Auslan Holiday

December 20, 2022 1:47 AM

Auslan, the majority Australian sign language has a visual dictionary with three recognised signs for ‘holiday’, of which the second is noteworthy.
posted by Fiasco da Gama (26 comments total)

Oh yeah. I you think hearing Aussies are sweary, cynical, and irreverent, you're gonna shit meeting Auslan speakers.

I have a very dear friend whose Auslan name is essentially "short but big tits", and she has a friend whose name translates as "the guy who put his dick in a vacuum cleaner".

Auslan is wild.
posted by prismatic7 at 3:09 AM on December 20, 2022 [14 favorites]

Derail: Years ago, I used to run a session on more effective use of PubMed [the index of publication Abstracts in the biomedical science] which included a list of search terms to try: "vacuum cleaner injuries" "Vasectomy and prostate cancer" "Vending machine injury""Vesalius" . . . I was just checking that list and found a link to "Airway foreign body removal by a home vacuum cleaner: Findings of a multi-center registry in Japan" - the limitless extent of human ingenuity.

On-track: for me, the previous Auslan sign to Holiday is "idleness, loafer, loafing" which to my eye is identical to holiday(1) and a quite a bit different from "bludger", lest anyone suspect that Auslan lacks nuance.
posted by BobTheScientist at 4:06 AM on December 20, 2022

I'm learning JSL, and whenever I have to talk about my siblings, I burn so many calories trying to maintain my veneer of grownupness.
posted by The genius who rejected Anno's budget proposal. at 4:54 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

This will probably reveal my ignorance, but is there a reason why there are different types of sign languages? It seems like having a universal sign language would be much more attainable than a universal spoke language.
posted by vorpal bunny at 5:57 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Why? People learn their language from the people around them and the culture they experience, regardless of whether it’s spoken or signed.
posted by Songdog at 6:05 AM on December 20, 2022 [6 favorites]

This will probably reveal my ignorance, but is there a reason why there are different types of sign languages? It seems like having a universal sign language would be much more attainable than a universal spoke language.

For the same reason there are different types of spoken languages. Different communities came up with them in different times and places. Sign languages are languages, and while there are instances of borrowings and so forth, it isn't more than other languages.

American Sign Language has a lot of similarity to French Sign Language, because the biggest Deaf residential school in the 19th century was founded by a French immigrant. But it also has a lot of Nantucket Sign Language, some Plains Indians sign, and a great deal of stuff which just naturally came about. It has absolutely no similarity to British Sign Language whatsoever.

And sign languages are natural languages. There was an actual attempt to stamp out ASL the way that the English tried to stamp out Welsh, or Americans tried to stamp out various Native languages. ASL went underground and became a language taught secretly by generations of Deaf kids in residential schools whose teachers were trying to ban it.

The idea of a universal sign language is just like the idea of a universal spoken language. It might sound like a good idea, but, in practice - how many native Esperanto speakers do you know?
posted by Xiphias Gladius at 6:16 AM on December 20, 2022 [27 favorites]

Go on holiday and find out. I like this!
posted by The Half Language Plant at 7:09 AM on December 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

but that is just a proper good greeting: HOLIDAY!! I not only have time for you, I have two fucks to give
posted by elkevelvet at 7:18 AM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Easier than a worldwide spoken language might still mean incredibly difficult.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:06 AM on December 20, 2022

The Deaf Village in Dublin includes the Holy Family School for the Deaf: a recent [2016] merger between St. Mary’s School for Deaf Girls and St. Joseph’s School for Deaf Boys. These latter were founded in Cabra in the 1840s when all education was under the control of one or other church. The girls school came first and two Dominican nuns set off for l'école des sourds du Bon Sauveur de Caen to learn best practice from their French counterparts. That's the fundamental, historical inertia, reason why ISL follows the French model rather than the British. Another oddity of historical contingency is that Ireland followed/follows a wide-spread practice of educating boys and girls separately. Because they developed in isolation, the ISL used by deaf girls departed from that used by the boys on the other side of the wall.
posted by BobTheScientist at 8:36 AM on December 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Following on from other responses about sign languages developing and evolving much as spoken languages do, the story of Nicaraguan Sign Language is really interesting as it developed spontaneously in the 1980s. So (as well as having all the cultural richness of any language) it offered a case study for linguists in how human languages develop organically.
posted by plonkee at 8:50 AM on December 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

There is a similar dictionary of New Zealand Sign Language (my friend Dave M is responsible for the site). Wikipedia tells me NZSL, like Auslan, is a descendant of British Sign Language with much in common (not the sign for holiday, it would appear).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:47 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

I will be teaching people some sign language at dinner this weekend.

All three signs are pretty good responses to, "Have any plans next week?"
posted by Revvy at 11:36 AM on December 20, 2022

So this is interesting: I've been told that "the bird" is not really considered part of sign languages, or at least definitely not ASL, and that it's a hand sign hearing people use as part of their language to say "fuck you" with hands. Whereas an ASL speaker has other signs to use to convey that sentiment in a way that's definitely in that language.

So the Auslan version 2 seems to come from a "standard" sign for vacation with an added overtone of English Hand Shape for the bird. As in "not only am I out relaxing but to hell with your urgent work call I'll see you after the new year". Is that where it actually comes from? Is it a multilingual pun that combines a formal sign language with an informal, but more universal, use of hand signs?
posted by traveler_ at 11:59 AM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well, that's how I feel about Christmas so right on, I can dig it and all that.
posted by y2karl at 1:19 PM on December 20, 2022

I mentioned this to my friend Dave the NZSL lexicographer, who is an actual linguist as well as a computer person, and he said:

"Discussions of the etymology of signs in sign languages is fraught. That said, there is an NZSL sign for "lazy" which uses the middle finger extended; given that Auslan and NZSL both have their roots in BSL, it makes sense that a sign for holiday is related to a sign for lazy."
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:29 PM on December 20, 2022

I mean, is this just like how one French word for wax, fart, resembles an English word?
posted by Chef Flamboyardee at 2:10 PM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Following on from other responses about sign languages developing and evolving much as spoken languages do, the story of Nicaraguan Sign Language is really interesting as it developed spontaneously in the 1980s. So (as well as having all the cultural richness of any language) it offered a case study for linguists in how human languages develop organically.
posted by plonkee

This is the most fascinating aspect of all languages to me, including 'technical' languages like maths or music. If you put two people together with no common language, but the need to communicate, they will spontaneously and organically develop one to suit their circumstance and purpose.

The endless variety of sound and gesture created for language by our dextrous voice and hands never ceases to impress and delight me.
posted by Pouteria at 5:16 PM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

So does this imply that being on holiday is just fucking around?
posted by amusebuche at 5:58 PM on December 20, 2022

I took a few classes in ASL, years ago, and they taught us about the myriad of sign languages all over the world, and the difficulties an ASL signer would have when meeting deaf people in other countries. Yes, they are very different. But there are signs that mean one thing here and something entirely different somewhere else. There were a lot of deaf people from Taiwan at the local city college where I was going. And our teacher told us that the ASL sign for “shit” was the same as the Taiwanese sign for “happy birthday.” Laughs we’re had when the American and Taiwanese students were signing to each other. Sign language is language with all the quirks of spoken language.
posted by njohnson23 at 6:28 PM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Sorry if this is a derail but I'm intrigued by how often people ask the "why isn't sign language universal?" question.

Why would people think that gestures & expressions are so different from verbal language?

Genuine, not exasperated question.
posted by Zumbador at 9:06 PM on December 20, 2022

People might think that Sign Language is simply further elaboration on what one might call 'universal pantomime' - eat, drink, drive a car, shrug for I don't know.
Make these motions to almost anyone you don't share a language with, and you can convey simple meanings.

They're not thinking about how, as mentioned above, the deaf of Tokyo and of Toronto would naturally and separately come up with their own signs for more complex meanings like 'last Tuesday before breakfast' or 'flowers grow from shit' and they might not match.

(my own question about various SLs is about grammar and word order. Does French Sign Language sign 'book blue' or 'blue book'? Is there correspondence between local spoken languages about Subject-Verb-Object patterns and local sign languages, or no? Or only sometimes? Do many SLs happen to follow similar patterns with each other; regardless of the local languages they're surrounded by?)
posted by bartleby at 11:40 PM on December 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

bartleby I can only speak to ASL / American English: their word orderings are quite different and to me seem entirely unrelated. (And why would ASL speakers care about English, after all?)
See glossed examples of word order: ASL normally puts adjectives after nouns and modals after verbs, for example. More fundamentally, ASL is a subject-verb-object language in S/V terms, but actually uses topic/comment syntax that doesn't even fit that structure.
posted by away for regrooving at 12:46 AM on December 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

(And why would ASL speakers care about English, after all?)
I was thinking about written languages vs signed.
If 'sign grammar' is your first language, but there is written American English all around you; do Yoda's subtitles make more sense than Luke's?
Do you tend not to read or write for pleasure, because [local language] writing is so baroque and needlessly wordy?
That's what I was thinking about, the amount of code-switching between written and signed, either within one language region or across regions.
Little oddities like (hypothetically) Brazil and Portugal can read each other's newspapers; but their sign languages are opaque to each other.
Or maybe the reverse, where Koreans and Egyptians have no language barrier in sign but can't send each other a postcard.
posted by bartleby at 1:46 AM on December 21, 2022

One of the only things about sign language grammar that I do know, is that it's not necessarily linear. Which makes sense because people are communicating using a 3-d space and usually with 2 hands.
posted by plonkee at 7:46 AM on December 21, 2022

One of the only things about sign language grammar that I do know, is that it's not necessarily linear. Which makes sense because people are communicating using a 3-d space and usually with 2 hands.

I have a lot of trouble with envisioning 3D space, and when I was studying American Sign Language, this was a thing that was really hard for me. One way that ASL uses pronouns is that the speaker can establish a pronoun by pointing to a spot, and then, rather than re-spelling or using the person's sign name if they have one, point to that spot. You could have three, four, or even more places in the 3D space in front of you designated as pronouns as you're telling a complex story. My brain did not cope well with that at all.
posted by Well I never at 9:36 AM on December 21, 2022 [3 favorites]