Equal Opportunity: Vision and Future
EOC: Vision and Future
Tanmoy Bhattacharya
[Talk given at the AIF-RTE meeting, 7th Nov. 2009, University of Delhi]
The Equal Opportunity Cell, of the University of Delhi (http://eoc.du.ac.in) was constituted in 2006 with Rama Kant Agnihotri as the co-ordinator to provide equal accessibility and a barrier free environment to persons with physical disabilities and students in reserved categories, such as SC/ST/OBC and other minorities.
Right at the beginning, I’d like to emphasise that ‘barrier-free’ is now a much familiar phrase which, in the common imagination, implies environmental aspects of accessibility (like building more ramps, putting up signages, etc.), but as Anita Ghai in her talk later will re-emphasise, it is more than a physical concept alone. In fact, we have come to stand for the view that the barriers are more a part of the society and the collective mind-set of the society peopled by the majority doing and building things for the majority.
When the EOC was constituted, there were very few members and even fewer enthusiasts and takers. We didn’t have a space of our own, the meetings were held every month or at least every two months, in a tiny corner of the Braille library where a motley crowd of 10 or so people, including some interested students, would gather to discuss the newly emerging issues to do with disability. Even we didn’t have a clear agenda but one hallmark of this early period was the accessibility audit that was conduced for the colleges of the university, and later for many university buildings, by Samarthyam. It is only now that the implementation work of that audit is taking shape slowly. Apart from that, we would deal case by case issues of disability as referred to the committee. Early on, we dealt with the inhuman case of one lecturer of this university in wheel chair who would sometimes have 2-3 hours gap between two classes and would have to simply wait in the corridor in the wheelchair, the teachers room being on the first floor; there wasn’t even an accessible toilet and the person would have to be carried by two people to the toilet.
It took two years of single minded vision of Prof. Agnihotri and few dedicated individuals associated with him to bring into existence the modern space that we have now. This, in spite of active and genuine support from the Vice-Chancellor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of this university, for whom, the EOC is like their favourite child – so much so, that in all the functions that we have arranged so far, at least one of them, and sometimes both of them, like on the Orientation Day, would be present. We do not have any high-profile function, we do not get dignitaries in our centre, but the VC and/or the PVC’s presence can be counted upon. With this support and the generous support from NTPC, who on their own came up to provide financial and engineering help, the DU-NTPC ICT Centre was inaugurated on 20th October 2008.
After the centre was set up, along with continuing the earlier work, it has also made available assistive devices through another NGO Saksham to ones who need them, produced about 100 scanned books and collected 4000 e-books. A strong area of the EOC has been to hold sensitising and awareness workshops for different groups within and outside the university. Again, we have a very dedicated staff of people manning the centre, Dr. Nisha Chandra Singh, the Officer on Special Duty has been looking after the workshops very efficiently among other everyday work at the Centre, Prashant Verma who is the manager of the Centre employed by the NTPC has been looking after the ICT course, Hidam Gaurashyam (technical assistant for the Hearing Impaired) and Ramnik Singh (technical assistant for the orthopaedically impaired) are hired as specialists in their areas and they are doing a commendable job. In addition, we have a very dedicated staff of people like Geeta, Vinod and Rajbeer who have been doing much more than just their job profile demands, like everybody else at the Centre. Almost all these people are here today making this meeting happen!
However, the flagship programme of the Centre has been the short-term certificate courses that were started on December 3, 2008; in fact, Sonal Sena, sitting here, was the one who took the first class at the Centre – it was as a part of the Disability and Human Rights course. We started with 4 courses, namely, Sign Language Interpretation (A Level), Disability and Human Rights, Information and Communication Technology, mostly geared toward the Visually Impaired, and Communicative English, mainly geared towards the reserved candidates. Although we didn’t have a lot of time for publicity, we managed to get a good number of students (88) during the first run. Many experts from the disability field were invited to deliver special lectures and take classes as part of the Disability and Human Rights course. For the next batch of courses, we introduced a new course entitled News Reading, Anchoring and Voice Over taught by well-known television personality J.V.Raman; several invited lectures were given by experts from Doordarshan on topics ranging from news reading, anchoring, makeup, lighting, to the portrayal of disability in the media by Anita Ghai a few weeks back. Further, among the next batch of courses to be started in January 2010, we’d like to introduce another new course, Sign Language Interpretation (B Level) for students who have passed the A-level course of this Centre or any other institute. The courses have been a judicial mix of skill development and awareness building. Thus, they are designed to provide skills required to enhance job prospects and also to provide manpower for sectors dedicated to working for the disabled, like Sign Language interpretation and Human Rights.
Apart from the courses, the other academic component of the Centre has been to hold monthly workshops on Sign Language which has been quite popular and reports of the workshops are available at the EOC website. We are also concentrating on issues that have to do with the universal evaluation metric that is applied still in our schools and colleges, where the orthopaedically disabled person is forced to climb up exams and interviews, where the visually impaired person is forced to write exams with or without assistance, where the deaf is interviewed or orally examined. Very few people know that reading or writing skills of the blind or the deaf is very low, and this is not only the case of India in isolation. A survey in the US revealed that 18 year deaf students have the reading skills of a 6th grader. I have been saying this for a while, that among the deaf there is a high level of illiteracy, that is because the education system as a whole, and definitely the evaluation method, is heavily biased against the disabled. We need to address strongly the issue of equitability of testing and exam systems. I think this meeting of educationist and school-teachers here can take this up in one of their future meetings.
However, we don’t want this to turn into a mere training centre, otherwise it will be just a centre for getting a DU certificate. A mere training centre cannot take the movement ahead – I am calling it a ‘movement’ because that is how we need to view disability at the moment and perhaps for another half-a-century to come. There needs to be an underlying philosophy that binds us together and takes us ahead. I outlined this in a recent talk in the context of the philosophy of justice of Martha Nussbaum. There she proposes the Capabilities Approach, which advices us that instead of making bargains as equals, we’d be better off if we participate with our varying degrees of capacity and disability and establish an interconnection of mutually dependent network with each other. For example, I mentioned earlier the high level of illiteracy among the deaf, it is quite possible to make minimal adjustments and create a network between the deaf and the hearing where there is a give and take relation between the two.
In addition, we also need a political vision, especially in a world that is threatened by, what I call, radical homogeneity. With the dissolution of a mainly bipolar world (at least in the Anglo-American discourse), the initial euphoria of globalisation has given way to this threat of radical homogeneity that has pervaded across many spheres of life. This complete absence of agonism and antagonism and conflict in opinion-making can be countered only if a radical form of democracy can be extended to more and more spheres of our lives. And an institute like the Equal Opportunity Cell is one such sphere. The logic of equality cannot be the logic of homogeneity, it has to be the logic of ‘equivalence’. This is where we tie up with an organisation like the AIF-RTE, and also in our need to enrich our experience of activism, I think we are doing alright with teaching, training and documentation aspects but the activism side has been so far lacking and we are fortunate to be able to host this meeting and learn something in return.
©Tanmoy Bhattacharya 2009
2nd IPSL Workshop @ EOC
The IPSL blog is back to reporting on Sign Language, this time with embedded videos as well! The videos are without sound, if anyone know of compressing software that can create smaller files with sound, please let me know.
The second IPSL Workshop at the EOC was held on 30th October 2009 at the DU-NTPC ICT Centre. It is clear from the large number of participation that it is becoming an important event in the calendar for the deaf in the capital. In this workshop, there were two presentation and very lively discussion from the deaf participants. There were a total of 35 participants, out of which 24 were deaf, including students from China, Nepal, Burundi and Uganda.
Audience at the 2nd IPSL Workshop at the EOC, DU
First, it was Prof Rama Kant Agnihotri, Co-ordinator of the EOC and Professor of Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics who gave a highly germane talk on the issue of “Standardization” as it is understood for spoken languages. He further compared it and drew parallel with the situation in Sign Language Standardization.
Rama Kant Agnihotri at the 2nd IPSL Workshop at EOC, DU
Here is a video clip:
It was pointed out that there are four stages in the Process of standardization in natural languages (including of course, Signed languages) as follows:
1. Selection
2. Codification
3. Elaboration
4. Dissemination
As a part of the process of Selection, one variety is chosen to represent the language. Agnihotri pointed out that this is also point where the “Politics of standardization” enters into the picture. It is the powerful who are in a position to select a particular variety. This is obviously not the ideal situation because as linguists and human beings, we would like to believe that all languages or all varieties are equal.
The second stage of codification involves the process of writing up dictionaries and grammars of the variety chosen as the standard. It is important to understand that codification implies bringing into existence real objects like dictionaries and grammars although – and this is the important part – all languages and varieties have ‘dictionaries’ and ‘grammars’ since lexicon (or a list of words) and syntax (knowledge of making sentences in a language) are part of knowing a language, thus, knowing a language means knowing the dictionary and grammar of that language. It was further emphasized that language comes first and dictionaries and grammars later. At this point, Kakooza Muhammes from Uganda pointed out that in Africa (Kenya) there were attempts to first write the grammar and they propagate the language but that experiment, apparently, failed. It was pointed out by Agnihotri that there are certain languages which are not natural languages, foremost being computer languages, that are planned languages. Also, among the spoken languages, Esperanto is one language that is a planned languages but of course there are now 2nd, 3rd generation natural speakers of Esperanto.
The third stage of the process of “Elaboration” involves producing various texts and corpuses in the chosen variety. This is also a stage where discrimination on the basis of the variety one speaks (or signs) may be associated, where the chosen variety (and therefore its users) attains a certain amount of power. Questions raised at this stage by Vishi from Kerala and Upendra from Nepal about this situation being less than ideal.
The fourth stage of “Dissemination” involves spreading the chosen variety among the masses through education and other means. It was very poignantly pointed by Prof. Agnihotri that actually there is in fact sometimes a conscious effort to in fact to not disseminate it to the masses by changing the variety in such a way that the masses will never be able to catch up with the so-called standard variety. At this point, I clarified it for myself that this is something that is more likely to happen within a chosen variety, that is, class-based differences start creeping (and designed) once the variety has been chosen as a standard.
The impression given is that it “unifies” but actually it separates people. In addition, it also produces “attitudes”, where one starts ‘loving’ the standard (and by now ‘high’) variety and ‘hating’ the non-standard (by now ‘low’) variety.
At this point there were many objections and questions from Bablu Kumar (from Delhi), Robindranath Sarkar (from Kolkata), Upendra Khanal (from Nepal), Guan Xuesong (from China) and Njejimana Charles (from Burundi) about their varieties and their place in their lives.
Rabindranath Sarkar at the 2nd IPSL Workshop at EOC, DU
Njejimana Charles at the 2nd IPSL Workshop at EOC, DU
Prof Agnihotri concluded by saying that language is a continuum and there is a model which helps make standardization inclusive and not exclusive and this is the model of multilingualism which has been successfully employed in many countries.
However, many questions remained and the audience was invited for another round of discussion on this topic during the 3rd workshop on 27th November, 2009. Here is a handout of the talk that was distributed during the talk.
The second presentation was by Hidam Gaurshyam on “Adpositions as Classifiers in IPSL”. Hidam started by reporting that many native signers of IPSL when asked about separate signs for Adpositions (prepositions or postpositions like in, on, under, across, etc.) usually deny their existence. However, in ASL (American Sign Language) is claimed to have separate sings for Adpositons. Hidam claimed that in fact, IPSL also has Adpositions but that it’s incorporated into the verb in the same way that a Classifier (like HAND-SHAPE) incorporates features of the noun it classifies.
Hidam presenting at the 2nd IPSL Workshop at EOC, DU
Here is a preliminary version of the talk.
Geetnajali again did a marvelous job of interpreting both the talks in IPSL and interpreting questions back to English:
Geetanjali Nair at the 2nd IPSL Workshop at EOC, DU
Samar has asked me about the notation us…
Samar has asked me about the notation used in the last post. I will explain it soon, but till then, I think we need to discuss this basic issue threadbare. I had mentioned this in an earlier post as well. So, let’s get discussing.
Expletive ‘There’ in IPSL: Is it there?
In SL class today, we had the sentence:
(1) There are 100 children in the school
and many such similar sentences. The sign for (1) is:
(1SL) READ-CHILD(SCHOOL) IX(SCHOOL) a-b-CHILDREN 1-0-0 (HAS)
[Note that the sign for school is actually a compound sign, the variation that exists has only one sign "reading" for school]
Anyway, the point of the discussion is the “pointing” sign IX(SCHOOL) — what is it doing here? Pointing as we know can mark various things including pronouns, demonstratives and locatives. The most likely interpretation here is that “There” is being interpreted as a ‘locative’; however, ‘there’ in the English sentence in (1) is not a locative adverbial but an expletive. What is an expletive?
In simple Linguistic terms it means, meaningless. It’s a strange animal which crops up in many languages when there is no meaningful lexical item to fill up a syntactic position in a clause. The expletive ‘there’ in English crops up in a subject position in sentences where there is nothing else that can be placed in that position. since languages like English has a requirement that the subject position be filled overtly (that is, it cannot be “understood” like in many other languages), the subject position cannot remain vacant. Thus the sentence in (2a) below has an “expletive” versions in (2b):
(2) a. A girl is in the class
b. There is a girl in the class
In most cases, these are considered to be equivalent sentences. That is there is no difference in the meaning of these two sentences. Although this last point is not universally accepted. For example, it has been claimed that the sentence (3a) below is ambiguous (that is, it has two possible meanings), whereas (3b) is not:
(3) a. An error is likely to appear in the proof.
b. There is likely to appear an error in the proof.
Apparently, it is claimed that (3a) is ambiguous between the following two meanings:
(4) a. …. a claim about the proof that it’s likely to be erroneous
b. … persistent error
It is further claimed that (3b) above doesn’t have the (4a) reading. The syntactic theory which is proposed in this connection is very complex but it will suffice to know that one reading is blocked for (3b) because of the expletive nature of ‘there’.
However, in most cases (like (2a,b)), the non-expletive and the expletive constructions are considered to be equivalent. So, this is how expletive elements (like ‘there’) appear in languages — they fulfill some syntactic function but are themselves meaningless.
In short, (1SL) cannot be the sentence for (1). But then, what is the pointing IX doing here?
In this connection, Hidam has an interesting theory that we discussed after the class; IX here is surely pointing but not for locative adverbial like ‘there’ but of ‘in’ of the PP (Preposition Phrase) ‘in the school’. This view is somewhat similar to point I had made some years back in this paper where an expletive ‘there’ is shown to be always related to a PP (note that the sentence ‘there is a man here’ is ok but not ‘*there is a man intelligent’); that is, there seems to be sharing of a ‘location’ information between the expletive THERE and the PP IN THE SCHOOL, they form a chain like (THERE … PP) and share a feature of LOCATION.
I don’t know how far this is going to hold but the post-class discussion revealed that there is perhaps more going on in SL. It is quite likely, that IX here is not just location (for the PP ‘in the X’ but also for definiteness. However, we concluded that Definiteness is not such big deal for SL given the very visual nature of the language and therefore the more important feature of pointing or IX in (1SL) above is actually the location information.
So, I don’t think that the sign for ‘there’ (1) as in (1SL) is ‘mistakenly’ interpreted as a locative adverb ‘there’ (as in ‘The book there’) but is more like a location denoted by the PP. We can thus conclude that IPSL DOES have an expletive ‘there’.
1st IPSL-List Workshop
IPSL-List Workshop at EOC
Finally, the first IPSL workshop was held today (1st October 2009) at the DU-NTPC Centre of the Equal Opportunity Cell (EOC) of the University of Delhi. I was apprehensive whether we will have enough to occupy the students and faculty members who had come all the way from IGNOU (as a part of the B.A. in Sign Language 4 year integrated course) for two hours. As it turned out, not only did we have enough material, we went beyond 2 hours and we wanted some more. The interest and the enthusiasm that the students (almost all of them deaf) showed made it worth our while to initiate this event. Like most gatherings among the deaf, this too was no exception in terms of the high level of interest and the obvious hunger for knowledge shown by the students. We at the EOC, especially Prof. Agnihotri, Hidam and myself were extremely happy that it has been a successful beginning and it already promises to be an important event every month in the Capital’s calendar of activities centring around the deaf and Sign Language. I was very glad that Sibaji had also brought Dharmesh, Geetanjali and Robindro along with the many students.
We started the proceedings with a short discussion with Sibaji about the feasibility and the need to integrate a component of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) for the deaf in the already successful ICT short-term certificate course that is being run at the Centre since the last year. Sibaji promised to publicise the course and also help us recruit an appropriate instructor for the same. The course will be run from July 2010 at the Centre. We also requested Sibaji and his team to help us run an advanced course on Sign language (Level 2) from the next semester (January-May 2010) at the Centre, as a sequel to the Level 1 course being run at the moment. It was pointed out that there may be other potential students who have completed A-level from other Institutes in Delhi interested in such a course. Sibaji also lent us several copies of Sign Language Studies journal and also a book edited by Ulrike Zeeshan on Negation and Wh in Sign language.
I welcomed the audience and hoped that they will all benefit from the presentations and following discussion. The newcomers to the mailing list we requested to join the list and initiate discussion and even ask for information with regards to deaf issues and IPSL. Joining the list is easy, follow the instruction given at this site. An introduction about the nature of the event to be held every last Friday of the month was outlined and it was emphasised that it remains mainly academic with the social aspect of increased interaction between the deaf and the hearing.
Sibaji at IPSL-LW
Sibaji Panda made a power point presentation on the topic “ISL Standardization: The Current Scenario” and outlined the need for standardization, the past attempts and a model of unforced propagation of one dominant variety out of the several dialects in terms of dissemination through production of materials through that variety in consultation with linguists and sign language teachers. He entertained several questions from the audience about nature of similarity and difference with between the situations in sign and spoken languages, distance between the varieties from a potential standard variety as well as within the varieties, the nature of variation (in terms of vocabulary but not so much in terms of grammar), etc. Very importantly he drew up a chart of ‘gains’ versus ‘losses’ of standardization and posited questions for the audience to pontificate and discuss about whether or not standardisation is a good ting and whether or not we should go for it. One conclusion that I drew from the presentation is the justification for standardisation in sign language arising out of the need of bringing the deaf community together – it’s like demand for recognition of a minority language (and not several varieties within one community); obviously, we need to keep this aspect in mind when we compare the standardisation procedure as practiced for spoken language and sign language.
Hidam and Geetanjali at IPSL-LW
The next presentation was by Hidam Gaurshyam of the University of Delhi on the linguistic notion of “Incorporation in Sign Language”. The presentation brought out clearly the unavoidable consequence of incorporation in SL given one of the main differences between spoken and SL, that is of the distinguishing aspect of the latter to be able to use language through different modality, e.g., non-manual marking or space. As a consequence it is likely that in SL it is possible to incorporate, for example, the adverb to the verb; so, instead of using separate signs for ‘walk’ and ‘slowly’, the latter incorporates into the former producing a “composite” big word like “walk-slowly”, except that the graphics of the writing system does not allow one to view the simultaneity of the two words ‘walk’ and ‘slowly’. In fact, to bring the point home forcefully, one might want to depict it as follows:
Hidam then went on to show that all verbs don’t allow incorporation, it is only when action, undergoer and path are together that a verb is able to incorporate. In this context the model of Ramchand (2008) was recalled. As this was a technical topic, students had some difficulty in understanding the point being made at the beginning but during the question-answer session, the importance of Linguistics in studying SL was brought home and the essence was understood by all.
At the closing session, the audience was invited to make short presentations at the next meeting in addition to presentations by Sibaji, Hidam and others. It was also announced that the next workshop will be held on 30th October at 3:30 pm and the first presentation will be Prof Rama Kant Agnihotri on “The Linguistics of Standardisation”.
Finally, the first IPSL workshop was held today (1st October 2009) at the DU-NTPC Centre of the Equal Opportunity Cell (EOC) of the University of Delhi. I was apprehensive whether we will have enough to occupy the students and faculty members who had come all the way from IGNOU (as a part of the B.A. in Sign Language 4 year integrated course) for two hours. As it turned out, not only did we have enough material, we went beyond 2 hours and we wanted some more. The interest and the enthusiasm that the students (almost all of them deaf) showed made it worth our while to initiate this event. Like most gatherings among the deaf, this too was no exception in terms of the high level of interest and the obvious hunger for knowledge shown by the students. We at the EOC, especially Prof. Agnihotri, Hidam and myself were extremely happy that it has been a successful beginning and it already promises to be an important event every month in the Capital’s calendar of activities centring around the deaf and Sign Language. I was very glad that Sibaji had also brought Dharmesh, Geetanjali and Robindro along with the many students.
We started the proceedings with a short discussion with Sibaji about the feasibility and the need to integrate a component of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) for the deaf in the already successful ICT short-term certificate course that is being run at the Centre since the last year. Sibaji promised to publicise the course and also help us recruit an appropriate instructor for the same. The course will be run from July 2010 at the Centre. We also requested Sibaji and his team to help us run an advanced course on Sign language (Level 2) from the next semester (January-May 2010) at the Centre, as a sequel to the Level 1 course being run at the moment. It was pointed out that there may be other potential students who have completed A-level from other Institutes in Delhi interested in such a course. Sibaji also lent us several copies of Sign Language Studies journal and also a book edited by Ulrike Zeeshan on Negation and Wh in Sign language.
I welcomed the audience and hoped that they will all benefit from the presentations and following discussion. The newcomers to the mailing list we requested to join the list and initiate discussion and even ask for information with regards to deaf issues and IPSL. Joining the list is easy, follow the instruction given at this site. An introduction about the nature of the event to be held every last Friday of the month was outlined and it was emphasised that it remains mainly academic with the social aspect of increased interaction between the deaf and the hearing.
Sibaji Panda made a power point presentation on the topic “ISL Standardization: The Current Scenario” and outlined the need for standardization, the past attempts and a model of unforced propagation of one dominant variety out of the several dialects in terms of dissemination through production of materials through that variety in consultation with linguists and sign language teachers. He entertained several questions from the audience about nature of similarity and difference with between the situations in sign and spoken languages, distance between the varieties from a potential standard variety as well as within the varieties, the nature of variation (in terms of vocabulary but not so much in terms of grammar), etc. Very importantly he drew up a chart of ‘gains’ versus ‘losses’ of standardization and posited questions for the audience to pontificate and discuss about whether or not standardisation is a good ting and whether or not we should go for it. One conclusion that I drew from the presentation is the justification for standardisation in sign language arising out of the need of bringing the deaf community together – it’s like demand for recognition of a minority language (and not several varieties within one community); obviously, we need to keep this aspect in mind when we compare the standardisation procedure as practiced for spoken language and sign language.
The next presentation was by Hidam Gaurshyam of the University of Delhi on the linguistic notion of “Incorporation in Sign Language”. The presentation brought out clearly the unavoidable consequence of incorporation in SL given one of the main differences between spoken and SL, that is of the distinguishing aspect of the latter to be able to use language through different modality, e.g., non-manual marking or space. As a consequence it is likely that in SL it is possible to incorporate, for example, the adverb to the verb; so, instead of using separate signs for ‘walk’ and ‘slowly’, the latter incorporates into the former producing a “composite” big word like “walk-slowly”, except that the graphics of the writing system does not allow one to view the simultaneity of the two words ‘walk’ and ‘slowly’. In fact, to bring the point home forcefully, one might want to depict it as follows:
|
SLOWLY |
WALK
<!–[if mso & !supportInlineShapes & supportFields]> SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT <![endif]–>
|
walk |
|
slowly |
<!–[if mso & !supportInlineShapes & supportFields]> <![endif]–>
Hidam then went on to show that all verbs don’t allow incorporation, it is only when action, undergoer and path are together that a verb is able to incorporate. In this context the model of Ramchand (2008) was recalled. As this was a technical topic, students had some difficulty in understanding the point being made at the beginning but during the question-answer session, the importance of Linguistics in studying SL was brought home and the essence was understood by all.
At the closing session, the audience was invited to make short presentations at the next meeting in addition to presentations by Sibaji, Hidam and others. It was also announced that the next workshop will be held on 30th October at 3:30 pm and the first presentation will be Prof Rama Kant Agnihotri on “The Linguistics of Standardisation”.
[polldaddy poll=2065705]
Adpositions
Adpositions in IPSL
Postpostiions and prepositions comprise the category of Adpositions that appear after or before the Nouns, respectively, to indicate location. Spoken languages use the position of the adposition (after or before) in relation to the Noune to mark the “type” of the language. For example, SOV languages (Subject-Object-Verb as the basic word order), generally show postpositions rather than prepositions, that is, the adposition appears after the Noun, or, in terms of symbols, N-P rather than P-N. For example, Assamese, Bangla, Hindi, Manipuri, Malayalam, Marathi, etc., all are N-P type of languages and they also happen to be SOV languages, whereas English, French, Dutch, German, Mandarin, Vietnamese are all P-N languages and they also happen to be SVO languages.
Some examples of IPSL adpositions are depicted below.
Postpositions in IPSL
Note that the term being used here is adpositions and not either post- or pre-positions. So the obvious question that arises is whether the adpositions in IPSL are post- or pre- positions. The answer is not easy to formulate. This is mainly because of the typical property of IPSL (and Sign Languages in general) to incorporate the adposition onto/ into the noun itself or sometime to the Verb. However, this is a topic of a much larger consequences, to do with temporality and spatiality of sign languages, and will be dealt with separately.
Deaf Photographer
On September 12, 2009, the channel NDTV good times broadcast a programme on a deaf photographer Vivek (Handa?). It was repeatedly mentioned that Vivek has a unique angle to his photographs, the implication being, just because he is deaf he must be having a unique view of life. The presenter failed to realise that since Vivek is an established photographer, he better have a unique angle to his photographs, his excellence in that area has nothing to do with his being deaf. This is yet another instance of the media people being still unaware of the issues that concern people in Deaf studies.
However, there was more in store — and that really is the trigger for this post. When Vivek was interviewed, he was seen to not use any sign language at all. Although there was an interpreter, she seemed to be parroting rehearsed lines. This is so because Vivek was making very broad-spectrum general gestures which were being interpreted as specific statements.
This brings up two issues: (i) An apparently upper middle-class deaf person is not exposed to Sign Language and is therefore unable to sign; or, (ii) the stigma against using Sing Language is so strong that either the TV channel discourages it or the deaf person herself/ himself desist from using it lest the viewers be “shocked” to find such a well-organised linguistic system at the disposal of the Deaf.
The resistance to sign language from the society takes many forms, and this is certainly one.
Tanmoy
Sign Language is multi-modal and thus one step ahead!
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