My first reaction was relief my stepson is no longer a rash, impetuous teenager but rather an overworked small business owner, but my rapidly succeeding reactions were even when he was a rash impetuous teenager he was a very mellow one, far more interested in relatively mild chemical enhancement of life and hanging out with his friends lifting weights, playing football, etc., plus he has always resolutely refused to learn any sign language, and lastly he's about as irreligious as they come. In short, I'm a distracted idiot today.
My response to the traffic-direction part was that I didn't notice the guns, really (I mean, I noticed them, but they looked normal in the situation, I guess, so I didn't think about it) but I did have a very strong "UGH I HATE THOSE TRAFFIC DUDES" response based on similar-looking setups in other countries. They're not helping! They're just running around making shit up and blowing whistles and gesturing incomprehensibly and then yelling at people! The traffic would be just as good* without them!
*bad
The traffic cop on Grant Street used to help.
2 is fantastic and awesome. 1 raises the maybe-related question of what armed insurrections those of us who are parents WOULD be okay with our children joining.
British, French, Italian, Australian, or Rwandan
Are these all related or did you have to learn a bunch of separate languages.
British (BSL) and Australian (Auslan) are very close*. French (LSF) and ASL are very close. Rwandan has some influence/history from BSL, LSF, and ASL (among other things). Italian (LIS) is different.
The only one I'm fluent in is ASL. I'm conversational in Rwandan (AKR) (or I used to be). I can have a conversation with a British or Australian person using a hodgepodge of signs and gestures and fingerspelling and mouthing. I can sort of have a conversation with French people but that's helped greatly by knowing spoken (well, written) French and having a shared fingerspelling system. I cannot have a conversation with an Italian (unless they know ASL) but I can recognize it.
*They are the same. But you can't say that around anyone who uses either one because of politics.
6.1 first sentence is mordantly hilarious, but the humor may not travel beyond the D(d)eaf and their nearest & dearest.
Or did you mean the footnote? Thank you, thank you.
The footnote was funny. It reminded me of a passage about somebody going around the Balkans and how all the little countries served Turkish coffee except they all called it "Whatever place you are standing in" coffee.
Yes, the first sentence and its footnote, sorry! Am really very scattered today.
It occurs to me that due to my protestant bubble, I don't know how religions which only worship in one language (Islam/Arabic, Russia Orthodox/Old Church Slavonic, Greek Orthodox/Greek, pre-Vatican II Catholicism/Latin) deal with sign language interpreting. Is it ok for a Deaf Muslim to pray in a signed vernacular? Or do they have to use spoken Arabic? Is it considered wrong to interpret the Koran into a sign language?
deal with sign language interpreting
My bet is, they mostly don't.
Googling, there seem to be quite a few things on-line for and by deaf Muslims.
http://www.islam21c.com/islamic-thought/5247-being-deaf-and-muslim/
Last couple seem to be UK-originated.
According to those links, there's at least a couple of mosques in the UK that have BSL interpreters at Friday prayers.
And:
http://www.muslimdeaf.org/gallery_khutbah.html
I don't think deafness would have been any big impediment for a pre-Vatican II Catholic. Understanding the words spoken wasn't a high priority, which is why they used Latin.
Now, there is nothing in sign language for ordinary occasions. But with the exception of the homily, it's all written down right there in the missal. I don't know if there are enough visual cues to follow along easily or not, but I suspect so.
If the bishop is giving a big talk, then they have somebody interpreting at least some of the time. I think the televised mass probably has an interpreter also.
There also are (often) invented signed versions of whatever local spoken language. I don't know, but I'm guessing there is one for Arabic, so maybe they use that?
This distinction ended up having interesting implications for the US jury rules. Somebody (I forget the details of this and don't feel like looking it up right now)- some federal court somewhere- wouldn't let a deaf guy be on the jury and he sued and won because the judge said that he was able to "speak, understand, and read English," he was just understanding signed English instead of spoken. So as long as the interpreter was transliterating and not interpreting, he would be eligible.
14/15- yeah, the UK in general has way, way better access (in terms of both BSL interpretation and also amplified and/or captioned English) than anyone else I can think of.
Tangentially related to this post: I recently started reading the book Talking Hands by Margalit Fox and it's pretty interesting. It's one of those things that's been on my to-read list for long enough that I forgot how it got there, but Unfogged in general and E. Messily in particular seem like plausible vectors.
I assigned that to a class a couple of years ago! I liked it, it's a good read.
Although to be honest, a bunch of the "linguistics" going on over there is extremely silly and I find many of their claims extremely dubious. That's not Fox's fault, though.
I think the televised mass probably has an interpreter also.
This is true, but the question was whether the interpreter at a Tridentine mass would have used ASL or wherever-the-hell-they-were SL or whether they used Latin Sign Language (Lingua Latina Signorum?)