The race to save a dying language

Some weeks, or perhaps months, ago the Guardian introduced a two or three page middle section called the 'long read', which I had taken to be a wheeze to replace expensive news with cheap essays by middle ranking journalists and academics. A reflection of the troubled state of the Guardian's balance sheet.

However, the other day, I was moved to actually read a piece by one Ross Perlin called 'the race to save a dying language', around two pages, including a modest amount of picture, all about the politics swirling around minority sign languages, in danger of being swept away by the tide of ASL, the sign language used by most deaf people in the USA and plenty of others elsewhere. Built around the doings of a sign language which used to be used in Hawaii.

Plus a reminder that it was not so long ago that it was thought best for deaf people to stick to lip reading and sign languages which were more a less a transcription, perhaps at the level of the letter, of their local spoken language. Disciplinary action for children caught using sign in dorms after lights out - it then being the custom for a lot of deaf children to be collected together in residential institutions. Maybe it still is.

A good article. A reminder of why one buys the Guardian and the sort of thing that might once have appeared in the Observer or the Sunday Times, before they invented money and property sections - and, going forward, I shall look out for Mr. Perlin (see reference 1).

I thought to take an electronic copy, should I want to look at it again, so off to the Guardian web site to get one. No download pdf option seemed to be available and I declined to register myself, after which such an option might have become available. So I was reduced to copy and paste into (MS) Word, which was not too bad, with about 5 minutes editing getting rid of the dross which came along with the copy.

PS: I was almost moved to donate a little something to the Guardian to help with their balance sheet, but was rather put off by the likelihood that they would spend a large proportion of any such little something on sending me promotional material - an irritating custom of a number of otherwise worthy charities. Not yet taken the plunge.

Reference 1: http://www.rossperlin.com/.