{"id":19757,"date":"2020-08-14T09:25:31","date_gmt":"2020-08-14T03:55:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak?p=19757"},"modified":"2020-08-18T13:53:31","modified_gmt":"2020-08-18T08:23:31","slug":"sign-language-language-sexuality-and-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/sign-language-language-sexuality-and-innovation\/","title":{"rendered":"Sign Language, Language, Sexuality and Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Vani Viswanathan, with inputs, ideas and encouragement from Ramya Anand<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

In the series James May: Our Man in Japan<\/em>, British TV presenter James May shares how Japanese translations into English yield \u201cvery, very fetching phrases that are actually much nicer than the words we really use.\u201d One of his examples is a sticker on a hotel wall next to an electric kettle that said \u201celectricity pot\u201d, which, May says, \u201cis a much nicer name for it than kettle.\u201d<\/p>\n

I laughed, because I love Japan and jokes to do with language. Also because it\u2019s startlingly simpler than coming up with another word for something that is, after all, an electricity pot.<\/p>\n

I was 17 when I learnt that languages, like Chinese and Japanese, could have pictorial <\/em>scripts that aren\u2019t based on letters,. This baffled me; every language I knew until then \u2013 English, Tamil, Hindi \u2013 was script-based. I couldn\u2019t fathom the idea of writing<\/em> with characters<\/em>. For example, the Chinese character for \u201chouse\u201d has components that include the characters of roof, and swine, I believe, because pigs were an inherent part of families. I\u2019d stare at Chinese words and be amazed that people managed to read them quickly, because if it were me, I knew I would be putting together each symbol to know what each word meant, and then string the words together, and then figure out the meaning of the sentence. That doesn\u2019t make for speedy, effective communication.<\/p>\n

These thoughts pop up on and off in my head due to Indian Sign Language (ISL) classes that I\u2019ve been a part of. Some of my colleagues at TARSHI and I have learnt the basics of ISL from v-shesh<\/a> in an attempt to make our work more inclusive and to (begin to) learn to explain the complex components of sexuality in a language other than English. ISL, like Chinese or Japanese scripts, is visual too, and requires the communicators to quickly interpret signs and expressions, even for complex words that don\u2019t have a single sign but are a composite of signs. \u2018Religion\u2019, for example, is made up of the signs for \u2018prayer\u2019 and \u2018different types\u2019.<\/p>\n

The ISL lessons remind me that English has given us a vocabulary so rich that we tend to forget what it means to express some of its words in other languages. I owe my understanding of so many sexuality concepts to English. We \u2013 individuals, activists, academics \u2013 come up with new words to explain (existing) concepts or behaviour, simply by adding a prefix or a suffix, or conveniently slapping two words together. Heteronormativity is one of my favourites. A word that needs to be explained using a few sentences, but conveys a nuanced idea in a jiffy. We use \u2018consent\u2019 in our conversations and instantly communicate nuances that go beyond the dictionary\u2019s \u201cpermission for something to happen or agreement to do something\u201d. We create words to describe sexual identities \u2013 pansexual, greysexual, demisexual, and so on. There\u2019s transgender, bigender, cisgender, genderqueer, and nonbinary, all built around a single word, gender. And then there are words like queer, which have been reclaimed.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve previously written about the struggles<\/a> in finding rights-based terms to describe sexuality-related concepts in Indian languages. If that\u2019s the case with languages that have centuries of established grammar and literature, what can one say of ISL which is only in the initial stages of being standardised across the country<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Despite these struggles, we persisted. We tried, starting with the biggest (in terms of our work) concept of them all: sexuality. In the few years that I\u2019ve engaged with interpretation or observed sign language interpreters at sexuality-related events, I\u2019ve learnt that they may sign the word sex, or end up spelling sexuality. In a recent class, I asked Kanika and Tincy, our ISL teachers, how we could sign sexuality, and they asked, \u201cHow do you explain sexuality?\u201d I wondered how I could sign ideas like attraction, pleasure, gender, values, and so on, but tried nevertheless, using my limited vocabulary, apologetic about being reductive.<\/p>\n

I started: Who-you-love-who-sex-with-who-you-man-or-woman\u2026 and stopped at this point because I couldn\u2019t bring myself to reduce gender to man and woman after several years of explaining gender as going beyond the binary in TARSHI\u2019s trainings.<\/p>\n

I could see why our teachers asked us to \u2018explain\u2019 a concept in sign. The number of people with hearing impairments in India who learn ISL is still shockingly low, and added to that are complications of sign language borrowing heavily from local contexts: we learnt that marriage in many north Indian contexts is signed using the sindoor<\/em><\/a> (Hindi), whereas in some southern contexts, it is commonly signed using the thaali<\/em><\/a> (Tamil and Malayalam). Like I said earlier, ISL is visual, relying on common symbolism \u2013 such as signing hand-to-mouth for eating \u2013 to help Deaf people (and others) pick it up easily. Coming up with a large vocabulary is going to make it tougher for people to understand each other, although as the number of \u2018speakers\u2019 increase and study or work in different fields, it has to happen. Signs have to be innovated for \u2018mergers\u2019, \u2018acquisitions\u2019, and, well, \u2018sexuality\u2019. \u2018Innovated\u2019 signs, however, may take a while to reach and be understood by diverse people, as opposed to the more intuitive signs that already exist.<\/p>\n

We gave our teachers a list of sexuality-related words for which we wanted to learn the signs, and they taught us a few \u2013 clearly \u2018innovations\u2019, if you consider how several other signs were put together to form one big sign. Gay, for example, is man+man+love. Rape was sex+coercion. Bisexual was love+man+woman but we weren\u2019t quite happy with it, and we tried to explain that bisexual referred to a person being sexually attracted to people of their own gender as well as another gender. Our teacher also said there wasn\u2019t a sign for \u2018contraception\u2019 just yet, so we could forget \u2018safer sex methods\u2019.<\/p>\n

And suddenly, leave alone sexuality, \u2018gender\u2019 also felt like a sign so difficult to sign (\u201cwho+you+inside\u201d seems philosophical; and can it be explained without reference to man or woman?) Of course, there may be an ISL sign for gender that we aren\u2019t aware of, as our teachers said they, too, need to connect with other specialists and the Deaf community to ask about signs they don\u2019t know. And of course, there are other sign languages in the world that may be more \u2018advanced\u2019 and have signs for these (there\u2019s this lovely video<\/a> with signs for queer identities in American Sign Language). Perhaps we borrow ideas from these to innovate for ISL?<\/p>\n

And what if we don\u2019t \u2013 what does it mean when a word doesn\u2019t \u2018exist\u2019 in a language? Like \u2018contraception\u2019 in ISL? Or has a simplistic meaning, like \u2018domestic violence,\u2019 signed\/understood as husband-beat-wife, leaving out the myriad aspects and victims\/survivors of such violence? How crucial is it for language to innovate a word for a concept, and what happens to the concept until then? What does it mean to live a concept even if there is no word for it? I know I\u2019m slipping into a rabbit hole here, but what happens to the thoughts that germinate in our minds until we have words to articulate them, even if only to ourselves? I dig deeper: does a thought even exist if we don\u2019t have words for it?<\/p>\n

Besides, is the idea of a language not having certain words new? After all, English didn\u2019t have transgender and demisexual and homonegativity until a few years\/decades ago \u2013 we just made them up as we saw the need for such a word rise in order to talk about it to more people, to press for our rights. Then there\u2019s the whole universe of words in non-English languages for which English doesn\u2019t have satisfactory equivalents. Komorebi<\/a>. Saudade<\/a>. Schadenfreude<\/a>. Nyaka<\/a>. We get by, explaining them in English, unless we are communicating with people that we think will know the word.<\/p>\n

Will ISL go that route too, \u2018explaining\u2019 words in sign until they have reached a critical mass of people who could be assumed to know the concept that we now have a sign for it?<\/p>\n

As all these questions about innovating signs come up, I wonder whether all of language isn\u2019t innovation anyway! Isn\u2019t it innovation to put cis and gender together to form a composite that conveys that one\u2019s gender identity matches the gender assigned to them at birth? Or when the English \u2018pariah\u2019 was derived from the Tamil paraiyar <\/em>(and a similar Malayalam word), the name of a historically marginalised caste, which lends the English word its meaning?<\/p>\n

For now, we are only done with the first set of lessons on ISL basics, so it\u2019s going to be a while before we get anywhere close to communicating concepts related to sexuality. When we get there, though, I do foresee quite a lot of \u2018electricity pot\u2019 type signs.<\/p>\n

Cover Image: Unsplash<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a recent class, I asked Kanika and Tincy, our ISL teachers, how we could sign sexuality, and they asked, \u201cHow do you explain sexuality?\u201d I wondered how I could sign ideas like attraction, pleasure, gender, values, and so on, but tried nevertheless, using my limited vocabulary, apologetic about being reductive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":188,"featured_media":19793,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,2308,8],"tags":[26,1701,2371,707,1563,1485,25],"class_list":{"0":"post-19757","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-categories","8":"category-innovations-and-sexuality","9":"category-voices","10":"tag-gender","11":"tag-heteronormativity","12":"tag-indian-sign-language","13":"tag-innovation","14":"tag-language","15":"tag-sexual-identities","16":"tag-sexualities"},"menu_order":298,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/188"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19757"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19757\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19844,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19757\/revisions\/19844"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}