Blind people must save a lot on electricity.
Blind people must save a lot on electricity.
They do actually!
I had a blind professor, last semester, and I swung through his office to make up an exam. It was a while before I knew he was in there because he was sitting with the lights off. I finally went in, apologized, and took the exam by the light of a nearby window (which was fine). Forty-five minutes into dead silence he panicked and yelled in this booming voiced, “WAIT, YOU CAN SEE!!!” before diving across his desk to turn on the lights. I’m sure he was embarrassed but I thought it was endearing and it highlighted a large aspect of disabled life that I hadn’t previously considered.
Sort of relatedly I once had professor who was deaf, but she had learned to read lips and speak so she could communicate easily with hearing people who didn’t know sign language. One day she had gotten off topic and was talking a little about her personal life, so that one of the students said “Oh, I know, I grew up in Brooklyn too.”
She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”
And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”
She said “I do?” and the whole class nodded, and then she burst out laughing and said “I had no idea! The school where I learned to speak was in Brooklyn. I learned by moving my mouth and tongue the way my teachers did. So I guess it makes sense that I have their accent, I just never thought about it.”
My moms a sign language interpreter, and she’s signed with people from all over the US. According to her, when she signs with people from the south they sign with a “drawl.” They have slower hand movements and exaggerate certain parts of the sign. People from the Midwest sign very fast and people from the south sign very slow.
So we were at a restaurant once and my mom started interpreting for someone who was trying to order and she was like “oh you’re from the south!”
And they were like “how did you know that?”
And she said “you sign with a drawl.” And they were really surprised that it came through that much.
It’s really interesting that even when not speaking verbally accents and heritage come through.
I doubt that captures the important things she’s picking up on. Because it would be shocking if sign language accents were remotely that subtle.
You have to remember, before the printing press languages were incredibly local. Travel fifty miles from the village you were born and you’d have a bigger linguistic gap than exists between modern American English and the Indian variant of International English; grammar is a little off, vocabulary has a bunch of false cognates and confusing idioms, and they have a thick accent unless they’re the kind of merchant/tinker/messenger who travels between villages regularly.
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy” - standard languages are standardized, partly by state power and partly by shared media. Sign language doesn’t have state power backing standardization, and it is still impossible to write down sign languages. The best script that exists is one devised for conlanging, effectively as the sign equivalent of IPA, and essentially nobody is fluent in that (and it’s not really designed for fluency, IPA isn’t either). The American deaf sign in ASL but read and write English just like the hearing do.
Video calls are still not nearly as fluid today as the early phone system and radio broadcasting made spoken language in the early 1900s. I’m not sure they’re even as fluid as the mail systems which started being formalized and usable by the general population in the 1500s. And that means that sign language does not communicate at a distance - people don’t travel enough to spread a standard variant. Proper nouns, particularly, have no commonalities from city to city - if you’re lucky, the signs for SF and LA might be the same between those two cities; certainly no one’s using the SF sign for Oakland in LA or the LA sign for Orange County in SF. (It wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the signs for Oakland and Orange County are, in fact, the same - first initial and a simple motion is a very common proper noun sign.)
If the only thing that’s different between the South and the Midwest is signing speed, you’re probably only using a small subset of the language - one a lot like International Business English. ASL is less a language than a language family that shares a lot of vocab - certainly the various ASLs are more different from each other than English is from Scots.
Japan and the UK both have the dynamic where pronunciation has markedly converged since the early 1900s under the influence of a national broadcasting service that specifically worked up a “neutral” dialect and accent that was broadly intelligible across regions