come up, a mix that may not translate well to the viewer even tho they know English as a written language. In this case, having a single sign language would be more helpful and as you can now see, one language as English be it British or American English allows us to talk to each other and people access sign language video content. The majority of people who's asking why not one sign language are probably people who're not deaf, that's granted, but you can assume based on their own merit of not having access to all spoken languages, or at best being bilingual, that they take the same assumption of being able to see more content if they only had one language. While spoken languages have a huge population in comparision to sign language, one would naturally expect a smaller population of speakers, or signers in this case, to be wanting as large of a pool people who they can communicate with. Now, for the most part the internet is text based, and deaf people can get on with that quite happily, and it's not like most people, not even deaf, are going to be travelling outside their own language speaking country anyway, so as an American signer may never have to sign to british or german deaf signers ... the internet, as we've touched upon, disregards those land borders and places like TH-cam allow for them to interact, and that is where it'd be easier if we had a single sign language.
thats why we cant have anything good around here. if a deaf/mute can only do one dialect (or 2 or 5) he can still never talk to everyone, and the majority of people will still not understand him. so in the end they just form pockets of people in a sea of gibberish. also think of it this way, one sign language can also be learned by everyone. even people who can speak and hear. i for example can just speak english to every moron i meet and at least be partially understood. i only know of one sign that has the same coverage and thats the middle finger.
This was excellent, sometimes I like it when Tom goes away for a bit, it allows us to learn about things we wouldn't otherwise, including the fact that people actually believe there is only one sign language, but there you are.
Hell, nah. I love different languages. I find them all fascinating. ATM, I speak 3 (Swedish, Finnish and English), learning 2 other ones (Korean and German) and want to increase it to even more with Japanese, Spanish and maybe even more germanic languages.
Yes, learning about differences between languages can be fascinating, but languages are primarily a tool used to communicate, which would work better if unified.
Baader-Meinhof ahoy! I found Rikki's videos from a deep dive in youtube after seeing some funny sing language videos. It was really interesting seeing her transition from completely verbal and not knowing sign, to almost completely signed videos. Awesome to see Tom showcase her talent and perspective on this channel!
Just like with universal spoken languages, I feel like the better answer to the question, "why not just one of them" is not simply "That would be boring" but rather, "it's too late to fix it if we wanted too." The histories of languages run far too deep for us to just up and convert to a single universal language, even if we could decide on one objectively superior language. If the ways we're becoming more interconnected do manage to push us towards a single universal language, it will be centuries before we get there.
Because my aunt is partially deaf I have always been interested in sign language. This video just sparked up my interest even more, so thank you for that. Also, can't wait for the next vid! I am going to a music school, have been for the past 10ish years, so of course I'm going to be interested in music related things.
Good video. As a hearing American that grew up in a town that houses a school for the Deaf, have several Deaf friends, and learned ASL later (it is now my second language), it was nice to see the language represented on the global stage.
I guess all the hearing people saying deaf people should develop and all use a single universal sign language are fluent Esperantists right? (Not that that would justify it).
SimonHellinger I know. It is a common misconception. Very few Esperanto speakers want other languages to die out and many think minority language preservation is an important thing. Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?
I really disagree with her argument that different SL make life interesting. Having a universal SL would make their « speakers » have a very strong advantage for international relations. While languages are interesting to study, it does complicate a lot of things.
It would give sign language an awesome edge. The fact that there are different spoken languages isn't exactly helpful either. Interesting yes but not practical.
This is like saying everyone all over the world should speak, say, Mandarin Chinese, because it has the largest number of native speakers, so everyone can understand the same spoken language
Just a tiny detail, using "ASL" as shorthand for sign language is like using "USCU" for shorthand for measurement system, or "American" as shorthand for person. (And some people do the last one, in the term "African American" to refer to a "black person", such as dark skinned Europeans, which is really weird).
This is the first Tom Scott video where I didn't learn anything new, because this is also my area of expertise! :D I disagree that having a single sign language would make things boring, quite the opposite in fact. If there was just one then we would be able to interact with thousands of more people with no additional effort, how is that boring? It seems to me a very strange idea; The interestingness of a communication method, being directly proportionally with how segregated/inefficient it is. That's... the exact opposite of what communication methods are supposed to priortise! And in the case of little lexical tricks that some languages have that others lack (which are often cited in favour of linguistic diversity), those are tiny benefits in comparison to the massive cost of having so many languages. It's not even close to being worth it.
I really dislike the argument people use that "life would be so boring, if people were all the same". Worship of the cult of individuality is a dangerous thing. Can't we appreciate each others' differences, while also acknowledging that sometimes people can be better off not being different 'just because'? This is a great video and there are very good reasons why there are multiple sign languages much as there are multiple spoken languages but praising that as an inherent good rather than something which is the case only due to human development and history seems strange to me.
A language is much more than communication my friend . Different language brings uniqueness to the world . If everything the same and everyone the same it is kinda a dull world
there wasn't some conference one day where all deaf people decided "let's create a bunch of different sign languages!" they developed over time in completely isolated locations (without the internet obviously) - what the hell do you mean we had a chance to make a universal language?????
Thank you. I wanted to learn Sign language for a long time, but it was very discouraging when I learn that every place has its own version because I really wanted to be able to communicate with everyone and be a link for people who needed that from me, however, It's true, I love languages and I love to be immersed in the cultures behind the languages, so I'm happy that this also is the case with sign languages, and as soon as I finish with the one I'm currently learning I will go for ASL
I've been signing sense I was 3yrs old. My brother is deaf. Something I would like to point out is that Sign Languages are different in the same country much like spoken English has accents. You can tell where a person is from by the way they sign and how they sign different words.
I think the main argument for having a single universal sign language is that if there was then teaching sign language in schools to all students would make sense (which would in turn enable deaf people to communicate with everyone more easily).
Sure...but you could say the exact same thing about verbal languages, no? Why not teach all children, all over, English, or Chinese, or whatever. We teach what we know, we teach what we have learned in our home culture.
Yes but sign language doesn't replace spoken English, it would be an **extra** course. Which, in my country would mean some other useful course will be left out (education is already at its max). What is the use for the... ??% deaf people?
@@mikepictor, it's English. You learn English to communicate to people from many different countries. Why can't the deaf community learn a second language as well and use it as an intermediate layer to talk to people from all over the world? I'd rather learn a Universal Sign Language (it could be the American Sign Language, the French Sign Language, doesn't matter) than learn the Brazilian Sign Language that would be no useful in case I move to another country.
Great video! I wanted to know something: just as in spoken languages there are sounds which are hard for some speakers to pronounce (take the French R for English speakers, for example), are there gestures which are hard for people who are not used to it to make with their hands?
Yes, I can't give you many examples between countries because ive only ever used BSL but this is especially true for hearing people learning sign language. Across England there's is the sign for the number four which deaf people use and the sign for four which hearing people use because the hand position is painful for the proper one, and the difference between a hearing person and a deaf persons signing tends to be very noticeably different
I know in ASL, the way you sign the number 3 is different than the way hearing people do it (ASL 3 is the pointer and middle fingers and the thumb, not the ring finger. That's the ASL sign for 6, so 3 needed to be different). I have deaf grandparents (though I sadly don't know much ASL myself) and my mom taught me the ASL way of saying 3 when I was little, not the hearing way to do it. It's always felt natural to me. My classmates had a lot of trouble with it when I took an ASL class this semester, though.
I've worked with an number of deaf kids through volunteering with the charity sense and one of the big differences in UK signing is the difference between BSL (what you normally see on the BBC for example) and Makaton which I'd personally say is a lot easier to learn as a hearing person. A lot more of the actions are logical to what you're describing. Its actually what they tend to use on kids signing programmes such as something special. Its amazing when you see a interpreter (which I am not) signing in two or three different languages. Truly incredible, and something I intend to learn more about. Thanks Tom!
Not knowing anything about ASL, I still noticed there was kind of a quite obvious "negation sign" at the end of some sentences. So I guess it works by making a statement, and then negating it.
What Andrew said, basically. German Sign Language also mouthes German words, but sometimes mouthings indicate things like shape or size, or will be conventionalised for a particular word. In general, they are very different (though Sign Languages that are related to each other will be more similar, much like, say, German, Dutch, and English, or Italian and Spanish have many similar structures)
If you mean different grammar structures, as in how the sentence is ordered, (ex: English = Subject-Verb-Object vs Japanese = Subject-Object-Verb) then yes sign languages are the same way. As I understand anyway.
The reason we have many spoken languages and no attempt to create a universal language has ever nor will ever succeed is because it's literally impossible to have ~7 billion people all speaking the same language. If you have a large enough number of people who all speak the same language, it's only a matter of time before it forms a bunch of smaller groups who all make their own modifications to the language, and eventually what was once one language becomes many. Of course, if at some point there was a single sign language, the same thing would happen; different people from different places would end up creating their own signs and change the meanings of existing ones until that one language became several languages.
In this hypothetical situation, we have a universal sign language; local variants and slang wouldn't actually matter -- they'd be able to explain it to you... Just like how someone, for instance, can explain to you how cockney rhyming slang works.
Explaining slang is not the same as understanding slang (or words) without help needed. That help you get is a translator. I can understand French if someone explains it to me in English or Dutch.
Except that if one single worldwide USL had local modifications, it would still be based on the root USL and everyone would know that. As a result, everyone would know the original version enough---or at least, aware that it _has_ differences, even if they couldn't put their finger on exactly _what_ is different, and could therefore know to be clearer and more cautious in how they sign anyway---that they could communicate the differences to the other person should they come across them. Kinda like a Londoner and a Scotsman [in English], right? Unless, of course, I am talking total drivel... Possible. :')
Because one evolved over a very long time in very disconnected communities and other was created relatively recently in much more interconnected world?
Language *is* universal - which is why different sign languages evolved just as naturally as different languages. Fascinating to observe the human imperative to communicate.
Rikki Poynter If you'd leave the audio track for your videos, you'd get more views from the ASMR crowd. Really, it's one of the best unintentional ASMR videos I've ever seen. I immediately went to your channel for similar videos, but alas audio is muted.
This is fascinating, absolutely loved this video. I'm fascinated by language so found this really interesting. I also loved Tom's face as he signed 'over to you' - he looked so happy :D
Thanks very much to Rikki for stepping in this week! I've wanted to tell a story like this for a long time, but given I can't even fingerspell in BSL, I'm really not qualified...
Wow you made this 2 weeks ago? Why are you withholding your videos???!!??
Rikki Poynter so which sign language is the most common throughout the world?
he's away; so channel automatically uploads one video every week. don't you think it's better to have one video per week against to having 4 videos in a row and nothing for next three weeks?
The volume is too quiet on the video. I can't hear what she's saying
I can do fluent BSL. Its a language everyone that ive met wants to learn.
One of the few things from Tom that I actually DO know.
1.4k likes
2 years
No replies
Things You Might Not Have Thought About in a While
Same haha
"Canada uses the same thing as the US because of proximity but Quebec uses something completely different from the rest of the world out of spite" the basis for Canadian culture
this is true. all of canadian culture is "we're a mixture of the US and england expect for quebec who does something completely different for some reason
@@thecoolkittensarecool Because we speak French.
Watching with headphones in, I'll admit I jumped when Tom started speaking at the end.
Same tho 😆
Thanks for the heads up brother
Do deaf flat Earthers have a different sign for Earth that's not a globe?
That differs around the globe...
Maybe they make a point (pardon the pun) of finger-spelling "E-A-R-T-H".
If you make a circle with your hands, it works both ways!
I'm dying. 😂
You are asking the real questions here
As much as I love Tom's videos, I really enjoy it when he takes a break and I get to see so many interesting vloggers.
Thing about different sign languages is that they're mostly cultural based. If I remember correctly, the sign for boy in ASL is that of grabbing the bill of a ball cap, closing the top fingers with the thumb near the forehead. But other cultures don't really wear/relate those with boys so it doesn't work.
Doesn't have to be though. Nothing about the word boy in spoken English is cultural. While the written English symbol for boy: ♂ represents a spear and shield, and is culturally meant to be masculine as a result but that would make sense in a culture where women were the spear wielders.
A sign language can get away with being highly cultural or largely uncultural.
"While the written English symbol for boy: ♂ represents a spear and shield"
Woah, really? I never knew that. I always assumed it was something phallic, hah. (It still is, regardless of whether it was intended or not!)
And apparently the female symbol is supposed to be a bronze mirror and handle. Interesting. Though these seem to be derived from astrological symbols, so their original symbolic intentions were probably to represent the gods Mars and Venus.
Signs do not need to be iconic, or resemble their meaning in any way. Sign languages have a high percentage of iconic signs, just because it's fairly easy to portray an idea by moving your hands in space, but iconicity isn't necessary. Many signs bear no resemblance to their meanings, either because they were arbitrary at the start or because they lost their iconicity over time. It turns out that iconicity doesn't help you remember the sign, either; less iconic signs are remembered just as easily as highly iconic ones.
It should make sense that iconicity isn't necessary. In spoken languages, the mapping between form and meaning is almost entirely arbitrary, and we manage just fine.
@@columbus8myhw I’m learning BSL and the name for my hometown is the sign for apple which is brilliant because we’re known for our orchards. I’ve noticed that as with most languages the names for places are normally iconic (that’s the right word?).
An important aspect of sign languages is that they are naturally occurring, just like spoken languages. The question "Why don't you just have one sign language?" is no different to "Why isn't there just one spoken language?"
this is a rlly good point!
Many signs wouldn't make sense in other languages. For example, the ASL sign for juice is the letter j near your mouth. In another language where Juice doesn't start with j, that wouldn't mean anything.
Sign languages are NOT 'naturally' occurring. They are all relatively recently created and they often have a single identifiable creator. They are more like Esperanto.
konskift Actually, not correct. I'll give two examples.
In Nicaragua, in the late 1970s, schools for the deaf began to be established. The home signs used by the students at home gradually became combined into a creole, and each successive class took it to a higher cmplexity until it was a full language. This is a far more natural process than Esperanto, which was invented by one person on his own.
Also, there are aboriginal sign languages which are very old indeed. The Aborigini of Australia have had various signed languages in use for different reasons for a long time.
konskift This is just so patently false that I don’t even know where to begin...
My dad can sign in German better than he can speak German. It’s kinda cool to see.
Ha, I can sing in German.
I know only one german sign.
And it requires an arm in a certain position xD
Let me guess:
....................../´¯/)
....................,/¯../
.................../..../
............./´¯/'...'/´¯¯`·¸
........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\
........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
..........................'...../
..........''............. _.·´
..........................(
..............................
And with that, greetings from Germany :P
Is he deaf?
That's a hand, not an arm! ;D
Is red lipstick a valid replacement for the t-shirt?
I was thinking that it probably makes the lip reading a lot easier
yes
Moritz Köckritz
What are you saying kid
Rodrigo Crisanto is her lipstick a replacement for the lack of Tom's red shirt
Darren Bohan
Oh I see..
1:34 Wait, is the sign for "France" twirling your mustache?
Now you're just taking the piss.
It also uses the F handshape. That is, that finger configuration (looks like the "okay" hand gesture) is the letter F in American Sign Language.
Is the ASL manual letter ‹F› being waved. Not sure why, but _English_ according to my ASL teacher looks like a person leaning with both their hands on top of a cane, while _Spanish_ looks like someone putting on a cape, as in a matador.
Wait until you see the BSL (and Auslan) sign for Manchester.
+David Willanski
So how offensive is it? I mean don't Australians like to say c@$% a lot?
sion8 it is literally "man+chest".
she's speaking in asl, for anyone wondering
*kas :* I thought so. I know some ASL, and I could pick out a lot of words.
*signing
Haha cause I know BSL I went in fully prepared for that and then just had a moment of wait, bilingual deaf person xD
@@RedHair651 speaking
The good thing about sign language if you forget a word in sign just spell it out.
euan todd, that works for spoken languages too! 💡
Michel Fugers well kinda that implies that you know how to spell the word but not say it (whilst not being deaf...or 6)
That might not work for someone who is fluent in ASL but not fluent in English. I don't know how common that is, but it doesn't seem implausible...
This would be kind of like people in bilingual communities substituting a foreign word for a local word when they can't remember it.
If you forget a sign, you don’t fingerspell it, you point to the object or describe it and sign “SIGN WHAT”
@@DNP_10 /me points to CRIPPLING DEPRESSION
Really nice video Rikki. This is something a lot of people, myself included are fairly uninformed about so thank you for teaching us just a little bit.
Thanks for doing this Tom and Rikki! There are so many misconceptions about disabled and deaf people, so channels like yours can do enormous good by putting the truth out there.
I knew that sign language was different across the world, but not that ASL is similar to French Sign Language. Interestingly, Braille is different across the world too.
It's like a language tree, the French sign is the root. It's interesting to see what languages are related here, when they aren't at all related as spoken languages:
- Austro-Hungarian
-- Czech
-- Ukrainian
-- Russian
--- Bulgarian
--- Estonian
-- Slovak
-- Slovenian
-- Croatian
-- Israeli
- Belgian
-- Flemish
-- French Beligan
- Dutch
- Danish
-- Malagasy
-- Norwegian
-- Icelandic
- Latvian
- Philippine
- American
-- Puerto Rican
-- Thai
-- Ghanaian
-- Nigerian
-- Kuala Lumpur
-- Bolivian
-- Moroccan
-- Black American
-- "Eskimo" (dubious)
-- Quebec
-- Greek
- Italian
-- Tunisian
- Irish
- Mexican
- Algerian
- Romanian
- Catalan (dubious)
braille isn't a language it's a writing system
@@venus1813 As someone who reads braille, and have taken classes in ASL, I am aware of that. But braille and sign language have similarities in that they are accessable means of convaying a language and both change depending on the language of origin; American, French, ect. I only meant that it's cool have adaptible these methods of communication are.
For languages that use the Latin alphabet, the basic 26 letters and most of the punctuation is the same. They only differ in additional letters, abbreviations and some puncuation. Braille is, to a large extend, just the Latin alphabet made readable to blind people.
I Study Pedagogy in Brasil and one of the classes we need to take is LIBRAS (Brazil's Sign Language). My teacher explained that one of the reasons we had so many sign languages is the same reason we had so many languages and so many variations inside a single language; cultural differences. Slang in regions of the same country are diverse, and the language ends up expressing those differences.
I know this is a weird and probably difficult question but how different would you say LIBRAS is from say ASL? I mean I only just started learning ASL, but because I'm me, I've read about other Sign Languages and apparently LIBRAS is a language isolate (it has no known relatives), while ASL is of course related to LSF ( _langue des signes française_ ) and many of Europe's Sign Languages are also related to it, with one of the biggest exceptions being BSL (British Sign Language).
Thats a very difficult question indeed! hahahahaha
I know that in around 1860, old LIBRAS and the French Sign Language mix themselves to form the New LIBRAS in Brazil. So i think they have a lot o similarities with ASL too.
+asturb
Did they? Could you provide a link to that info? Is okay I also know Spanish and some _português!_
I haven't seen anything saying there was ever interaction between LIBRAS and any other SL, the closest thing I remember is that the genesis of LIBRAS was encouraged when news reached Brazil about deaf people being educated in sign language over in France was a viable way to educate such people, but never anything about LSF making its way to Brazil in anyway (perhaps books about it, but not teachers like it happened in the U.S.).
Cara o que eu não entendo é pq não ter uma só língua de sinais para todo mundo. Me pareçe que o pessoal do primeiro mundo quer se manter fechado no círculo social deles e deixar quem eles não gostam de fora.
Brilliant!
Tom you're a little bit late to the ASMR thing.
CheekyRektangle I thought the same thing! The background noise and the sound of her lips was very soothing like an ASMR video.
5Rounds Rapid or very upsetting like an ASMR video ^^ I had to turn the sound off to watch this.
Love the guest hosts you choose while you are busy.
When the video turns into ASMR (kinda)
I can't hear the difference
bruh
If you put your ear close enough you can hear a sound of the air moving around as the hand doing some breakdance
PFFF LMAO
Please be a little more respectful
@@radenprasetyo8234 ?
Great informative video! I think having a universal sign language would be near impossible. It’d be like telling everyone they had to speak Esperanto. Sure it makes sense but all the different cultural variations and groups using it would either reject it or eventually result in significant variations over time anyway. When you have isolated groups of people using the same language they inevitably differentiate over time.
Jaqen to be fair everyone should speak Esperanto (as a second language, mind)!
Yes, Esperanto was originally meant (and still is) to be learned as a second language! It was meant to be used as an alternative resource in case people didn't speak your language and you didn't speak theirs
Jaqen Cxu vi parolas Esperanton?
Also, the metric system is stupid. Everyone should measure at will.
Jaqen is having variations a problem? When we are talking about a language i dont think it is
I always thought it would be interesting if there was a movie with deaf characters from different countries, they would need translators and subtitles to translate the different sign languages
So, not only body language isn't universal, but even sign language isn't. Interesting
So glad you put out this video Tom. As a Koda (kid of deaf adult), I'm often clearing up a bunch of misconceptions about sign language and Deafness as a whole. And I enjoy doing so! But it's also awesome for two prominent creators to team up and show that sign language isn't all that different from spoken language. Thanks Rikki!
as a human being that can hear speak and talk i feel like if you cant speak a language of international circulation, as is english, then you are closed minded. and fighting for dialects when you cant even speak the language of the country you live in is also...not smart?... so taking that and applying it to a group of people that already are having a hard time being understood its just crazy. if its a "matter of preference, and of choosing how you want to express yourself when you only know one way to express yourself" then go ahead and only talk to your village.
Draganoiu, that completely disregards that the signing community within those countries is large enough to be self-sustaining. Rewind the clock a couple hundred years and come up with a universal program when deaf children were just getting to the point of not being immediately institutionalized for life and you might have a chance, but now that there are self-sustaining language groups you aren't going to be able to convert them to a universal sign system by fiat. Why would a deaf person in, say, the UK isolate themselves from the local signing community in order to better be able to sign with a larger signing community hundreds of miles away from them?
The deaf already have to confront a world that is bilingual to them, and the vast majority of their surroundings doesn't bother to become bilingual with them. The language they speak with one another often has little to do with the written language they are surrounded by. Try teaching the concept of phonetics and "sounding out" difficult words to someone who is deaf! It's not an effective strategy for reading. In essence you are expressing an expectation that the deaf community should be fluent trilingually, when most of the world is monoglot, or maybe partially bilingual.
Interestingly, here in the Dominican Republic (native spoken language is Spanish) we use ASL, or a 'dialect' of it: Dominican Sign Language. Now in Haiti (native spoken language Creole) they also use ASL, specifically Haitian Sign Language. But both Dominican and Haitian SL are so close to ASL, Dominican and Haitian deaf can communicate without any problems, thus sharing one language. Which is not something the hearing from these nations can do...
Rikki Poynter made it to the guest videos! I've been following her for a while now and I highly recommend her channel. I was super excited for this one and now I can't wait for the musical one.
Watched this whole video with headphones on, feel a bit dumb now tbqh...
Why would you take them off for one video?
Me top
Yeah I learned Americans sign language and got schooled when I talked to a German. They didn't speak sign language, they just had better English then me and kept correcting my spelling
Than*
katinjegat
Please, oh please tell me you're German.
how could they have corrected your spelling if you talked to them
Because some words, like names, don't have a sign and must be spelled out.
or it's a school where most things are written down in books and people look at each others because they're nosy and bored?
Okay, I knew that there were different sign languages because I knew about AUSLAN, ASL, and BSL. I did not know however there were over 300. It does make sense though, and of course, my immediate thought was "why *don't* we have a common sign language." But language affects interpretation. So a single sign language would stifle creativity. I hadn't thought down that path before this video so thanks you Rikki; this was really eye-opening. :)
Yuki Fox “300 hundred”
Doh! Yup let me just go correct that thanks for the heads up Hollie Mae >< :)
Yuki Fox most speakers will know just one sign language though. Are you implying that they're not creative?
Tom have you heard about that one sign language that apparently spontaneously arose in a school for deaf people in Nicaragua? I heard it is an interesting linguistic case study and there are still debates whether or not it has been "contaminated" by ASL...
"Contamination" exists in all languages. English is contaminated by French, Latin and Greek. Loanwords exist in all languages.
If there's enough politics involved, a language can reject its foreign loanwords by coin its own words (something many languages had gone thru in the past, e.g. French, Romanian, Turkish).
Jesus Gonzalez yea, I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the video. I was expecting it to be mentioned
That's not what I meant by that word. Some linguists argue that it did not originate *that* spontaneously after all and had some influence from bits and peaces of ASL in its creation...
One way to test that out would be to see if it had ASL-style grammar (word order, conjugation) rather than just looking for loanwords. I think, anyway.
(I wonder if it has Spanish-inspired grammar, actually, because the kids were taught to lipread Spanish before they invented the sign language. Like, ISN prepositions mapping one-to-one onto Spanish prepositions. Do sign languages even have prepositions?)
Then you got Madagascar, where they speak Norwegian sign.
It's not just different across borders, but also within them. There's three different sign languages here in Norway, each from three different teachers living in three different cities at the time when deaf schools were introduced.
Yes, spoken an sign have just about no structure in common, but that is probably also because the different schools have their origin elsewhere. It's been too long for me to remember all the details, but iirc they each come from England, France and Sweden.
Nillie to be fair, the line between 'dialect' and 'language' is a ver grey one.
Yeah, in Finland people use Finnish sign language, Finnish-Swedish and some Swedish. My friend works with deaf kids and says it can be complicated sometimes.
Came for the video, stayed for the ASMR gum chewing experience.
That made me think. Is it possible for deaf people to enjoy seeing certain visuals, e.g. certain sign language, just like we enjoy listening to sounds as featured in ASMR videos?
SandtC97 Now that is a bit of a stretch since sign language is just a visual help to transfer information. You can experience this ASMR visual pleasure by examining art for example, in complete silence. Unless you're that type of person that can get off 5+ syllable words, I believe that this theory is very unapplicable.
It is possible, after all, I'm sure that there's at least one freak that is into this stuff. Each to their own, I guess...
When I opened this the audio in youtube didn't work and I sat out Tom's intro because I thought it was a gag...
Aaron Robey haha!
Apologies if anything I say here is wrong, I'm not a linguist who specialises in sign language, but here is what I have learned whilst learning and using sign language in different locations around England to talk with deaf people. It seems to me that sign language emerged in a very natural way, with deaf people effectively doing charades to try to communicate with others. Naturally, deaf people clustered together, opening deaf clubs and bars and the like and forming relatively tight knit communities. Within these communities common expressions and signs specific to that community developed. This caused extremely strong dialects from town to town, and these dialects are preserved today, as the majority of deaf people are culturally deaf, which means that they do not learn formalised sigh language but instead learn how to sign from other local deaf people. Imagine what spoken English would be like if communities clustered together and most people did not learn formal English, the slang would be very strong, and here you are starting to understand just how different these dialects are from one another. It is genuinely extremely difficult to communicate with someone from a different town, and often feels closer to a different language with some common elements than a dialect. I would also like to point how sign language is still very Similar to charades, if someone's shirt has a square picture on it, you would do the sign for picture whilst doing a square around your chest. Most signs make sense, e.g the sign for climbing is to mimic climbing with your hands. And if you wanted to say climbing is very hard, you might scrunch your face up and breathe heavily, mimic climbing and wobble your arms and then sign hard. To me it seems that sign language is very similar to creole which developed as slaves from different countries having no way of communicating using onomatopoeia to communicate. For these reasons I think sign language is the most interesting way of communicating you can learn and reveals a lot about how humans would communicate before formalised education.
" opening death clubs and bars and the like" Those are some violent deaf people.
death clubs sound awesome
*Naturally, deaf people clustered together, opening death clubs.*
Well... that escalated quickly! Might want to fix that typo. ;)
Interesting points nonetheless. I always find it interesting to look into how languages developed. I also like how you don't really have to understand sign language in order to understand what they're saying. You just watch their expressions and you can often pick up what they're trying to say. Even in spoken languages, many still "talk with their hands" or use other body language to emphasize their point, and I think sometimes deaf people can pick up on what we're trying to say (unless they can lip read) on just our random gestures alone.
Niki Groeger yeah sorry autocorrect. On the body language/expression point, deaf people express themselves much more strongly than hearing people since strong facial expressions and body language is part of the language, and this results in some noticeable cultural differences I think. Imagine if when describing someone being cross we raised our voices and moved angrily and you get the picture.
thanks for your comment. I was hoping someone would give an actual reason why sign language is difficult to make universal
I've been subbed to Rikki for about a year or so, it's so weird seeing her sign and not speak, she's awesome:)
I think we got at least 2 signs in Britain, I know because Mr Tumble got in trouble for a normal sign in one language that resembles swearing in BSL.
Irish Sign Language is related to French Sign Language (for some reason) and apparently Northen Ireland Sign Language is a combo of BSL and ISL, also just like there are dialects of English all over Britain and Ireland, BSL and IRL have various dialects. In all it could be that in standard BSL there was a sign that is rude, but not in a dialect of BSL or something else altogether!
Here I turned on my soundoroof headphones, boosted the bass ready to watch some TH-cam and then found this. I knew very basic sign language at one point. ASL. We had a student in our class that was mute so he signed, so we learned to sign. The words I remember are yes, no, salad, soup, snake, thank you and I'm sorry.
But why salad and soup, though? I am vastly curious now...
gremma ludic salad and soup sounds like reasonable words in a school setting. Everyone has to eat. I'm more curious about snake.
Because they were easy to remember. I think.
SQL is also a good one
Maverick Fox I heard PHP was better
Signed Query Language: There’s a guy standing at a wall of filing cabinets who is deaf. The only language he knows is Signed Query Language (SQL), which can only describe how he should organize, label, fill, and retrieve things from the filing cabinets.
Nothing But The Austin occasionally smart people trick him into doing stuff for them with some talk about injections
This summer Deaflympics was held in my hometown, Samsun. I was so sad to not know IS, or any sign language. They inspired me to study sign language and now I am planning to study Linguistics in university next year.
It's really interesting how this has brought up the 'we should have a universal language' conversation once more. Language is something that is entwined with culture and they often reflect each other very strongly too. To get rid of a language would require getting rid of, or at least seriously changing, the culture it's a part of. In my opinion doing so would be a massive loss. I'm not at all surprised to find out that there's multiple sign languages too. What I'm more interested in is how they differ and how rooted they are in their country of origin.
Thanks so much for this video. I guess I hadn't thought about it very much before but now I think I'm about to go on a Googling spree.
It's really a functional inevitability given the rate that the world is "getting smaller" so to speak. Throughout history at any given time there is always a dominant language, it used to be Latin, now it is English, in the future it might be Chinese. As education standards rise globally more and more people will speak the dominant language in addition to their native language, and eventually practically everyone will speak it.
At that point it would be more efficient to print everything in just that language, think of all the instruction manuals you have seen that are 90% translations and then imagine all of that being gone.
That would establish a feedback loop where only the dominant language gets used with any sort of regularity and the native languages slowly get out of practice then forgotten.
Assuming AI doesn't make this all moot.
This is so helpful! I'm from the Philippines and we have our Filipino Sign Language (FSL) that is also used by my deaf sister. Unfortunately, resources to learn FSL is scarce here, so our mother tends to learn ASL. I always tell her to learn FSL because the signs are different and it might make it more difficult to communicate with my sister. I'm going to show her this video to let her realize why there are different sign languages around the world
I feel we missed a trick by not having a universal sign language, we could have had a language everyone in the world can use and it can be used across distances that cant you cannot speak across such as through a window.
hitforhelp This is true, but if we had a universal spoken language, we could communicate better in all the other scenarios, and yet we don't.
hitforhelp a single sign language is absolutely not maintainable. even if you started out with one it would eventually diversify just like spoken languages.
speakers of sign language make up new signs or use old signs in novel ways to facilitate their speech. this is why you can observe dialects even among the same sign language. given enough time those dialects would eventually become separate languages.
Just imagine Italians.
Espehando
A universal spoken language would be a nationalist nightmare, but sign languages are far less tainted with nationalism.
"We have different sign languages because it would be boring otherwise."(paraphrasing)
A lot of human achievement is because people are easily bored, apparently.
"we were bored" is why we have Stonehenge and the great pyramids for the most part. No one who was busy with important things would have done such projects.
RealLuckless probably haha!
Yeah... the metric system was created because we were having too much fun.
+Antonio Meza, you really hate the metric system, why?
... Yes the ancient Egyptians did 0 important things. Your comment is so poorly thought out it's laughable. Nobody that achieved anything even remotely interesting said they did it because they were bored. The initial push might have been boredom, but that it is. They did it because they were passionate/greedy/desperate/curious/threatened... but never bored.
Both of your examples, Stonehenge and the Pyramids were among the most important projects that said civilisation carried out, it might not seem it now but to them, these tasks were of monumental importance.
Rikki Pointer
im so sorry
look at his spelling of her name. He's making a pun.
Funniest pun I've seen this whole year
+BucketOf Hurt quite a slow January you're having then
0x21d36e0... i'm sorry too
ay mate arent we all having a slow one
Now I'm waiting for a linguistics video from Tom about sign language.
It’s awesome to see you and Rikki collab! Im disabled and love all things disability and follow Rikki as well, so this is a cool video.
This was super interesting! I'm glad you keep doing these guest videos, since they allow me to learn about TH-camrs I probably wouldn't've found otherwise.
I really appreciated the sounds of the waves at the end there, really struck home how lucky I am to have the ability to hear!
Great video, Rikki! You're just gained a subscriber!
(0:33) Not only do they think there's just one sign language of the world, a lot of people think it's the *American* sign language that is used across the world. The name should tip people off that something's wrong with the statement, but apparently not.
Sign language ASMR
Thank you!!! Been following Rikki for a few years and it's so cool to see her in your channel!!!
Is this ASL or ASMR?
ASLMR
Autonomous Sign Language Meridian Response?
Automatic Sign LASER MONSTER ROBOT!!!
Sorry. :)
(don't want to ruin your pun, but this was BSL :D)
Terrus Ciekawostki no, it was definitely ASL
It doesn’t matter if everyone being able to speak the same language would be boring, sign language should be universal.
The sound being on makes it awkward because it’s just background static and the occasional mouth noise. Great vid nonetheless.
yes, a little bit of background music for us non deaf people would have been nice.
Perhaps very light music or something might help (because I agree, dead silence might be awkward) but for some people the sounds of hearing people smack their mouths, even very quietly, is surprisingly disturbing and it becomes the only thing their brain focuses on. I'm definitely one of those people and no matter how hard I try to ignore dry mouth smacking, my brain just zeros in on those sounds to the detriment of everything else.
Interesting topic though. I've wondered about accents, and how often people throwing up gang signs are just spelling letters, or rappers in videos are accidentally saying something ridiculous.
This is a great video!! As a person who has just started to learn ASL, this answered a lot of my questions.
Particular signs may even differ even from place to place. Group of people may naturally create their own sign for a word and newcomers into that group just adopt this sign. I was told that one school for deaf children had/have a bald headmaster, so their sign for "headmaster" became "head over top of your head".
This is very true, the dialects from town to town is very strong, and discovering why the signs are as they are like your bald headteacher example is like a fun puzzle and is a great source of conversation.
Ever since I started studying BSL about 9 months ago, whenever I mention it to someone, there's 2 reactions I'm extremely likely to get.
1) "Oh cool, you'll be able to travel the world with it!"
2) "Like the little guy in the corner of the tv!"
There will never be a proper universal sign language, for the same reason why there will never be a universal spoken or written language : dialects might not be always be originated from the place in which they are used, but they usually evolve to suit the culture of the people that speak (or in this case, sign) it. Sorry, Esperanto lovers, not gonna happen.
I agree Esperanto won't take, but knowing a common language becomes more and more convenient the more connected people are.
English is already close to a universal spoken/written language. Sure, other countries still have their native languages. But so many also learn English.
Culture has already been melding together due to increase connections and communication. And languages can easily take on words from other languages to accommodate lexical gaps.
So I think it is quite likely we will end up with a single language, if we last long enough and the trends keep going. There will probably always be other languages, too, but there will be one that everyone is expected to understand.
Rikki Poynter is a queen. I've been bingewatching her videos over the past few days, and everything is so, so quality. Thanks Tom for having her on.
Thumbnail: Rikki
Thumbnail Text: "Things you might not know"
Me: Huh?
(I subscribe to Rikki already)
+Zachary Perkins
That's where the humble "might" comes in
Hence the word "might"
How would saying I'm subbed to someone be related to humbleness
+Zachary Perkins
I was trying to describe Tom's phrasing of "Things you _might_ not know" being humble, sorry for the confusion
Oh ok i see now
Just started taking Greek Sign Language lessons about a month ago and I love it!
Isn't someone asking, "Why can't there be one sign language wouldn't that be easier?" like someone asking, "Why can't there be one language wouldn't that be easier?"
Yeah, and wouldn't it?
In contrast to 'one spoken language' it seems that 'one sign language' is more achievable because it is a constructed language. So why not construct it the same everywhere?
A few things;
Those that are deaf can't hear (mostly) spoken words, trying to find deaf and sign language videos on youtube means they have to type in English or what ever written language they know. For English, this means they're going to get a mix of american and british sign language come up, a mix that may not translate well to the viewer even tho they know English as a written language. In this case, having a single sign language would be more helpful and as you can now see, one language as English be it British or American English allows us to talk to each other and people access sign language video content.
The majority of people who's asking why not one sign language are probably people who're not deaf, that's granted, but you can assume based on their own merit of not having access to all spoken languages, or at best being bilingual, that they take the same assumption of being able to see more content if they only had one language. While spoken languages have a huge population in comparision to sign language, one would naturally expect a smaller population of speakers, or signers in this case, to be wanting as large of a pool people who they can communicate with.
Now, for the most part the internet is text based, and deaf people can get on with that quite happily, and it's not like most people, not even deaf, are going to be travelling outside their own language speaking country anyway, so as an American signer may never have to sign to british or german deaf signers ... the internet, as we've touched upon, disregards those land borders and places like TH-cam allow for them to interact, and that is where it'd be easier if we had a single sign language.
So you're saying that a universal sign language would be far superior, but because of cultural differences and human failure there isn't one?
thats why we cant have anything good around here. if a deaf/mute can only do one dialect (or 2 or 5) he can still never talk to everyone, and the majority of people will still not understand him. so in the end they just form pockets of people in a sea of gibberish. also think of it this way, one sign language can also be learned by everyone. even people who can speak and hear. i for example can just speak english to every moron i meet and at least be partially understood. i only know of one sign that has the same coverage and thats the middle finger.
a year ago i couldnt understand this. now i know what she's saying wow
I wonder how fingerspelling works for someone with dyslexia
This was excellent, sometimes I like it when Tom goes away for a bit, it allows us to learn about things we wouldn't otherwise, including the fact that people actually believe there is only one sign language, but there you are.
naaaaa a common language for everyone would be great. I would love that. And I am sure a single sign language would be great too.
Hell, nah. I love different languages. I find them all fascinating. ATM, I speak 3 (Swedish, Finnish and English), learning 2 other ones (Korean and German) and want to increase it to even more with Japanese, Spanish and maybe even more germanic languages.
Yes, learning about differences between languages can be fascinating, but languages are primarily a tool used to communicate, which would work better if unified.
The benefits of having one common language everywhere would faaar outweigh the "fascination" of different languages
Baader-Meinhof ahoy! I found Rikki's videos from a deep dive in youtube after seeing some funny sing language videos. It was really interesting seeing her transition from completely verbal and not knowing sign, to almost completely signed videos. Awesome to see Tom showcase her talent and perspective on this channel!
Just like with universal spoken languages, I feel like the better answer to the question, "why not just one of them" is not simply "That would be boring" but rather, "it's too late to fix it if we wanted too."
The histories of languages run far too deep for us to just up and convert to a single universal language, even if we could decide on one objectively superior language. If the ways we're becoming more interconnected do manage to push us towards a single universal language, it will be centuries before we get there.
Good job you mentioned about the subtitles because when I saw they were on by default, I instinctively went to switch them off!
Great vid Rikki, too bad for the lack of red shirt. :D
British sign language is so gentle (and almost hypnotizing...)
Cantonese sign language looks like the signer is picking a fight...
Because my aunt is partially deaf I have always been interested in sign language. This video just sparked up my interest even more, so thank you for that.
Also, can't wait for the next vid! I am going to a music school, have been for the past 10ish years, so of course I'm going to be interested in music related things.
You might be interested (if not already subbed) in sideways, a music analysis channel. :)
Anneke Oosterink Thank you for the recommendation!
You might also like PlayTheMind if you haven't seen it already; he was one of the guest videos the last time Tom took a break.
honeycombfromheaven the one that did the video about song translations? Oh he seems awesome, thank you for the recommendation!!
Good video. As a hearing American that grew up in a town that houses a school for the Deaf, have several Deaf friends, and learned ASL later (it is now my second language), it was nice to see the language represented on the global stage.
I guess all the hearing people saying deaf people should develop and all use a single universal sign language are fluent Esperantists right? (Not that that would justify it).
Um, no.
Ror shach Why not?
D600Active Esperanto was not meant to replace the native languages of people (even though there are Esperanto native speakers by now)
SimonHellinger I know. It is a common misconception. Very few Esperanto speakers want other languages to die out and many think minority language preservation is an important thing. Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?
Ror shach But a suitable verbal language already has been invented?
Great stuff, most informative. My wife is an audiologist and knows BSL and I find it fascinating to watch. I can even sign a little bit - slowly!
I really disagree with her argument that different SL make life interesting. Having a universal SL would make their « speakers » have a very strong advantage for international relations. While languages are interesting to study, it does complicate a lot of things.
It would give sign language an awesome edge. The fact that there are different spoken languages isn't exactly helpful either. Interesting yes but not practical.
I agree. I imagine it also leads to non-deaf people being less likely to learn.
Rufus, that's beside the point. Your ability to do something does not mean you shouldn't aim for something better.
Yeah, the argument is bad, but USL is not going to happen for the same reasons we don't use Esperanto.
This is like saying everyone all over the world should speak, say, Mandarin Chinese, because it has the largest number of native speakers, so everyone can understand the same spoken language
Always on the look out for more ASL/Deaf lifestyle/Awareness channels. Thanks, Tom! And Thank you Rikki! I'm hopping right over to sub!
Just a tiny detail, using "ASL" as shorthand for sign language is like using "USCU" for shorthand for measurement system, or "American" as shorthand for person. (And some people do the last one, in the term "African American" to refer to a "black person", such as dark skinned Europeans, which is really weird).
I'm blind, & now how am I to listen to this video? I cannot see subtitles, Tom!
You can copy the transscript of the video to some text to speach program. The transscript is located under the "more" button.
are you really?
text-to-voice apps are really handy, but you already know that right?
Does your teletype reader not do closed captioning/subtitles?
this video was so quiet i could hear my tinnitus.
thank you rikki for answering a question i never knew i needed answering
This is the first Tom Scott video where I didn't learn anything new, because this is also my area of expertise! :D
I disagree that having a single sign language would make things boring, quite the opposite in fact. If there was just one then we would be able to interact with thousands of more people with no additional effort, how is that boring? It seems to me a very strange idea; The interestingness of a communication method, being directly proportionally with how segregated/inefficient it is. That's... the exact opposite of what communication methods are supposed to priortise! And in the case of little lexical tricks that some languages have that others lack (which are often cited in favour of linguistic diversity), those are tiny benefits in comparison to the massive cost of having so many languages. It's not even close to being worth it.
I really dislike the argument people use that "life would be so boring, if people were all the same". Worship of the cult of individuality is a dangerous thing. Can't we appreciate each others' differences, while also acknowledging that sometimes people can be better off not being different 'just because'?
This is a great video and there are very good reasons why there are multiple sign languages much as there are multiple spoken languages but praising that as an inherent good rather than something which is the case only due to human development and history seems strange to me.
@@rabidfurify Do you want a world where every person the same ?
A language is much more than communication my friend . Different language brings uniqueness to the world . If everything the same and everyone the same it is kinda a dull world
THIS WAS SO INTERESTING THANK YOU!! I'd never really thought about sign language before, but now I'd like to learn it!
We had ONE chance to make a universal language, and we messed up.
there wasn't some conference one day where all deaf people decided "let's create a bunch of different sign languages!" they developed over time in completely isolated locations (without the internet obviously) - what the hell do you mean we had a chance to make a universal language?????
Thank you.
I wanted to learn Sign language for a long time, but it was very discouraging when I learn that every place has its own version because I really wanted to be able to communicate with everyone and be a link for people who needed that from me, however, It's true, I love languages and I love to be immersed in the cultures behind the languages, so I'm happy that this also is the case with sign languages, and as soon as I finish with the one I'm currently learning I will go for ASL
Apparently, the tagline for the Deaflympics is similar to the tagline for the film 'Alien'.
Because at the Deaflympics, no one can hear you scream.
This made me laugh out loud.
I've been signing sense I was 3yrs old. My brother is deaf. Something I would like to point out is that Sign Languages are different in the same country much like spoken English has accents. You can tell where a person is from by the way they sign and how they sign different words.
I think the main argument for having a single universal sign language is that if there was then teaching sign language in schools to all students would make sense (which would in turn enable deaf people to communicate with everyone more easily).
Sure...but you could say the exact same thing about verbal languages, no?
Why not teach all children, all over, English, or Chinese, or whatever. We teach what we know, we teach what we have learned in our home culture.
Mike Schilder Most children learn English in school nowadays, at least in Europe afaik
Yes but sign language doesn't replace spoken English, it would be an **extra** course. Which, in my country would mean some other useful course will be left out (education is already at its max). What is the use for the... ??% deaf people?
@@mikepictor, it's English. You learn English to communicate to people from many different countries. Why can't the deaf community learn a second language as well and use it as an intermediate layer to talk to people from all over the world? I'd rather learn a Universal Sign Language (it could be the American Sign Language, the French Sign Language, doesn't matter) than learn the Brazilian Sign Language that would be no useful in case I move to another country.
Thank you very much for having this on your channel I think it's important for people to be more aware of our differences
Great video!
I wanted to know something: just as in spoken languages there are sounds which are hard for some speakers to pronounce (take the French R for English speakers, for example), are there gestures which are hard for people who are not used to it to make with their hands?
There could also be a cultural question to that in which some gestures could be considered rude in othe places.
Yes, I can't give you many examples between countries because ive only ever used BSL but this is especially true for hearing people learning sign language. Across England there's is the sign for the number four which deaf people use and the sign for four which hearing people use because the hand position is painful for the proper one, and the difference between a hearing person and a deaf persons signing tends to be very noticeably different
I know in ASL, the way you sign the number 3 is different than the way hearing people do it (ASL 3 is the pointer and middle fingers and the thumb, not the ring finger. That's the ASL sign for 6, so 3 needed to be different). I have deaf grandparents (though I sadly don't know much ASL myself) and my mom taught me the ASL way of saying 3 when I was little, not the hearing way to do it. It's always felt natural to me. My classmates had a lot of trouble with it when I took an ASL class this semester, though.
This is an awesome question!
I've worked with an number of deaf kids through volunteering with the charity sense and one of the big differences in UK signing is the difference between BSL (what you normally see on the BBC for example) and Makaton which I'd personally say is a lot easier to learn as a hearing person. A lot more of the actions are logical to what you're describing. Its actually what they tend to use on kids signing programmes such as something special. Its amazing when you see a interpreter (which I am not) signing in two or three different languages. Truly incredible, and something I intend to learn more about. Thanks Tom!
I wonder, do different sign languages have different features and structures like spoken languages do?
Same, for example Japanese has honorifics, do they keep it in their sign language?
Not knowing anything about ASL, I still noticed there was kind of a quite obvious "negation sign" at the end of some sentences. So I guess it works by making a statement, and then negating it.
What Andrew said, basically. German Sign Language also mouthes German words, but sometimes mouthings indicate things like shape or size, or will be conventionalised for a particular word. In general, they are very different (though Sign Languages that are related to each other will be more similar, much like, say, German, Dutch, and English, or Italian and Spanish have many similar structures)
If you mean different grammar structures, as in how the sentence is ordered, (ex: English = Subject-Verb-Object vs Japanese = Subject-Object-Verb) then yes sign languages are the same way. As I understand anyway.
In short, yes.
I cast my vote on a common language : communication is more important than "not being bored".
The reason we have many spoken languages and no attempt to create a universal language has ever nor will ever succeed is because it's literally impossible to have ~7 billion people all speaking the same language.
If you have a large enough number of people who all speak the same language, it's only a matter of time before it forms a bunch of smaller groups who all make their own modifications to the language, and eventually what was once one language becomes many.
Of course, if at some point there was a single sign language, the same thing would happen; different people from different places would end up creating their own signs and change the meanings of existing ones until that one language became several languages.
In this hypothetical situation, we have a universal sign language; local variants and slang wouldn't actually matter -- they'd be able to explain it to you...
Just like how someone, for instance, can explain to you how cockney rhyming slang works.
Explaining slang is not the same as understanding slang (or words) without help needed. That help you get is a translator. I can understand French if someone explains it to me in English or Dutch.
Except that if one single worldwide USL had local modifications, it would still be based on the root USL and everyone would know that.
As a result, everyone would know the original version enough---or at least, aware that it _has_ differences, even if they couldn't put their finger on exactly _what_ is different, and could therefore know to be clearer and more cautious in how they sign anyway---that they could communicate the differences to the other person should they come across them. Kinda like a Londoner and a Scotsman [in English], right?
Unless, of course, I am talking total drivel... Possible. :')
Thank God I Found This Video. Definitely the best speaker test i have ever seen.
about that "why is sign language not universal?" I'd say "why is language not universal"?
Why isn't there a single programming paradigm, language and compiler? Most CPUs compute in binary, right?
Because one evolved over a very long time in very disconnected communities and other was created relatively recently in much more interconnected world?
as such I demand everything is written in java, no other languages allowed
Java only? Dear God no.
Language *is* universal - which is why different sign languages evolved just as naturally as different languages. Fascinating to observe the human imperative to communicate.
This was so cool! Not only for the knowledge itself but for introducing us to Rikki. I'm definitely subscribed, so thank you, Tom!
Hi Rikki, great video! I was just wondering, what is the purpose to recording audio for the video. Thanks
Rikki Poynter If you'd leave the audio track for your videos, you'd get more views from the ASMR crowd. Really, it's one of the best unintentional ASMR videos I've ever seen. I immediately went to your channel for similar videos, but alas audio is muted.
This is fascinating, absolutely loved this video. I'm fascinated by language so found this really interesting. I also loved Tom's face as he signed 'over to you' - he looked so happy :D
Do Bulgarians show thumbs down when they mean thumbs up? ;)
Well obviously they show thumbs up when they mean thumbs up. The question is whether they mean the same thing you do when you show thumbs up.
Thanks for sharing, Rikki! I wasn't aware.