Imagine if there was one language... period. Then you wouldn't take any foreign languages in high school

by Anonymous 12 years ago

We already have that; it's called an auxiliary language and nearly everyone agrees that it's English. 6 billion in the world can speak a language, but what about those who can't even hear?

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Yes, but there are still other languages... imagine if there was ONE, keyword.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Other languages are only spoken for cultural reasons. Take me for an example: I speak Church Aramaic and Neo-Aramaic because my mom told me I have to try and keep these languages alive in my daily life so they don't die out.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

In a world where only one language exists, your language wouldn't exist in the first place, so there would be no need to keep it from dying out. And how do you know there aren't any cultural links to sign languages?

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Which is why I don't speak it much often. Thank you for that; I had no idea that in a world with one language, there was only one language. There are cultural links in EVERY language, spoken or not. That's why sign language is beautiful: There are no diacritics, punctuation, capitalization or anything of the like. There is such a thing as International Sign, you know. I don't see why we can't be offered that instead of ASL or BSL: Not that it would matter, as I wasn't offered any. I'd much rather learn a formal than a creole. Just sayin'.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

It's ridiculous that you chose not to take Sign Language just because it's not universal. German is not universal. Latin is not universal. Spanish, Italian, French, English, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, etc are not universal. I took ASL in high school and it is a beautiful visual language. There are many cultural aspects of ASL that I'm sure differ in others. Sign language actually originated in France, so if you think about it we'd all have to know FSL. There have to be different sign languages to match the countries the Deaf people live in. If you learned this universal sign language as a Deaf child but had to read street signs, instructions, etc, you would not understand your own language. Like people above had said, imagine if there was only one language. Great idea but it's not going to happen, so in order to not alienate the Deaf more, there has to be a sign language to each language.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

What are you on about? I wasn't offered a chance to learn ANY sign language course, ASL, FSL, BSL or LSA, for that matter. Also, I'm not suggesting that we do away with ALL languages, I'm just saying that we should do our part to help communicate with the deaf and learn a universal sign language; an auxiliary sign language. Look at Esperanto: it has done amazingly well for a construed language, and even used by Baha'its to communicate with one another, no matter what the mother tongue is. They've evolved in a way that communicating ideas is important, not the language. They're people, too, so you'll excuse me if I can't see where you're coming from.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

By that, I mean I would have gone personally out of my way into a different learning institute if so, just to learn it.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

I was on about it for the way you structured your last sentence. "Had that been the case, I would've taken THAT instead of any other foreign language in high school, amirite?" you make it sound like you had the option but chose not to take it solely for the reason that it wouldn't be useful to you.

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Ah, I see. Please then, forgive me for the structure of that last statement. English isn't really my first language...(:

by Anonymous 12 years ago

-nod- just glanced over your profile. I apologize for my lash out. If you do have the time or interest, though, Sign language is truly a beautiful language, especially the poetry. If you're interested, a site we used a lot in my class was aslpro.com :)

by Anonymous 12 years ago

All is forgiven(: Can I actually learn without the help of a native speaker?

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Yeah, you can learn the signs themselves, there are little videos that show the person doing them, not like the picture diagrams that are sometimes hard to understand :)

by Anonymous 12 years ago

Aww, well it's worth a try, I suppose. It's sad though, knowing that I can't attain fluency. Well, it's better than knowing nothing of it(:

by Anonymous 12 years ago