The forgotten endangered languages: Lessons on the importance of remembering from Thailand's Ban Khor Sign Language

Nonaka, Angela Miyuki

doi:10.1017/s004740450404504x

Cited by 109 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…These are the natural sign languages used in village communities with a high incidence of deafness, often hereditary deafness. Typically, these sign languages arise in isolation from other sign languages and are localised in a very small geographical area (Johnson 1994, Branson, Miller & Marsaja 1999, Nonaka 2004, Nyst 2004, Sandler, Meir, Padden & Aronoff 2005. One such sign language, Kata Kolok from Bali, was included in the typological project on questions and negation, but there are many others whose linguistic structures are undocumented or which have not even been identified yet.…”

Section: Scope and Significance Of The Volumementioning

confidence: 99%

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Zeshan¹

2006

172

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The Sign Language Typology Series is dedicated to the comparative study of sign languages around the world. Individual or collective works that systematically explore typological variation across sign languages are the focus of this series, with particular emphasis on undocumented, underdescribed and endangered sign languages. The scope of the series primarily includes cross-linguistic studies of grammatical domains across a larger or smaller sample of sign languages, but also encompasses the study of individual sign languages from a typological perspective and comparison between signed and spoken languages in terms of language modality, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions to sign language typology. We started talking about sign languages and deaf communities, and, becoming more and more surprised at all the strange facts I was bringing to his notice, he summed up our discussion with the words: "I only came to find a new television, but I found a whole new world!". Since 1994, my work in the world of deaf communities in various countries has brought with it a constant stream of memorable moments. A nightly journey in 1998 on a bicycle-rickshaw through a quarter of the old city in Delhi to visit a deaf family, in almost total darkness due to one of the usual electricity cuts. The first Indian conference on bilingualism in deaf education in Hyderabad in 2001. A long evening in Eskişehir learning the local games of chance in the deaf club together with some of my first Turkish signs. A week trapped in snowstorms in the worst Istanbul winter in decades, and severe Monsoon floodings in Mumbai. And above all, the long nights of relentless and addictive signing.Working in developing countries means working under the constant strain of insufficient resources and, at times, personal hardship, but more often than not, this is counterbalanced by the amazing human resources to be found in the deaf communities themselves. I gratefully acknowledge that they have been my main source of inspiration, and so it is to them that I wish to dedicate this volume.On the academic side, I am no less grateful to the many people who have accompanied me on various stages of the journey towards the beginnings of sign language typology. I owe a lot to the Research Centre for Linguistic Typology (RCLT) in Australia, which was my host institution in Canberra and in Melbourne between 1999 and 2003. The framework for a large cross-linguistic study on negatives and interrogatives in sign languages, which has resulted in the present volume, first took shape at the RCLT. The subsequent development of the project is something that still surprises me. Having designed questionnaires and contacted possible collaborators around the world, the sensible expectation, which luckily I was not aware of at the time, would have been to get some basic information from a handful of respondents, if not less. Instead, I received responses for sign languages from 18 countries, varying from a few basic written answers to complete 20-page papers. Mo...

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Section: Scope and Significance Of The Volumementioning

confidence: 99%

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Zeshan¹

2006

172

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“…This understanding can hardly be overestimated, bearing in mind that the recognition of sign language as a genuine language was disputed within scholarly linguistics until the late 1960s. This shared experiential knowledge constitutes a unique from debates concerned with the circumstances under which Deaf communities or identities evolve (e.g., Schein 1992;Bahan and Nash 1995;Woll and Ladd 2003;Monaghan 2003), the study of disablement and non-medical models of disability (e.g., Scheer and Groce 1988;Oliver 1990;Ingstad and Whyte 1995), endangered languages (Nyst 2007;Nonaka 2004), and the emergence of new sign languages as a prism to the origins of human language and its structure (e.g. Senghas 2005).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Deaf Discourse”: The Social Construction of Deafness in a Bedouin Community

Kisch¹

2008

Medical Anthropology

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“…The indigenous sign language of Ban Khor 2 has, according to the preliminary research of Angela M. Nonaka (2004), three basic color terms and, consistent with Berlin's and Kay's theory, these terms are BLACK, WHITE and RED (Nonaka 2004: 749-750). The description of the Adamorobe Sign Language (AdaSL) 3 by Victoria Nyst (2007) also confirms Berlin's and Kay's theory.…”

Section: Basic Color Terms In Sign Languagesmentioning

confidence: 71%

Basic Color Terms in Estonian Sign Language

Hollman¹,

Sutrop²

2010

sls

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The article is written in the tradition of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay’s theory of basic color terms. According to this theory there is a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories from which the basic color terms of any given language are always drawn. The number of basic color terms varies from 2 to 11 and in a language having a fully developed color system there are eleven basic color terms: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray . The studies about basic color terms in sign languages show that lexicalization of basic color terms in sign languages follows the same pattern found in spoken languages. The current study is the first close study on the color terminology in Estonian Sign Language. The survey was carried out in summer 2005 and consisted of three tasks, following Davies and Corbett’s field method: the list task, the City University color vision test and the color-naming task. Fifty ESL users from different parts of Estonia were interviewed for the study. The collected data shows that the BCT hierarchy is clearly displayed in Estonian Sign Language and it may be concluded that Estonian Sign Language is a Stage VII language and has nine basic color terms: black , white , red , yellow , green , blue , gray , brown and pink / purple .

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The forgotten endangered languages: Lessons on the importance of remembering from Thailand's Ban Khor Sign Language

Cited by 109 publications

References 28 publications

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

Interrogative and Negative Constructions in Sign Language

“Deaf Discourse”: The Social Construction of Deafness in a Bedouin Community

Basic Color Terms in Estonian Sign Language

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