Swedish sign language used to be my native language due to having a deaf sister. After relocating to another part of the world and discussing languages, it surprised me how many times I had (have) to explain how "sign language" is not a language.

That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself".

> That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself".

This is fascinating. Do you have an examples that stick out?

So from my memory of ASL in college there was less worry about being rude or not offending. So if you were asked who someone was, you would start with their most identifiable feature. So if they are the only black guy in the room, or the most over weight you’d sign the black guy or the fat guy. Whereas in English it’s basically a joke now that we’d use just about any other descriptor besides those.

I would guess that has more to do with speaking in private rather than anything else. If one knows that the black guy or the fat guy or someone who loves them won't hear them, they'll refer to them however they would like. Same goes for anyone who speaks a minority language; I've had a few very good eastern European and Asian friends who told me later how I was being referred to by somebody who seemed entirely civil in English.

I don't think so.

My deaf BSL instructor said that it was about being understood clearly, and just about deaf culture. If you're in a room of people signing everyone can see you're saying "who is the fat guy at the bar" so there's no point in being euphemistic. Might be a UK deaf culture thing.

I live in the US and have a deaf mother-in-law. This is true here too.

Does the language have the sort of precision required to say something like "rotund gentleman" instead? If not I can't really blame someone from saying something in the most polite way a language practically allows.

Limited practical knowledge here (beginner ASL and some time in a linguistics research lab) - there are fewer synonyms, but facial expression and other movements make a huge difference. Much like German adds suffixes that can really change the meanings of words, a eyebrow or tongue movement can modify a sign in ASL.

Another reason ASL has fewer synonyms is that it’s not a horrible amalgamation of a ton of different languages like English is (English has a weirdly large vocabulary, like 3 times as large as some other languages). ASL is a direct descendant of French SL, no weird mixing. Moroccan SL, in contrast, is a descendent/hybrid of several languages and it, as an example, has like a million different handshapes for different kinds of insects.

Further, a word-sentence model is too limited to describe sign languages (I know this applies ASL and Moroccan SL, not sure about others). For example, a large set of concepts are expressed through classifiers. Classifiers are systems of hand-shapes, spatial locations (e.g. side of head vs in front of chest), and motions which can specify a objects (including its shape, size, and location) and also the objects’s verb and relationship with other objects. Some people mistakenly think classifiers are a form of pantomime, but classifier motions and hand shapes have specified and limited meanings (e.g. the flat rectangular object classifier is not making a rectangle shape, it’s more of a pinching motion). That’s just one example of how sign languages diverge from a word-sentence model, many more differences exist.

The main take away is that sign languages work differently from spoken languages, it’s not that easy to compare 1-to-1. There’s definitely no word that means “rotund” in ASL, but there are certainly grammar structures that let you express that.

Although you could, there’s no need to soften or euphemize physical characteristics in American Deaf culture. You can just sign “that fat person over there” and it’s not considered rude.

ASL does have a large heritage from French Sign Language, but it also was influenced by Martha’s Vineyard Sign Language.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha%27s_Vineyard_Sign_Lan...

Classifiers aren't unique to ASL or signed languages, though how they're expressed does differ somewhat due to the medium. For example in Japanese, counting objects requires classifiers, like 'hon' for cylindrical objects or 'nin' for people.

Based on my very limited experience and the posts above, I'd say sign languages don't really have the luxury of having many "synonyms" with slightly different connotations, at least in the same way you'd list words in a dictionary. jbergstroem mentions "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself", so I think the idea is people just say things how they are, in simple terms. I imagine ideas like politeness are instead conveyed in other body language, facial expressions maybe, instead of dancing with words.

But I'm just speculating, I'd love to hear someone's firsthand experiences here.

"hear" ASL

"first hand" Then, second hand.

True in Spanish as well, in my experience.

>>explain how "sign language" is not a language

Can you explain it one more time?

>>That said; it is amazing how many sign languages can come to similar conclusions due to "always trying to find the simplest way of explaining yourself".

That does sound like most languages though. So maybe sign language is a language and everything local is just a dialect? I'm sorry if I come of insensitive but I don't get it.

> Can you explain it one more time?

There is no one, universal sign language.

For example, there is Australian Sign Language (Auslan), American Sign Language (ASL), etc. They're all different languages.

I mean all spoken languages are just sounds, right? Sounds like one language to me, with multiple local dialects?

No, the type of sounds can be grouped into distinct language families and further down into language "branches". I just don't see (no pun intended) how this translates into different sign languages.

Any time you get enough deaf people in one place, who don't already have a signed language, they invent one. In times and places where signed languages have been suppressed, they've popped up all over the place at schools for the deaf. There's not much reason for any of the languages to share grammar and such with each other, since they're effectively unrelated. You wouldn't expect Japanese and Navaho to use similar grammar or vocabulary, right? Same here.

[Not Deaf, but I studied ASL and deaf culture for a few years at 2 colleges and in private lessons.]

There certainly are relationships between sign languages; A(merican)SL and French SL are arguably two dialects of the same language, or at least they were in relatively recent memory. Others are distantly related or unrelated; B(ritish)SL is absolutely unintelligible to signers of ASL and arose separately, for instance. Many of the modern global sign languages are related to one or the other of those families (and might be "dialects" as you want to call them, or might be further apart and thus merely "related languages"), but there are a few others that are not, including one—Nicaraguan Sign Language—that arose from scratch less than 40 years ago.

I think more comparable examples might be:

The symbol for 1 in different orthographies, such as: 1 I ١ ― 𒐕 一 etc ...

The words for father/mother are often a bilabial and open syllable combination regardless of language family origin.

The point is that while the details of the languages (sign, oral, written) could be different, there are some human affinities that make provide commonality. Another meta-pattern might that common words in many languages are often monosyllabic, though this is less universal than the two examples I gave above AFAIK.

There's a fascinating history on the spread of sign languages around the world to different deaf communities. IIR most sign languages derive from only a couple source languages and have very little relation to the local native language.

Which makes me wonder: is there like an Esperanto of sign language? Is/was there any attempt to create one?

Kind of. International Sign[0] is a pidgin language that came together in the early 1950s at the first World Deaf Congress. It was more formalized in the 70s. However, it's never used in a day-to-day fashion (like at home or school), so people don't adopt native fluency.

It's not perfect, but it does help resolve communication barriers at large world Deaf-culture events like the Deaf Olympics.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Sign