Tuesday, 23 February 2010

pne: Dots representing "pne" in Braille. (brl)

I wonder how many native speakers of a sign language learn a second sign language. At a hunch, I’d imagine that fewer do than those who use a vocal language, if only because foreign languages are compulsory in many schools I know (which all use speech for instruction) but I don’t know whether the same is true for schools taught through the medium of sign language.

I also wonder what the situation is for readers of Braille: how many of them learn the Braille system of a foreign language. Here, I can much more easily imagine such a person learning a foreign (vocal) language at school, but I don’t know whether they would get taught the Brailly system used by native speakers of that language.

For example, would a German person learning English at school use German Braille to represent it, English Grade 1 Braille (which, I think, differs mostly only in a couple of punctuation marks from German basic Braille), or would they learn “proper” Grade 2 Braille (which, of course, has all sorts of different abbreviation rules compared to German contracted Braille)?

pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)

I’ve come across a construction a couple of times while reading news in Romansh that seems to be used to refer to people from a specific place: “ils da X”, literally “the [ones] from X”.

I was reminded of that just now when seeing an article with the subtitle “Ils dal Vnuost vulessan eir alch «Bio e sfera»” (The ones from Vinschgau Valley would also like some ‘bio and sphere’”), but had also seen things such as “ils da Flem” (the ones from Flims; die aus Flims, die Flimser) in the past.

It’s fun extracting such grammatical constructions / learning them “by osmosis”—and makes me feel accomplished :-)

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pne: A picture of a plush toy, halfway between a duck and a platypus, with a green body and a yellow bill and feet. (Default)
Philip Newton

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