Stuff You Should Know - How Sign Language Works

Episode Date: February 7, 2014

It wasn't until the was developed and despite its co-existence alongside English, a user would be hard-pressed to sign with a British person. Find out about the independent evolution of sign language in the U.S. and how intuitively sensible it is. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm Josh Clark. With me as always is Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry and the three of us together are Stuff You Should Know. Hey buddy. Hey. How's it going? It's going pretty good. I have to say this was one of the better articles I've read in recent memory.

Wow. By Mr. Jonathan Strickland, our nemesis at Tech Stuff. Yeah. He wrote a great article in sign language. Arch nemesis. Who knew? I had no idea that he knew anything. Yeah.

It's like there's nothing about the future of sign language in here. It's just sign language. Yeah. And this is one of those where I knew really not much about it and it was just a delight to learn. Yeah. And he basically just did American sign language. Yeah.

I have the impression that if he'd try to expand it, it would have really gotten unwieldy quick. So it's a good editorial decision, good writing. Well that's one of the things I didn't know. I didn't even know that, that there are hundreds of sign languages. I kind of thought it was all the same, but he makes a point even that you may be better able to communicate with someone speaking French sign language because that was the basis of American sign language than to speak sign language if you're American with someone speaking British sign language.

Yeah. Because it's just different. Sharing a common spoken language with another country does not mean... It's nothing to do with it that they share common sign language. Yes. No. And that's a really good point because it reveals that the deaf community has over time just basically said, we're going to do this ourselves.

Yeah. And it even gets to the point where regional dialects just like a regular spoken language, it basically just is a regular language. Right. The more I read it, the more I was like, this is just like speaking English or speaking Southern English or Midwestern English. Sure. And depending on your community, the community you're raised in, the type of house you're

raised in, that's what will necessitate what kind of sign language you learn or develop or whatever. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah, it is. And let's talk about the history of this a little bit first. Okay. So Chuck, humans have a long and storied history of mistreating groups that are different from

everybody else. It's what makes America great. Not just America. It goes back even further than that. Humanity. The deaf community, up until shamefully recently, were kind of one of those groups that were just kind of mistreated. Yeah.

The Torah, for example, forbids deaf people from fully participating in some of the rituals in the temple. The ancient Greeks wouldn't allow deaf people to be educated. St. Augustine, he's a saint for goodness sake. He taught that deaf people were evidence that God was angry at their parents. Wow. Yeah. It wasn't until about the Renaissance that anybody finally took a stab at educating deaf

people and they found pretty quickly that, oh, they just can't hear. That's the thing. They can learn very quickly and just like you and me. So that kind of became the springboard once people figured out that you can't educate deaf people to them being included more into a normal society. But for a long time, they were mistreated. As a result, I think they kind of, well, I'm speculating here, but I think they kind of said, we're going to handle this ourselves.

Like I said. Right. We're going to develop our own language. Take matters into our own hands, literally. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where sign languages started to come from, just necessities of the mother of invention.

Sure. You need to be able to communicate with people around you. And so sign language developed in communities where there are deaf people who were accepted and not just kind of put to the side. Yeah. Before it was even, they were getting official with it. People were using sign language. Right.

Because they were like, well, I don't care if you're going to make it some official language or not. We're going to talk to each other. Exactly. We're going to figure it out. And not only do they need to talk to each other, they need to talk to the community at large as well. Sure.

And there's actually this really cool story on Martha's Vineyard. There was up to a quarter of the population when they moved over here from England. They were an isolated population. So they suffered what was called the Founders Effect, where the population just kind of bottlenecked. Yeah. Their families intermarried, but they didn't marry outside of their group. So a hereditary deafness was a trait that was passed along the group.

So up to a quarter, one in four people in this community were deaf. Really? Right. As a result of this community on Martha's Vineyard in the early 18th century, having up to a quarter of its population deaf, a specific type of sign language called Martha's Vineyard Sign Language developed. And not only were the deaf in the community proficient in it, everybody in the community was proficient in it.

And up until 1952, when the last deaf Martha's Vineyard resident, Martha's Vineyard board resident died, that's when it became extinct. So they were practicing it from about 1700 to 1952. And apparently Oliver Sacks went and interviewed some of these people for part of a book. Man, he's always on it. He is. Yeah. But he reported that some of these elders, these Martha's Vineyard elders, reverted to

sign language while they were talking. So they were coming in and out of speech and sign language and apparently weren't even aware that they were doing it. That's awesome. And they were not deaf. That might be the fact of the show. Martha's Vineyard Sign Language? Yeah.

It could be one of them. I think there's a bunch in here. Yeah, agreed. So if we're talking about history, we have to go back to the early 1800s to a dude named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet. And he was a minister to the deaf and he went to Europe because, like we said, in France is where it sort of originated officially. And he wanted to learn some techniques on how to teach this stuff.

Met a guy named Roche Ambrose, Cucuron Saccard, who was in Abbey. Abbey Saccard. Yeah, it's a title. He's like a clergyman. Right. He was the director of the school of the deaf in Paris. And he learned some stuff from him and then plucked one of his students, Laurent Clerk, and said, hey, there's big money in this.

Let's go start a school in the United States. That probably wasn't his motivation. I hope not. Although you never know. Nothing wrong with making a little money by starting a school. So they established the American School for the Deaf in 1817 in Hotfoot, Connecticut, and went on, like they incorporated what they learned in France with what was already going on in the United States.

That's right, which is why, like you said, if you are an American sign language speaker and you go to France and you're speaking with a French sign language speaker, you'll probably be successful because American sign language is partially rooted in French sign language. Yeah, more so than like going to England, this is so weird to think about. And they ended up founding as well Gallaudet University in D.C. Go Bisons. Is that right? Yeah, they got a football team. They played for the Beverly Bisons in elementary school.

Really? I'm a Bison. It's pretty cool though. They got a football team, all deaf or hard of hearing. And it's cool to watch the video. Like, you know, the coach is given like the motivational speech and he's signing at the same time. And it's, I don't know, things kind of neat.

That is cool. And I thought about this too, probably not affected by home field advantage or not. Oh, the noise? Yeah. So like, the tremboliness of it, of that much sound, the sound waves, the physical waves hitting you. Well, but yeah, true. But it's not the same as, you know, NFL teams when they go to visit like Seattle, they have,

they work out all these sign language for each other. Oh, I see what you're saying. I thought you meant getting psyched out by like the crowd noise. No, I mean, like not being able to hear when you're changing a play at the line of scrimmage. Right. These signs and these guys are like, dude. They're just in ASL or something. So anyway, go Bisons.

And that is a school of more than 1500 students today, although they're not all deaf. About 5% may consist of hearing students, which I thought was interesting because I guess they're just, you know, it's good school, you know. And it says here in the article that there was a controversy among the students and some of the faculty. And I looked it up and apparently there was a, an incoming president in like the mid 2000s who was born deaf, but it had been raised to, to speak rather than sign. And apparently most of the students were not very happy about that because they didn't

think she was planning on emphasizing sign language. Yeah. And they wanted to make sure that sign language was like the, the, the main method of communication. Yeah. So like we said, we're going to be talking about ASL mainly, which has his own grammar and syntax and phonology, which if you're talking about speaking, it's a study of sounds. If you're talking about signing, it is the hand movements and signals and motions. Phonology.

Yeah. Yeah. It's the, it's how in the 60s, some researcher discovered that sign language isn't made up of a distinct sign for everything. Right. It's a discrete set of hand gestures, movements that you can change and alter to make different words or concepts. Yeah.

And that that would be phonology, right? Yeah. It's kind of like, I don't think we pointed out sign language, American sign language is not literally trying to translate each word someone speaks. It's about the concept and getting the point across of what someone is saying. Right. And we'll get into that. It'll make more sense in a minute.

So, but that's phonology and phonology. Yeah. So, each goes would be syllables. Yeah. The study of sounds. This is like hand, like in a gesture, whatever. Yes. Okay.

And morphology, which if you're speaking, that is how words are formed from basic sounds and in sign language, that's the way your hand and motions represent the concepts. Right. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. And you were saying that American sign language is not follow English necessarily. It doesn't follow English.

In fact, they try to avoid sounding like English. Yeah. Like they abandoned English syntax. Yeah. They, there's no use of the word am or be. It's pretty simple and straightforward. And some of the stuff also are, some of the signs are conceptual, like there, there are some that are symbolic, but some are like a concept or an icon, I guess is a better

way to put it. Yeah. So, if you are doing deer, if you're saying the word deer, signing the word deer. Yeah. D-E-E-R. Yes. The animal. You put your, you stick your fingers up and put them close to your head.

Like antlers. Right. Yeah. So I was curious like how you would sign the word moose. Yeah. And I looked. What is it? It's the same thing, but rather than having them up against your head, they're out off

to the side a little bit because moose has like antlers that are bigger than a deer. Well, and that illustrates a very important point with ASL. It's not just the things, the signs you make with your hands. It's body language, expressions, and the space, how you use the space around you, like to take the antlers away from your head, represent something. And as we'll learn later, where you hold your hands represent different things, like further away from your body or closer to your body, and we'll get to all that. But basic nuts and bolts, they are, you can call them speakers even though they're signing,

but generally you call the person receiving the sign at the time, the receiver. The person being spoken to. Yeah. And the receiver, if you're a receiver, you don't just stare at the hands. In fact, you don't focus on the hands at all. You focus on their face and sort of keep the hands in the periphery. That's how, remember the, did you hear about the guy who was signing at Mandela's memorial service?

I thought that was going to be your intro, actually. I just guessed. I went with the mistreating people intros, too. No, I like that. The, yeah, this guy was a fraudulent sign translator. Now was he really, did they get, because I thought he was like, no, I'm not fraudulent. I'm just. There's a fraud.

Okay. What's unclear is, so he suffers from schizophrenia and he was hired on officially to do this. And they think that the way he was hired was because his rate was about half of what a normal sign translator would have been. So they basically just went with the cheaper option and didn't do their due diligence and figure him out. Because he'd actually done this before where he doesn't know sign language. And apparently it's no malicious intent or anything like that.

I don't know if he just needed money or if he thinks he knows sign language or if he wants to know sign language or if he feels like he can get it across. But during Mandela's funeral, he was doing all the sign language and it was total nonsense. So none of it was real at all? No, it was utter gibberish. And one of the ways that the deaf community who were understandably upset at all this. I bet some of them got a good laugh. Sure.

But overall, they said, if you're doing sign, you don't just sit there with a stone face which this guy was doing. He was all hand gestures and hand gestures didn't mean anything. But then also you express most of sign language with expressions, with facial expressions, with movement. You don't just stand there because it doesn't do anything. You're not getting your point across. So this guy, one of the ways he was found out was that he was like stone faced.

Yeah. Wow. And if you go and look at it, he's not moving his face at all like he's completely solemn. He was found out pretty quick too. Yeah. Because I'm sure there are people watching here like, what's going on? This guy's talking gibberish. So weird.

If you were signing actions a lot of times, but not always, you just mimic the action like Strickland points out, if you want to sign, eat, you hold your finger and thumb like you're holding like a little piece of chocolate and you go to put it in your mouth. Yeah. That means eat. Yeah. Pretty straightforward. And there's also something I think that's kind of neat and efficient about sign language

is that the same sign for eat doubles for other signs too depending on what you do with it. Yeah. It can get confusing. It can, but it's also, I don't know, it makes the whole thing more elegant to me that one sign when delivered in a certain way changes the meaning and you really have to pay attention. Yeah. For instance, if you want to sign food, it is the same, a lot of times you will double

a sign to indicate something else. To indicate a noun. Well, it depends. That's why it can get confusing. So the sign for food is the same as doubling the sign for eat. But if you want to sign eating, which is a verb, you would also repeat the eat sign. So that's where, if you're receiving sign language, you understand it, it's all about your context.

You're going to be like, what are you talking about? Yeah. What do you mean you guys went out and you were food? Yeah. Exactly. Right. I should teach you something. It's going to be fun.

But I need to learn it first. Actually also the verbs or action words or signs are bigger, whereas nouns are smaller. Like the gestures are bigger or smaller depending on whether it's a noun or a verb too. That's true. That's another way. So again, you can't just sit there with your hands directly in front of you, moving within a very small box, you wouldn't be speaking, at least as far as American sign language goes, you wouldn't be speaking correctly.

That's true. There is an alphabet too, as every 13-year-old girl knows. Why? Don't you remember that? It seems like in the seventh grade, every girl I knew went through a phase where they learned the sign alphabet and would spell out things with their friends that no one else knew what they were talking about. What?

You never saw that? No. Oh man. I remember the big bubbly, cursive writing with the rainbow pens with the different yeah. Yeah, I just seem to remember a lot of young girls learning the sign language alphabet and they would sit around and spell things about people. Had not run into that.

Not in Toledo. Maybe it was a Georgia thing. Maybe. Anyway, there is an alphabet which actually, it's called finger spelling, but it's only used to illustrate a really specific concept or to indicate a person. Spell a name. Yeah, like if you're going to be telling a story about Josh, all you got to do is spell out Josh at the beginning and then you don't have to keep doing it over and over.

Right. One way to do that too, especially if I'm not present, is to indicate an empty space by you. Yeah. Spell out my name, point to that empty space, and then from that point on, anytime you point at that empty space, you're saying Josh. Yeah, if you're there, it's called indexing, use your finger, you just point to Josh. But yeah, if you're not there, you just make an imaginary Josh and you keep pointing to

that space. Yeah, I refer to Josh. It's pretty cool. Another reason that you would use finger spelling would be to ask somebody what a sign was for something you couldn't remember. So if you're saying something and you couldn't think of moose, you might spell out in finger spelling what's the sign for moose, and then they would say, hey, fingers up, away from the head.

Yeah, I wrote an article from the Washington Post earlier about Washington, D.C. They call them Terps interpreters. Oh, I hadn't heard that. Yeah. Are you sure they weren't talking about University of Maryland? No, they were talking about, you know, Terps. But it's a big deal in D.C. on any given day, there's like 1,500 people in D.C. signing for clients.

I can see that. Yeah, of course, it makes sense because it's law, first of all, federal law requires reasonable accommodation for a deaf person. But this one guy that they interviewed, what's his name, Painter, he said that spelling is your back door. Yeah. And it's tough in D.C. because he's like, basically try signing a speech by Bernanke when they're saying like very D.C. specific political jargon that maybe not have a concept

you can represent like fiscal cliff or it's not your first rodeo or kick it down the road a little bit. And so they basically have invented political jargon for people to do that and he said, or if you get stuck, you can always just spell it. And that appears to be a hallmark of sign language is they're like new signs are created all the time, just like new words are created all the time. And just like with speech, there are prescriptivists and there's descriptivists like people who say, no, American sign language is sacrosanct.

It is what it is. It's not to be added to. If you add to it, it dilutes the language. Go come up with your own language if you want to add fiscal cliff to it. And then there's other people who are descriptivists who say, no, language is a living, breathing, evolving thing. Right. Like we need to get the concept of fiscal cliff along across.

So right. Here it is. It looks like moose kind of. I would just do a little guy walking and then falling off a cliff. Sure. You know, sure. And then making a dollar sign. If you have seen people do sign language and you see them looking upset or puffing their

cheeks out or raising their eyebrows, they're indicating an inflection. This was called a non manual marker. So like if you wanted to ask someone and that's also true with punctuation, if you wanted it, you could do the little question mark sign, but more likely you would just say the sentence and then raise your eyebrows. Right. Go give them an example. Like movies, do you like the movies?

Right. You would say you like movies and then raise your eyebrows like, huh, you basically like a Russian, you like movies. That's basically what's going on there. Any Yaka Smiroff reference is hilarious. It doesn't matter what it is. Do you ever see that King of the Hill that he co-starred on? No way.

They go to Branson and like he, I think Bobby like ends up hanging out with him. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Another way you can modify a sign, there's basically a couple of ways you can modify action is by directionalizing. So if you, you know, had a nice leisurely meal, you would do the symbols for the signs for eating very slowly. If you want to tell someone, I had to wolf it down real quick because it was late for a meeting, you would just do the signs for eating very fast.

It's pretty easy. Yes, or if you wanted to say, I'm going to give a gift to you, you would just do the signs for give gift and then, you know, indicate that I'm giving it to you or to someone else. The direction of it is going from I to you. So it's implied right there. Give gift is going from I to you. I give you a gift. It really cuts through all the jibber jabber.

I kind of like it. Yeah, it really does. And there's also rules with syntax are just totally out the window in relation to English too. It's, there's something called the topic of the sentence and that's frequently a pronoun like I. Right. And it genuinely doesn't matter where that goes.

You can go at the beginning of the sentence, the end of the sentence or both. And I haven't figured out where I, where both comes from, why you would say the pronoun twice. So like I am an employee here. Yeah. Right. You would just say I employee or employee I or I employee I and I can't figure out hopefully somebody out there can let us know why you would want to say what the purpose is for

saying it twice, but it's, it's allowable structure wise. Interesting. Yeah. So within that structure, I think you said it was topic comment structure. Generally, the comment is the predicate. So man, this took me like down memory lane. Yeah. I was like, what's a predicate again?

It says something about the topic or the object. If you were talking about English and then there's the tense, of course, if you want to talk about when something happened, you can do it in a variety of ways. But generally you would announce the tense at the beginning and then you wouldn't have to keep saying it over and over that you're like speaking in the past tense. Right until you say, until you change tense. So you would start by saying yesterday and then you would start talking about how you went to the store and you saw this trans am and you're like, Hey, that's a great trans

am to the guy. And he said, thanks a lot. But then today, so then you'd sign today, I saw the trans am again and it had gotten an offender bender, right? And it was sad, right? So in the middle, you have signed today and it's changed tense. So the tense is, this is something you have to pay attention to like sign language, American sign language relies on you to be a smart, non-lazy person because you have to pay attention.

You have to keep up with what you're saying. So you can't just, you know, drift off or, you know, just start staring into the middle focus. You know, like you have to be paying attention and it's not just because you're watching the signs or anything like that. Like it can change and switch very suddenly going from yesterday to today. And then everything after that stays the same and you have to look for a change in tense so you don't miss it and get confused.

Yeah. And they're quick too. And it relies on you to understand context as well. So for example, you, if you were saying, I had lunch today, yes, I went out for lunch today. You can't even speak it in English. I went out for lunch this afternoon. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. You would say, today I go to lunch is what you would say in sign language. And depending on when you were saying it, the person, the receiver would know what you were talking about. If you were talking about in the morning, they would know, oh, you're going out to lunch this afternoon. Or if you were talking to them that night, they would know, oh, well, you're saying you

went to lunch already this afternoon. Yeah. Now you're going to, you already went. Right. Right. It's all context as well. Yeah. Like you said earlier, you won't get confused if you're, if you're understanding what they're

saying. Yeah. That kind of makes total sense, doesn't it? It really does. It's, it's smart. Yeah. We talked about using the space. If you sign close to the body, it might have been something that happened recently or might

happen soon. If you sign further out, maybe it was something that happened a long time ago or might happen way far in the future. Yeah. Again, super interesting and smart. And that kind of runs into the calendar that some synesthetes report around them all the time. I thought of that same thing.

Didn't it make you think of that? Totally. I wonder if Strickland did that on purpose. He is an evil genius. All right. So I think maybe we should take a message break and then get to the etiquette of sign language. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life.

In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. Check where you're going to talk about. Mr. Manners. Etiquette. Yes, there is etiquette, like with regular speaking language. You need to wait for the speaker to finish signing, and then they'll look at you and

say it's your turn to speak. If they look away, they're still talking or signing. You know what I'm saying? I know what you're saying. So don't take that as your cue to jump in there. In fact, if that can be rude, they will actually give you the signal that it's time for you to respond. Right.

But if you watch two people who are signing with one another kind of frantically. Yeah. If they're arguing. Yeah. That's one was a tactic in an argument using sign language. You don't wait until the person stops and points to you. You can just cut in what you're doing is interrupting them. Interesting.

Yeah. Another thing that might happen if you are a receiver of sign language is the person signing might suddenly turn and start signing to somebody who isn't there. Right. So you're not supposed to take a couple steps over. Right. They know where you're standing. What they're saying is that they, they're basically saying like, and then I was talking

to Todd. Right. And this is Todd all of a sudden. This is what I was saying to Todd. Right. Right. So they're not, they're not addressing, they're addressing you still, but they're talking about how, what they said to Todd.

Yeah. Or what Todd said. If Todd said that he has a sore back, you would look at the imaginary Todd and say, I don't know what you would say, probably back sore. Sure. Or sore back. But the, the, the proper etiquette there is to just keep watching their, their facial expressions and gestures, just like they are talking to you.

Yeah. You don't just wander off. Right. If you see, if you have nothing to do with any of this and you just see two people signing on the street, they say, according to Dr. Bill Vickers, who owns a company, I'm sorry, he's president of a company that creates sign language programs. He said it's not rude to walk between them. If you just kind of just walk quickly between them and like it's no big deal.

So there's that. Right. But you don't want to be like, oh, sorry, sorry everybody. You see me. I'm about to walk through here. So you just go through. Yeah. Or I would say just go around if you can.

That's Chuck's recommendation. Go around. You know, like I wouldn't walk between two people having a conversation either. Yeah. Speaking conversation. Yeah. I absolutely had. I thought that was a little rude too, but apparently.

Yeah. I'm just going to go with it. All right. So good to know. So Chuck, we talked about American Sign Language and obviously that's far from the only sign language in the world. There's hundreds. But in the States, American Sign Language is the dominant sign language.

Yeah. But there's other types of sign languages that are also practiced enough to warrant mentioning here. Yeah. One is signed exact English. Man, this sounds tough. It is because it's slow, one of the advantages of American Sign Language is that it gets rid of a lot of the crud.

Yeah. Yeah. So like you just say, give gift. Yeah. And by the direction you're moving, you get the point across that I give you a gift. Yeah. All of these other things that you can do with the gesture, you're cutting out two, three, four words in a sentence.

This whole thing, I feel like I've wasted a lot of words. We do, especially in English. Yeah. It's a strange, technically difficult language. Yeah. And American Sign Language gets rid of a lot of that stuff. Yeah. Or I should say, it doesn't get rid of it, it evolved without that stuff.

Yeah. That's a better way to say it. And signed exact English is like trying to literally get English across and all of its weird syntax and order and am and be and is using sign language. So it can be very slow. Yeah. Like in ASL, if you wanted to sign beautiful, that could mean pretty, beautiful, lovely to look at.

But they get specific with signed exact English, you would actually, if you want to say someone was pretty and not beautiful, you might sign the letter P and then the sign, the ASL sign for beautiful. Right. Which I guess is, you know, if you're being set up on a date, you might want to get specific. Right. I guess you... You say he was beautiful.

Yeah. I said she was lovely. Man. What's the sign for good personality? And Strickland points out that hearing teachers who interact with deaf children prefer signed exact English to ASL because I guess just when you're at that stage in life to match up with the English spoken language, they think that has some benefit. Well, yeah.

But I guess one way of looking at educating deaf children is this whole immersed education. Yeah. Where it's like you learn speech, reading, which is lip reading. You learn sign language. You learn to speak. You learn... Fingerspelling. Right.

You learn reading because that's another thing too. If you just are raised on American sign language, you're going to have trouble reading English. Yeah. Because you're going to say what is B, what it is, what are all these extra words, what's with the syntax. It's not going to make sense. So there is definitely a school of thought among educators that if you have a deaf kid,

they should learn everything, including sign language, but also all the other stuff so they can effectively communicate with non-sign language, non-signers. Right. And that's as opposed to someone who loses their hearing later in life? No, I think that's opposed to people who think like, well, we're a deaf community and sign language is enough for us. We don't have to know how to speak. Why don't hearing kids learn sign language?

Why is it on us that we have to learn all this extra stuff? Yeah. Why is there not a balance? Right. So I think that that's... I think those are two camps. I don't know if that's the whole thing, but I think some people think you should learn everything where other people are like, my sign language is good enough.

Right. Interesting. Well, there's one more we'll get to in a second called Pigeon Signed English right after this message break. I'm Mangesh Atkala and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

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All right, so Pigeon Signed English, which is what we were talking about, is the other common form of sign language in the United States. And I don't fully understand this one. Do you? It seems to be the middle ground between signed exact English and American Sign Language. So they try to follow English syntax. But they don't have like B. Okay.

So there wouldn't be like, I give you a gift. It might just be like, I give you gift. Okay. You know? Yeah, yeah. That makes more sense. They do not require in Pigeon Sign English prefixes and suffixes like they do in S-E-E. And they say it can be easier to learn than either one of the other two versions, because

it does match up with English syntax. Yeah. And if you're one of those educators who thinks that kids should learn everything, you would be teaching C, or I imagine at least Pigeon Sign. Yeah. And they say you can speak out loud and sign at the same time easier because you're not going to get ahead or fall behind because it'll match up more. Makes sense.

And then there's a push, because like we said, if you're a deaf and a speaker of American Sign Language and you go to Great Britain, like you're going to have trouble communicating just like an English speaker would have in France. Yeah. What's a garage on her lift? So there was this push in the mid-20th century to create an international sign language. Yeah. That's what I thought everything was.

And the inner, yeah, I kind of did too. Yeah. I was very naive about all this. Yeah. Same here. The American, or international sign language, it came out of the World Congress of the World Federation of the Deaf from 1951. They said, let's do this.

And then 22 years later, they got around to doing it. And they created something called the gestuno, you should say it. Gestuno? Yeah. And it's an Italian word that means unified sign language, appropriately enough. And I think, Strickland says it's very much like the spoken language Esperanto. It exists, some people know it, but it is very far from an international language. Yeah.

I looked a little more into it. I think they use it at international meetings because they kind of probably have to. And they say it can be useful for like world travelers to pick up, I guess just like you would visit another country to pick up some phrases and things to help you out. But yeah, it sounds like it's far from codified. Right. Do you say codified or codified? Codified.

You do? Cod. All right. And then there's babies speak in sign language. And I want to say, if you want to see a creepy picture of a baby, check out this article on howstuffworks.com, how sign language works. I missed that. On the last page, the baby sign language page is a picture of a baby signing and it's staring

right at the camera. It looks way too young to be thinking of things. It's obviously thinking, murderous thoughts. He looks like he's doing karate to me. But look at his face though. It's like a scary kid's sinister. It's a great word. So that is a baby sign language.

Well, yeah, there's a school of thought that if you start your baby out before they can speak English words or whatever words that you are going to get them ahead in life by signing things that they need, like teach them to sign for hungry or puppy pee or daddy or mommy. Right. And they say it about six months. Kids can start picking this stuff up and learn like dozens of words. Yeah, they can learn it at six months, but it might take a couple months before they

start signing and return, but they're still absorbing it. And like you said, they learn obvious words that have meaning to them in their life. But apparently a lot of parents report that their kids, once they figure out what they're doing that they're communicating, they want to learn more and more and more, which is pretty cool. Yeah. And there was a little bit of concern when this was first introduced that kids who were learning sign language would become deficient in speech.

Right. And they did a study and they found out actually the exact opposite is true, like kids who are learning sign language as babies have better speech abilities and language abilities than their peers who didn't learn it. That's interesting. That's at least one study found, but these same researchers recommend that if you're teaching your kid sign language, which I didn't know it was a thing, but you and I went to go visit a friend of hers.

You didn't know it was a thing? And like they started signing to their baby and I was like, what is going on? Is your kid deaf? Yeah, kind of. And apparently it's a thing. I didn't realize it. I had seen it before. But they're saying if you teach your kid, your hearing child sign language, speak the

word as well so the kid comes to understand that speaking and signing are, they're saying the same thing. Okay. So there's not, there's not a reliance on just one or the other, I guess. Yeah. I'm glad to know that it does lead to better speech maybe later on because when I first saw people doing that, it was kind of like, I was one of those doubters. It was like, come on, what are you doing really?

Yeah. But now I get it. Yeah. It makes sense. Plus it's kind of cool. Like if you're a kid, if you can get your seven month old kid to sign things to you. Yeah. It's almost like the same thing, but on the opposite end of the timeline of getting messages

from the grave, you know, like babies can't talk for a reason. Yeah, yeah. If they know stuff that they're not supposed to know, you know. So if your baby does the sign for area 51, you're in trouble. Right. Yeah. I got one more little fun thing. I was talking about the guy in DC painter, this is his last name.

He said that a lot of times they'll get hired because they have to get hired, you know, to under federal law, but there won't be anyone there that's hard of hearing. Right. But they still have to stand up there and sign. And he calls that in the Terps apparently call that air guitar. That's awesome. That's pretty good. Yeah.

Cool. So sign language. Yeah. So if you have a friend who is deaf or hard of hearing and is sign language person, a signer, I guess, and you want to ask them how we did. If you go on to stuff you should know.com and go to the page for this episode, it will have a full transcript for it too. So everybody can check it out.

And if you want to know more about this article, see the scary, scary baby. You can type in sign language on how stuff works.com and it will bring up Strickland's article. That's right. So there's two websites for you to go to stuff you should know.com and how stuff works.com. Boom. And since I said two websites, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this HIV.

Hey guys. I recently went to visit family in Louisiana for Christmas break from San Francisco and during a conversation with a quote friend from high school, I mentioned the fact that I had recently started my medication for HIV AIDS. And this quote friend, end quote, became visibly uncomfortable and clearly was looking for an excuse to leave. I received a text later where I was accused of endangering his life by not immediately disclosing my status, with them giving examples of risky behavior like what if I had drank

after you or some microscopic speck of your spit had gotten on my face. 2013, 14 now, and this is what's going on still. Have you seen Dallas Barra's club yet? No. Can't wait. It was a stark reminder, guys, of just how little people know still about how HIV works. Not only are neither of those things a possible vector of transmission, but modern medication can so effectively eradicate HIV from your blood and semen that you're practically not

even contagious anymore, reducing the risk by as much as 99.9%. I had end-age AIDS in May, and by August my viral load was undetectable, and my T-cell count was normal, but there were complications with medication side effects such as liver damage. There's so much information out there about HIV that people who don't have it are unaware of when it comes to HIV ignorance and cause positive people some serious pain when they are uninformed because they feel like a biohazard. Yeah, I imagine.

And it would be awesome if you guys could do an episode how HIV works, and that is Jesse in San Francisco, and he works with the LGBT community out there. I can't remember where he works, but he was like, yeah, man, read this and do a podcast on HIV, and I think that's a great idea. I do, too. And we should get that together. Fourth coming. That's right.

Thanks, Jesse. Yeah. To your friend, boy. 2014. Get with it, dude. I remember doing something. I remember being a kid. Yeah.

We were the generation that was just scared to death of AIDS and HIV because we're the ones who were on the schoolyard when this thing was becoming a thing. And I remember being afraid of that kind of thing, and then learning as I got a little older, you'd have to drink something like a gallon or two gallons of an HIV patient's saliva to possibly contract HIV through saliva or something like that. And you were like, I just drank a quart, so I'm good to go. Isn't that grody? And the whole toilet seat thing?

Remember that? Yeah, I remember that. It's just ridiculous. But I have one for you. That's surprising. Oh, we'll do a podcast on it. Okay. Okay.

Oh, man. That's dispensable. Okay. So look for an HIV podcast, too. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me, you can get in touch with us via Twitter. That's right. You can join us on facebook.com, slash stuff you should know, send us an email to stuffpodcast

at discovery.com, and as always, go check out our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Lynda.com. Lynda.com offers thousands of engaging, easy-to-follow video tutorials taught by industry experts to help you learn software, creative, and business skills. Membership starts at $25 a month and provides unlimited 24-7 access. Try Lynda.com free for seven days by visiting Lynda.com, slash S-Y-S-K. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want

to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes, because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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