Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2018 October 13

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October 13

Genealogy of sign languages

I'm searching for some systematic/scientific/serious genealogical analysis of sign languages. Something like this diagram in the right

Indo-European family tree in order of first attestation

for sign languages. --Doroletho (talk) 16:37, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

Have you looked at Sign language#Classification? The links and sources there should get you where you want to go, or at least going in the right direction.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 18:34, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

It's not just about the tree, I wanted to find something more detailed, entering into comparative linguistics of sign languages. --Doroletho (talk) 21:02, 13 October 2018 (UTC)

You ask for a genealogical analysis (and to illustrate this you provide a genealogical analysis). I doubt that anything much like would even be possible for sign languages, as detailed written descriptions are very new indeed, film and video recording is rather new, and (very unfortunately) it's only recently that signing would have been recognized as worth recording. But then you ask about "comparative linguistics". This term usually refers to genetic relationships, but it needn't; if you mean (or can countenance) a (probably synchronic) typology, then yes, there's plenty, this series for one. -- Hoary (talk) 00:05, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Those are fantastic resources, even if they don't deal with the historical relatedness of sign languages. --Doroletho (talk) 02:07, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

Doroletho -- American sign language descended from Laurent Clerc's French sign language. American sign language and British sign language notoriously have little in common. Nicaraguan sign language famously kind of coalesced from various partial and rudimentary forms of "home sign", and has no fully-formed sign language as its ancestor. You'll probably need to read the primary scholarly literature to get much farther than that... AnonMoos (talk) 00:54, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

I'm afraid that you are right. Research around sign language is scarce. Doroletho (talk) 02:07, 14 October 2018 (UTC)

I don't think that that's really the case. However, it's true that popularizations for general readers summarizing linguistic research on sign language are much fewer than popularizations of Indo-European linguistics (there are quite a few of those). I don't think that historical relationships will be as strong as for spoken languages, due to the fact that before the late 19th century, most sign languages naturally sprang up where there was a local concentration of deaf people, and then naturally withered away when circumstances changed (the classic documented case being Martha's Vineyard Sign Language). If you tried to reconstruct sign-language relationships similarly to how it's done for spoken languages, then "grammar" would be more important than "vocabulary", which would require getting quite technical in your analysis. AnonMoos (talk) 14:35, 15 October 2018 (UTC)