lørdag den 17. august 2013

Creole language of the Phillippines

I've known for years of creole languages in the Caribbean, some in Africa, some in the Pacific, most of these involving English or French. But I never new that there is a creole language (or languages) with Spanish and Tagalog. As a speaker of Spanish this is fascinating to me! Wiki

An example from Wikipedia:
1)       Donde  tu     hay    anda?
where   you  FUT   go
'where are you going?'

Cool stuff!

Sign language

At the ALT10 2013 in Leipzig sign language interpreters were used by conference participants and this aroused my interested, and surely the interest of other participants at this linguistic conference. It is fascinating to see how quickly sign language can spell out novel words. At the same time, it also fascinates me to observe how many "articulators" are used for singing - apart from hands, facial expressions involving mouth, eyes, eye brows etc. are used in meaningful ways.

I have actually been interested in sign language for years and when doing fieldwork on Tol in Honduras in 2011-2012 I was fascinated to observe a so-called home sign language developed by deaf people in the Tol community. And I remember thinking that somebody ought to document / work on this. I know that there are people at the University of Copenhagen working on Danish sign language but such institutionalized sing languages are very different from "home made" ones - or so I'm told.