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Sheets of Class Feb.16

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Systems that are used by deaf people are called sign language and linguists consider them to be real human languages. They´re basically the same as spoken languge with this one differences that they don´t use speech.

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For centuries, people who were hard of hearing or deaf have relied on communicating with others through visual cues. As deaf communities grew, people began to standardize signs, building a rich vocabulary and grammar that exists independently of any other language. A casual observer of a conversation conducted in sign language might describe it as graceful, dramatic, frantic, comic or angry without knowing what a single sign meant.

There are hundreds of sign languages. Wherever there are communities of deaf people, you'll find them communicating with a unique vocabulary and grammar. Even within a single country, you can encounter regional variations and dialects -- like any spoken language, you're bound to find people in different regions who communicate the same concept in different ways.

It may seem strange to those who don't speak sign language, but countries that share a common spoken language do not necessarily share a common sign language. American Sign Language ( ASL or Ameslan) and British Sign Language ( BSL) evolved independently of one another, so it would be very difficult, or even impossible, for an American deaf person to communicate with an English deaf person. However, many of the signs in ASL were adapted from French Sign Language ( LSF). So a speaker of ASL in France could potentially communicate clearly with deaf people there, even though the spoken languages are completely different.

There is no direct correlation between natural sign languages and spoken languages -- speakers of sign language communicate through concepts, not words. While it is possible to interpret sign language into a spoken language such as English (and vice versa), such an interpretation would not be a direct translation.

Most speakers of sign language find it difficult to learn it from books and static pictures. The way a speaker signs a concept can say more about his meaning than the sign itself. Pictures don't capture the nuances that are intrinsic for clear communication with sign language, and sometimes it is difficult to communicate the motions some signs require without video, animation or an in-person demonstration.

In this article, we'll focus mainly on American Sign Language, the dominant sign language in the United States. We'll also look at Signed Exact English ( SEE) and Pidgin Signed English ( PSE), two alternatives to ASL that are used primarily between deaf people and hearing people. SEE and PSE rely on the English language to varying degrees. This means that unlike ASL, they are constructed, or artificial, sign languages. We'll talk about the attempt to establish a universal sign language and look at other applications of sign language.

In the next section, we'll explore the history of American Sign Language.

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American Sign Language (ASL) is one of the fastest growing languages of study in the United States. Learn about the history of ASL, how it's used and how it differs from other sign languages in the United States and around the world.

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People might somentimes lose their languge, they suffer from a medical condition called Aphasia, this is somenthing which usually hits people after they had a stroke. They will lose part of their language capacity because part of their brain no longer functions.
Exceptional Case
Genie was an American girl who was locked up in her room from when she was 20 months old until the age of 13, she didn´t have any human interaction. She didn´t learn any human language

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Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. Aphasia is always due to injury to the brain-most commonly from a stroke, particularly in older individuals. But brain injuries resulting in aphasia may also arise from head trauma, from brain tumors, or from infections.

Aphasia can be so severe as to make communication with the patient almost impossible, or it can be very mild. It may affect mainly a single aspect of language use, such as the ability to retrieve the names of objects, or the ability to put words together into sentences, or the ability to read. More commonly, however, multiple aspects of communication are impaired, while some channels remain accessible for a limited exchange of information.

It is the job of the professional to determine the amount of function available in each of the channels for the comprehension of language, and to assess the possibility that treatment might enhance the use of the channels that are available.

Below you can find more information on the different types of aphasia such as Global, Broca's, Wernicke's, Primary Progressive, Anomic, and Mixed Non-fluent aphasia.

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Aphasia Definitions - National Aphasia Association

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Aphasia is an impairment of language, affecting the production or comprehension of speech and the ability to read or write. Aphasia is always due to injury to the brain-most commonly from a stroke, particularly in older individuals. But brain injuries resulting in aphasia may also arise from head trauma, from brain tumors, or from infections.

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Language is so complex that one cannot imagine it simply appearing form nothing in its final form, but that it must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human ancestors.
Discontinuity-based:
Language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly in the transition from pre-hominids to early man.

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Linguists don´t know, there´s just not enough information about the origins of language, and there are only theories about how our early ancestor forme their first words and sentences. In movies people give languages to their carachteres but this is not qualify as languages for liguistis. A linguistic cannot really make a languge. To be consider as a languge is that have to be learned by children, from a very early age.

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Language have been written for maybe, well 5,000 years or somenthing like that at a very short period. A 100,000 years ago when these migrations maybe started. Let alone the things of a 100,000 years ago, so it´s a nice idea that maybe there was a languge, a common language a 100,000 years ago.

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For instances, there are languages which seem to have around 20 different vowel sounds where as others may have only two or three. Some languages seem to put a lot of information in one long big word, others seem to have very short words and therefore, they have sentences with many words. But all human languages are built according to a similiar scheme because they´re all spoken by humans. We have all similar bodies. We have similar brains. And therefore, also our languges are similar.

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It´s actually difficult to decide, maybe it´s impossible to decide on real scientific criteria, there is many areas in the world where we simply don´t know which languages are spoken there, The most heard estimate is somenthing between 6 and 7,000 languages in the world. Ethnologue is a page that gives us information about countries,languages, languages families,etc.
in Ethnologue we can find that many languages are very small, fewer that say 1,000 speakers, and many of those languages are dying out.

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Her main focus is on sign languages used in Africa. She explains that in sing languge there´s not just one sign language that everybody uses and there is a lot of variation just like with spoken languages. Whereas spoken languages use sounds, sing languages use what we call parameters, that are articulated simultaneously and this parameters are the handshape, that is used to articulate the sing, the movement that the hand makes in the articulation of the sing, the location, where is the hand located,

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Interview with Dr. Victoria Nyst - Introduction to Linguistics | Coursera

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Video created by Universiteit Leiden, Meertens instituut (KNAW) for the course "Miracles of Human Language: An Introduction to Linguistics". In this first week, we will try to determine what makes language human: why do (almost) all human beings ...