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Sign languages are faster and easier to learn than spoken
languages.
It is the ideal medium to use as a common language. The
Native
Americans knew this and to my knowledge were the only
people who
ever used sign language as a universal trading language. It
is simple
to learn. In high
school, we learned the basics in about one
week
and were able to communicate with each other. If everyone
in the
world took two weeks to learn this language there would no
longer
be any language barrier.
Its weakness is the lack of a written language. However, a
universal
written language already exists in the form of Chinese
characters.
They have no inherent pronunciation and so can be spoken
aloud
with any language. To this day the Japanese use Chinese
characters
and not surprisingly, the Chinese can understand what is
written in
Japanese, and vice versa.
I believe if we were to combine these two languages,
Native
American Sign Language and a simplified form of Chinese
characters, we would have a
universal language that could be learned in weeks or
months instead
of years and, when combined with modern electronic text
inputting
modalities, it would be a language accessible to anyone in
the world
no matter their disability so long as they had at least one
sense
(sight, hearing, or touch) and could control one party of
their body.
Virtually no one would be excluded.
Native American Sign Language Dictionary
http://www.inquiry....utdoor/native/sign/
[deussean, Jun 28 2015]
Sign Language Powwow
https://www.youtube...watch?v=bfT2a5SGDFA
[deussean, Jun 28 2015]
[link]
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Welcome, she said in English. Have to think about the idea
further. But welcome. |
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There's some divergence between Chinese and Japanese
ideograms but I take your point. Are you thinking the sign
language should be depicted? So you have drawings or
photos of the signs used? |
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It's been suggested, controversially, that some Native
American and First Nation languages are in fact related to
Chinese, for instance Tlingit. I don't think it's a very popular
idea though. |
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decent. Could be applied to ASL/BSL as well, no ? |
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Sign languages aren't universal. In fact, sign languages are
often much more dialectically diverse than spoken
language, since deaf communities in general are less
mobile and have less economic leverage than the general
speaking public. (In Japan, I was marginally involved in a
project to standardize three different Japanese sign
languages - and we kept running into others. We started
with Sendai, Tokyo, and Osaka regional variants; then ran
into Old Tokyo, Old Nagasaki, Western Japan Women's,
and several which were differentiated into local religious
communities. None of them had even passing similarity to
ASL.) |
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Welcome to the HB, [deussean]. |
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Hey guys, I'm not really sure how to respond to you
individually, so I will just try from here. To give some
background, I was raised in Montana near two Indian
reservations when I learned basic Native sign
language. I went to college and got a degree in
Japanese language and literature where I learned
about Chinese symbols. I am actively trying to create
this new language in my spare time. |
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To ninteenthly: I don't have photos of individual signs
or their corresponding characters yet (I will start a
blog in the future) but I will post two links on Native
American Sign Language. |
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The first one is a dictionary, which comes from one of
the easier to understand paper dictionaries (which is
also used in the boyscouts of america), and the
second is a video on youtube of a sign language
meeting in 1930. |
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To Ian Tindale: Chinese symbols can be hard to read
at first, but they gradually get easier with time.
Even easier is just pronouncing them in your native
language. Besides, Chinese characters don't have to
be hard. In this language I am proprosing, I was
thinking of having no more than a few hundred basic
characters which would correlate literally with the
signs. For instance, the Native American word for
'alcohol' was 'fire water'. Instead of using the word
for alcohol in Chinese characters, 酒 you could
simply
translate the word literally as fire water
=　火水,
thereby getting three words for the price of two and
cutting out one more complicated sign you have to
learn. |
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To FlyingToaster, lurch, and MaxwellBuchanan:
Thank you for the welcome. As for using this idea
with other sign languages, I specifically chose Native
American Sign Language because it is a dead
language. No one will have to fight about whose sign
language should be used as the universal language
because basically no one speaks Native sign language
anymore. |
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I believe that this language would bring the disabled
and non-disabled people together. The deaf and the
hearing don't communicate often in the US I have
noticed, but they did in Native American culture
because they all spoke in sign. I think this idea
would be a step up from that. For instance: my
language would require the use of the regular
Roman/English alphabet (in order to fingerspell
proper nouns not originally written in Chinese) and so
you could conceivably use any input system to
convert from English or whatever language into
Chinese characters and signs. That means that even
someone who has Locked In Syndrome, a terrible
disease leaving a person unable to do anything but
blink, could develop the ability to communicate
internationally using Morse code (in any language)
which would automatically by converted to the
universal language. |
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I am willing and able to take all suggestions about
how to get this idea off the ground and in the hands
of people. Thanks for all your responses! |
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Look up the history of the written Korean language. You
might end up thinking it is superior even to Chinese. Do
remember that Chinese requires a different symbol for
every different thing, meaning it is necessary to learn
thousands of symbols. The Korean written language was
designed to partly accommodate beneficial aspects of
Chinese, while also accommodating beneficial aspects of
phonetic alphabets. So, if we pretend that hand-signs are
equivalent to phonetic characters.... |
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What's Chinese or Sign Language for computer? |
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<later> OK, I tried Google Translate for some
English words
into Chinese, and as far as I can tell there is no
single
character for anything invented in the last century.
Instead,
two or more characters are used, so: |
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Phone = electric words
Car = steam car (oddly self-redundant)
Television = electric regard
Digital = number word
Plastic = model material
Radio = no line electric
Physics = thing reason school
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I think written Chinese is doomed unless people
find a way to
invent new words. |
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So what are the words for "electronic" and
"electrical"? |
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<later>
OK, apparently "electronic" is "electric son" and
"eletrical" is "electric move". |
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What worries me about the Chinese language is that
character set seems to have been fixed some time
ago, and is not amenable to change. |
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I hate to say this, but Chinese is one fucked-up
language. |
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Welcome. The HB is a fantastic place to
vet/hammer/refine ideas, as there are brilliant people from
around the (mostly English speaking) world here. |
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Yet, for the same reason, it's a horribly mismatched place to
see if those ideas will appeal to the masses, as the HB is
precisely those 0.01% of the intelligence, and seekers of
change & novelty. |
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Most people seek entertainment at the end of their boring
work days, not challenging enlightenment. |
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So, assuming that you do create the perfect language
(which, I have to say, is novel and fascinating, as I've always
assumed that the universal language would lean more
towards math, binary, etc). Once you get such a "perfect
language", HOW could you teach people this? |
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Esp. language is best taught young, esp. before puberty.
So, how can you create such language instruction to that
age group? |
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Maybe create an iPad/Android game, & put your new
language into the game. Kids are already addicted to those
mediums, and if you, for instance, got your new language as
the default UI into Minecraft, Five Nights with Freddy,
Candy Crush, etc. you'd have a generation fluent in this new
language. |
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[MB], every word on that list also has a non-English origin. |
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My understanding is that you're saying there's an auxiliary
sign language between speakers of different languages, is it
not? |
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//[MB], every word on that list also has a non-English
origin. // Yes, very true. I guess my point was
that English is very good at creating or adopting new
words. |
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{arrives late at the "Welcome, [deussian]" party, sheepishly clutching a cleanskin chardonnay} |
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//but instead give a clue to the pronunciation of the character by portraying something else that sounds like it// |
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Wow. So, written Chinese is like rhyming slang; a rather over-extended in-joke, kept going for centuries? |
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I think that, for this idea, we could simply rule that radicals are to be interpreted with a relentless, plonking literalism - no doubt infuriating to the Chinese, but a great relief to everyone else. The result would be no uglier than St Paul's Greek, or the Business English spoken by a Hungarian to a Japanese in Dubai. |
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I once heard that intelligence is measured in China by how many characters you can memorize. Still seems complicated. Why not just have Native Americans spit red on their signing hand(s) against a rock somewhere? |
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Very clever - this idea would have the disadvantages of both languages |
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I'm still waiting for my augmented-reality subtitling eyeglasses! |
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Having a universal translator is so much less effort than becoming one, but I'm not worrying too much about this issue. The AIs will undoubtedly bablefish us all soon enough, granting ways of communicating that go far beyond vibrating some air and/or wildly gesticulating. |
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Once we can feel the thoughts of another, language will seem as primitive as a bee dance. |
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