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Tuesday, April 25, 2006
A Reflection of Its Social Community
Experts Come Together to Produce an Extraordinary
American Sign Language Dictionary
Simply defined as texts that describe the meanings of words, with examples and
pronunciation, dictionaries often are much more than that. Dictionaries
frequently reflect the social community in which the language is used, and the
language need not be a spoken one. Gallaudet University Press has published a
dictionary that reflects the community of the first liberal arts university in
the world. With renowned linguist and native signer Clayton Valli as
Editor-in-Chief, a remarkable team of native ASL signers and linguists worked
for more than six years to create
The Gallaudet
Dictionary of American Sign Language.
Now available,
The Gallaudet
Dictionary of American Sign Language is a learning tool for beginning signers, a reference tool for more advanced
signers, and also an English vocabulary reference for Deaf people. Because
American Sign Language, like all languages, contains a lot of variation,
the editors of this dictionary have included several versions of some signs. To
achieve this goal, the dictionary contains more than 3,000 ASL signs. The DVD
enclosed with the dictionary includes live-action clips of signers making all of
the signs and is completely searchable, allowing users to look up signs by
typing in synonyms or to find signs with alternate meanings.
View
sample illustrations, and order
online now to receive a special savings of 20% off the regular price by
typing “APR0620%” in the box marked “Comments or Special Instructions” below
your credit card information. Or, order by
mail.
 In
her upcoming book,
Frequency of Occurrence and Ease of Articulation of Sign Language Handshapes:
The Taiwanese Example, author Jean Ann explores handshapes in Taiwan Sign
Language (TSL), one of the more studied sign
languages of Asia. Jean Ann explains, “About fifty-six handshapes have been
discovered for TSL (Smith and Ting 1979, 1984). The null hypothesis would
predict that all fifty-six handshapes ought to occur with equal frequency in TSL.
However, this conjecture is not the case; in fact, some handshapes occur with
much greater frequency than others. Why should this variation occur? Linguists
might hypothesize that ease of articulation has something to do with this
phenomenon. In other words, the handshapes that are used most frequently are the
easiest to articulate or make. This book examines that hypothesis.” Read more in chapter 2 “The Anatomy and Physiology of the Human Hand,” and
order
Frequency of Occurrence and Ease of Articulation of Sign Language Handshapes.
Just this month, Deaf Women’s Lives co-author Bainy Cyrus won a 2006 notable
award from Writers Notes Magazine, an
international resource for authors published by independent and small presses,
for her memoir All Eyes featured in
Deaf Women’s Lives: Three Self-Portraits, the
third volume in the Deaf Lives series.
In All Eyes, Cyrus vividly tells of how she was taught using the oral
method at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, MA, and how two girls
there changed her life later as an adult. Read an excerpt of Cyrus’s
memoir, and order
Deaf Women’s Lives
here.
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