Re: [Ietf-languages] [EXTERNAL] Re: language identifiers for sign languages (incl. sgn) vs. attribute for indicating the representation of an individual language in "sign language modality"

[David Starner <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, Nov 30, 2019 at 12:28 PM John Cowan <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Nov 30, 2019 at 2:17 PM Doug Ewell <[e-mail]> wrote:
>
>> English and Signed English (of any flavor), of course, are another matter.
>
>
> I understand David to be saying that it doesn't matter if a signed video is ASL or SEE: one is no more intelligible to English-speakers than the other.  And I replied (in effect) that if your native language is Haitian Creole and you're illiterate, it won't matter to you if a written document is in Haitian Creole or Standard French.

I didn't intend to include discussion of ASL or those illiterate in
sign at all, merely signed forms of English among those who understand
English and sign. Basically if you are literate, it's not good enough
in theory to say "en" for a written document; you must include the
script. In practice, you don't, but only because there's one standard
script for English and most languages. There's not one signed form of
English; there's many, and reading the descriptions implies some are
as different as en-Latn and en-Hani. In practice, there are several
cases in ISO 639-2 where languages that are basically the same are
split by script: ota and tr, or ur and hi. Serbian has two scripts,
but they're a different collection of glyphs for the same underlying
orthography.

Basically, English fingerspelled, English with ASE signs, and English
with BSE signs are not mutually intelligible, whereas all forms of
written English in actual use and most forms of spoken English in
actual use are mutually intelligible (and country tags usually offer a
workable proxy for the edge cases in the latter.) Which implies to me
that offering en-SSE/en-SEE2/en-PGSS is more important than saying
en-signed.

-- 
Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.