AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MORPHOLOGY OF ROMANIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

Transcription

1 STUDIA UBB. PHILOLOGIA, LVI, 1, 2011 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MORPHOLOGY OF ROMANIAN SIGN LANGUAGE SIMONA DAMIAN ABSTRACT. This article seeks to emphasize the importance of Romanian Sign Language research for the improvement of the communication between the Deaf and the hearing in general and for the education of deaf children and training of interpreters in particular. The article also briefly presents the work we have undertaken in this respect, pointing out several theoretical aspects related to the morphology of Romanian Sign Language. Key words: sign language, deaf education, sign language morphology, manualism, oralism. The communication barrier between the Romanian Deaf communities and the hearing mainstream society represents the source of most of the problems in the field of deafness. Researchers and linguists all over the world have proven that sign languages are real languages and should be regarded as such. Although the Romanian legislation 1 has officially recognized the Romanian Sign Language as the language of the Deaf, in practice they are facing discrimination on a daily basis due to a disability of the system. The UN Convention on the Rights of the People with Disabilities stipulates: States Parties shall [ ] facilitate the learning of sign language and the promotion of the linguistic identity of the Deaf community 2. According to the Romanian National Authority for People with Disabilities (ANPH), in Romania there are 20,247 hearing impaired people. However, most deaf specialists agree that the total number reaches as much as 30,000. If we add to this number the sign language interpreters and the friends and family of the Deaf who learned the Romanian Sign Language (RSL), we can imagine the number of RSL users that can benefit from the development of this domain. A study of the Romanian Sign Language grammar has been long-waited by the Romanian Association of the Deaf (ANSR) and the Romanian Association of Accredited Sign Language Interpreters, who are trying to promote and develop RSL. Simona Damian has graduated from the Applied Modern Languages Department within Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She is an authorized translator and interpreter, sign language interpreter interested in Romanian Sign Language research. address: simona.pintea@gmail.com 1 Romanian Government s Decree no. 102, Chapter III, article 15, item 1. ( ) 2

2 SIMONA DAMIAN Before having a closer look at the RSL linguistic aspects, we consider it necessary to mention the two main approaches of deafness. As Harlan Lane points out in The Mask of Benevolence (1999: 129), since decades sign languages have been a matter of debate among specialists. There is, even nowadays, a strong ideological conflict between the oralists and the manualists. The manualist theory supports the idea of educating the deaf children using their mother tongue sign language. It promotes the identity and culture of the deaf community and the development of sign languages. According to the oralist theory, the deaf must be taught the spoken/written language in order to be socially included and lead a normal life. In order to illustrate the complexity of this process we chose to present some excerpts from an article published in 2006 in the local newspaper Clujeanul, a regional newspaper, interviewing Mrs. Rodica Oproiu, a speech therapist working with hearing impaired children. A couple of dozens of children from all over the country pronounced for the first time ma-ma only after hundreds of hours of therapy, over a period of 8 to 10 years. Rodica Oproiu managed to teach speaking to almost 90 children who otherwise would have been limited to the use of Sign Language. [ ] This system [Sign Language] makes the children become lazy and not wanting to learn to talk anymore. I am against this system, in the case of children who can recover. 3 However, other specialists have less extreme opinions. For instance, Mihail Grecu, president of ANSR, seems to favour a mixed method. In the foreword of the Romanian Sign Language Dictionary (Bogdan & Bogdan 2003) he says: Practice has proved that in the education of the hearing impaired the most efficient method is the bilingual one (Sign Language and oral language), which is successfully used in the developed countries where the integration of deaf people in society was achieved with great results. Throughout history, practice has confirmed that by using the bilingual method children developed more than those educated exclusively through the oral method, they are more intelligent and more successful in life. In most Romanian schools for the Deaf the oralist method prevails, meaning that RSL is almost never used. Lane also speaks about minority languages and argues that if the minority language is not allowed in schools, this reduces the self image and the potential achievement of those who use it. He also adds that if education is ineffective, [ ] much of the minority is poor, illiterate and unlikely to exert political influence on behalf of goals distinct from those of the majority (Lane 1999: 106). Thus the limited usage of RSL results into a very low level of 3 (our translation) 134

3 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MORPHOLOGY OF ROMANIAN SIGN LANGUAGE education, leading to pseudo-deficiencies with an irreversible negative impact on the quality of life of these persons. According to the Romanian Academic Society 4, 12,7% of the Romanian disabled people aged between are employed. There are no statistics regarding the Deaf employment specifically but we can easily draw the conclusion that many deaf people are unemployed. Oralists tend to ignore the fact that for a deaf person a spoken language is a foreign language, even if it is the language of the country they live in. When we learn a foreign language we start from what we know in our mother tongue and at the beginning we start by learning simple equivalent terms, expressions, we start studying the grammar and the syntactic rules. So some theoretical background knowledge about one s own language is needed. The bigger the difference between languages, the more theoretical knowledge one needs in order to be able to fully understand the way in which the foreign language works. If we apply this theory to the RSL we can understand why learning the Romanian spoken language is so difficult for the Deaf. Besides the fact that it is a visual language, the grammatical structure is totally different from the one of spoken languages so that the more a deaf child knows about his own language, the easier it is for him to understand a spoken language and its theoretical aspects and complexity. If we highlight the importance of theoretical aspects it is because for many deaf persons it is not the oral communication mode that poses most problems, but the intricate structure of spoken language. Many educated deaf persons are able to lip-read, making the connection between the movement of the lips and the sequence of letters (the word) which designates a specific concept. This way of obtaining information can prove to be very effective when the speaker uses short, clear sentences without specialized terminology. If the speech is delivered fast, with long, embedded sentences, the complexity of the speech may be too intricate for the deaf person to decode it. Staying in the same oralist education context but moving on to the teachers, we notice that they also face difficulties in teaching, especially teaching Romanian grammar to the deaf pupils. We believe that it would be much easier for them as well if they used the theoretical aspects of RSL for explaining the spoken Romanian grammar. To illustrate our point, we will give the example of William Stokoe, an English teacher at Gallaudet University, who was the first to study the grammar of American Sign Language (ASL) and he did this precisely because he couldn t understand why his deaf students, even the most outstanding ones, had difficulties in understanding English grammar. He therefore started to study the phonological, morphological and semiological organization of signs (Maher 2002: 62). With each analogy to English and other spoken languages, Stokoe further undermined long-held beliefs about "the sign language": that it was limited both in vocabulary and in its ability to produce grammatical sentences, that 4 statistic made by ANPH,

4 SIMONA DAMIAN 136 it was iconographic, nothing more than graphic pictures drawn in the air, that it resembled pantomime, that it was universal, and that it could not be used to express the abstract. (Maher 2002: 69) Even though the oralist method excludes the usage of Sign Language, we tried to demonstrate that this method cannot function successfully without the contribution of theoretical and practical aspects of sign language. According to the data we obtained from ANSR, Dimitrie Rusticeanu was the first to have attempted, in 1935, to systematize the RSL. He tried to classify the signs according to several criteria, thus proving that RSL was seen as a language worth of attention back then. However, during the last decades, the medical model took over and less attention was given to RSL from the linguistic point of view. That is why, at present, Romania lacks scientific data regarding RSL. In our research we analyzed some basic morphological aspects of RSL and we focused on handshapes. Several attempts have been made in describing the handshapes in RSL but they were incomplete and they lacked precision. A clear, comprehensive set of handshapes was needed for standardizing the RSL and is especially needed in the training of the teachers for the deaf children and RSL interpreters. The Romanian manual alphabet represents the equivalent in signs of each letter of the Romanian alphabet. It is very important to mention the fact that RSL has a monomanual alphabet, the signs for the letters being performed using only one hand. Other sign languages, such as the British Sign Language, sign the letters of the alphabet using both hands. We largely used foreign scientific literature to guide our research, but the main instrument used in the attempt to identify the RSL handshapes was the Romanian Sign Language Dictionary (Bogdan & Bogdan 2003). In order to be able to compare RSL with spoken Romanian we used the Romanian Grammar Compendium (Bejan 2001). The dictionary does not include all the signs in RSL, given the fact that RSL is not fully standardized yet, but it represents the most advanced tool we could use for our purpose. We analyzed over 3000 signs included in the dictionary and identified around 50 handshapes, except from the manual alphabet handshapes. As some handshapes were very similar to others, we reduced the number to 35 basic handshapes. We took photographs of each handshape in order to illustrate the configuration of the fingers as clearly as possible. Afterwards, we validated the results together with sign language experts, native users of RSL. Just like spoken languages, sign languages differ from the lexical point of view as well as in grammatical structure. The basic lexical unit in ASL is the sign. Whereas words in spoken languages are articulated by various movements and interactions along the vocal tract, signs in ASL are articulated by various movements of the hands in visible locations on or near the signer's body. Some signs are produced with both hands; others are produced with only one. (Neidle 2000: 27)

5 AN INTRODUCTION TO THE MORPHOLOGY OF ROMANIAN SIGN LANGUAGE Within a word, we can identify morphemes segments which follow a succession in a linear, horizontal order in written form and a linear timeline in speech. In sign language, things are slightly different. Signs do have several constitutive elements, but given the fact that sign languages are three-dimensional languages, the constituents appear simultaneously (or almost simultaneously). In a written form, words can easily be analyzed, unit by unit. In sign language, specialists work with video recordings, which make the analysis a lot more complex and difficult. Despite the difference in the mode of communication, we can still make a comparison between RSL and Romanian from the point of view of the elements that make up the word/sign. The word can be divided in segmental morphemes (root, stem, prefixes, suffixes and inflectional endings) and suprasegmental morphemes (accent and intonation). Similarly, in RSL we have relatively fixed and finite elements (handshapes, location, orientation and movement) and other elements which can be infinite from the configuration point of view and more difficult to analyze (facial expressions, body position, breath, movement of the eyes and mouth). In RSL, the suprasegmental elements mentioned above have a higher share than their equivalents in spoken languages. Sign language researchers have tried in many ways to find morphological correspondences between the elements of sign language and those of spoken languages. For example, Stokoe identified three elements within the sign: location, what acts (handshape) and movement. Later on, other researchers such as Liddell (1999) and Neidle (2000) added the hand orientation. We chose to include this fourth element in our research especially because we noticed that there are many pairs of signs in RSL that only differ by the orientation of the hand. All elements of a sign are very important and if one element changes, the whole meaning of the sign can change. We must also mention that whereas the word has a fixed form (or several fixed forms), signs can greatly differ in shape according to different factors. For example, the better two deaf persons know each other, the more they tend to make shortcuts when signing by omitting signs and reducing the movements. An extrovert, energetic signer will tend to make ample, fast, clear movements, whereas a shy signer tends to use less space when signing, with less defined handshapes. An older signer might be restricted in movements and articulation by the loss of flexibility of the joints, or a heavily pregnant deaf woman might be forced to move all the abdomen-positioned signs in an upper position. A very common distortion of the signs is made when the signer is holding something in one hand and must use bimanual signs performed with only one hand. All these variations in signing, added to the fact that RSL is not fully standardized, make the research of RSL grammar even more challenging. This undertaking was meant to be a first step towards studying the RSL grammar. Beyond the theoretical aspects revealed, this study resulted in a set of

6 Powered by TCPDF ( SIMONA DAMIAN RSL handshapes, clearly illustrated in photographs. The study represents a starting point for further research of the subject matter but most importantly, it offers a tool for the training of RSL interpreters and specialists working with the Deaf, thus bringing service providers for the Deaf a step closer to the European standards. Further research on RSL is imperatively needed in order to facilitate the communication between the hearing and the Deaf and subsequently increase the quality of education, interpreting and generally the life of Romanian deaf people. BIBLIOGRAPHY BAKER S.A, PETITTO L.A (2005) The perception of handshapes in American Sign Language, Memory and Cognition, Psychonomic Society, Inc. BEJAN, D (2001) Gramatica Limbii Române-compendiu, Editura Echinox, Cluj-Napoca. BOGDAN, G. D. and R. BOGDAN, (eds.) (2003) DicŃionar de limbaj gestual românesc. Cluj-Napoca: Mega. COSTELLO, E. (1997) American Sign Language Dictionary - A complete Sign Dictionary with Full Definitions & Different Signs for Different Meanings of the Same Word. New York: Gallaudet University Press. HUMPHREY Janice H., ALCORN Bob.J (2001) So You Want To Be An Interpreter? An introduction to Sign Language Interpreting, H&H Publishing Company, Inc. Seattle, WA. LANE, H. (1999) The mask of benevolence: disabling the Deaf community. San Diego: DawnSignPress. LIDDELL Scott K. (2003) Grammar, Gesture and Meaning in American Sign Language, Cambridge University Press. MAHER, Jane (2002) Seeing Language in Sign The work of William C. Stokoe, Gallaudet University Press Washington, D.C. MARSCHARK M., PETERSON R., WINSTON E.A. (2005) Sign Language Interpreting and Interpreter Education Oxford University Press. NÈVE François-Xavier (1996) Essai de grammaire de la langue des signes française, Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et Lettres de l Université de Liège. NEIDLE, Carol Jan (2000) The Syntax of American Sign Language: Functional Categories and Hierarchical Structure Language, Speech, and Communication, MIT Press. SĂLĂJAN, Cristian (2006) O analiză socio-lingvistică introductivă asupra Limbajului Gestual Românesc, unpublished BA thesis. SANDLER W., LILLO-MARTIN D. (2006) Sign Language and Linguistic Universals Cambridge University Press. 138