Re: International Day of Sign Languages (23 September)

 Ar an tríú lá is fiche de mí Méan Fómhair, scríobh Ross Clark:

 > A serious one for a change. Proposed by the World Federation of the Deaf,
 > accepted by the United Nations in 2018.
 > WFD "represents over 70 million deaf people worldwide who collectively use
 > around 300 different sign languages."
 >
 > Yes, 300. There's a list here:
 >
 > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sign_languages
 >
 > A lot of them are highly localized, as you might expect. But they are not all
 > independent local inventions. The table shows that some are historically
 > derived from others, so that we have "families" analogous to spoken-language
 > families.

It’s very hard to get any feel for the mutual intelligibility of these, as
someone who doesn’t speak any of them. Are ASL and French sign language more
like Spanish vs Italian or Spanish vs Romanian?

I haven’t seen anyone in the group admit to any knowledge of sign language in
my time here recently and twenty years ago. Has there been anyone about who
could comment?

 > New Zealand Sign Language was made an official language of NZ by Act of
 > Parliament in 2006. The table says that American SL "is also officially
 > recognized as a language in Canada", but I don't know if that's the same
 > thing.
 >
 > Practical importance? I don't know. Maybe no more than the International Day.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)