How lame and petty. Chris Doss
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Teaching ASL to primates is offensive or can be seen as offensive, because there was a great resistance from the hearing world in accepting ASL as a language. The status of ASL is central to a whole political struggle for equal justice, civil rights, political and economic equality, etc.
You have to think about the social implication to language and the social isolation of the deaf community. Like immigrant communities, the social isolation is the key to understanding the nature of the oppression.
It's hard to explain but this issue isn't as lame and petty as it might sound. It's part of a whole political system and history. There was a great battle getting linguistics to accept ASL and declare it a language. ASL needed this formal certification. The certification was necessary in order to certify deaf education and teaching in ASL, so that deaf kids came out with accredited high school diaplomas, so they could get to college, and get jobs, etc, etc. We had to fight the UC system over getting ASL qualified as meeting the foreign language requirement.
So there are a lot of political overtones to using ASL in primate studies. What? We're monkeys? You think our language is so stupid, you can teach it to a monkey? See those are the political overtones.
I got to hang out with deaf people and their interpretors for awhile on a civil rights training project. It was quite an experience and quite a political education. It definitely contributed greatly to my understanding of the interaction between society, culture, language, politics, economics, and theories of mind and theories of knowledge.
In terms of theory of knowledge, trying to learn at least some ASL was fascinating. It is a language based on thinking in terms of space, position, gesture. It has a strong non-serial aspect, but makes perfect sense in a kind of random access world of vision. It is a gestalt form of thinking. The effect of this kind of thinking is to make it difficult to translate into a serial format like writing in English. When you literally translate ASL sentences, they don't make much sense. That's because a lot of meaning isn't in the words so to speak. The meaning is created in a space frame composed of the head, face, neck, upper chest, and shoulders. The dancers are the hands as they move to various locations in this space frame. This kind of space logic is not easily translated into a linear format.
My first mistake was trying to learn finger spelling and thinking that was ASL. For example, you can finger spell Obama. But he also has a name sign. Here is a quick video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67V8qWQd_EM
Notice in the first few seconds she finger spells her name for us. But the rest of the time she is signing ASL. Midway through she gives her name sign K-on-cheek. The cheek is the location for the feminine, and the forehead is the location for masculine. So K-on-forehead would be something like a boy's name sign.
Linguistics was so hung up on its theories of what constitutes a language, that as a field it seemed incapable of understanding ASL had to be a language since a whole group of people in this society sign it, were raised with it, study with it, etc. Of course it was language.
CG