I have been discussing language change and borrowing with my students and we started talking about signs for the i-phone.
Here are some of the signs people came up with (the last one is for the i-pad so it just shows the distinction between the i-phone and the i-pad):
Loans from either English or ASL don't work well.
A direct English calque of "i" plus "phone" works well enough for anyone who is happy to back-translate but visually it doesn't work at all. I think part of this is because the sign TELEPHONE is old enough to come from the time when it was something hearing people used. TELEPHONEs are things you put to your ear. Sure, i-phones can be put to your ear (not that ones sees it that often) but for members of the Deaf commnity the i-phone has no history of being a telephone. It carries none of the baggage of being a barrier to the world of hearing people. The word 'phone' and the sign TELEPHONE are almost coincidentally linked to the i-phone.
Then there's the 'i' bit. We can discount wordplay like EYE+PHONE, despite the wide open phonological niche where it could comfortably sit. There is a proud pedigree of BSL compounds where the first sign is SEE - SEE+MAYBE =CHECK, SEE+NEVER = STRANGE, SEE+SHOW = EXHIBITION, SEE+CATCH = DISCOVER and SEE+SWEAR-THE-TRUTH =WITNESS as just a few examples (there are plenty more in the BSL-English dictionary). And they all move away from the head and downwards, so that makes the perfect model for EYE+PHONE. But it's too clever by half. I+PHONE uses a closer letter-to-meaning link with the 'I' but that won't work as a compound because it moves upwards and in towards the head, and anyway it looks like a verb phrase "I phone [somebody]".
Most prosaically and functionally, then, if we want a calque we can simply fingerspell the -i- and then use PHONE. Again there is a linguistic niche open as wide as the sky (that's a Dot Miles allusion - watch her poem The Cat) for a manual letter and a sign to create BSL calques from English. We only have to think of -c-WALL (Cornwall), -c-WELL (Camberwell), CAT-f- (Catford) and –c-BRIDGE (Cambridge). It's all right, but no better than all right.
Maybe the ASL loan could help. We have a history of borrowing from other sign languages, including ASL, and sometimes we don't even notice it. Take the sign TREE that most BSL signers today would use. Not many are aware that it's a loan from ASL. But for the i-phone there's a major clash because the ASL manual letter corresponding to the letter 'i' uses the same handshape as the BSL morpho-phoneme 'bad'. Thus, instead of a sign that looks like a foreign sign for an i-phone we have a sign that looks like a native sign for a bad phone.
So we give up on loans from any other language and look to a visually motivated sign that doesn't even acknowledge that the i-phone is a telephone. Why would it, when Deaf people don't use it as a phone anyway? It is phonologically appropriate; the non-dominant base hand is a flat B hand and doesn't move. It might be more "visual" if the handshape were a handling classifier to show how one holds an i-phone, but that would be against Battison's dominance and symmetry constraints. So, instead, the handshape is an entity classifier focusing on the flatness of the i-phone. There is something deliciously elegant about using the open-8 handshape for the dominant hand. A 5 or 1 handshape (or G handshape for old fogeys like me) would do and maybe even be more visually accurate, but would have none of the charm of the open-8.
How can you not love this language?
(And from what I can make out, the only difference between the signs for an i-phone and an i-pad are in the size of movement)
Here are some of the signs people came up with (the last one is for the i-pad so it just shows the distinction between the i-phone and the i-pad):
Loans from either English or ASL don't work well.
A direct English calque of "i" plus "phone" works well enough for anyone who is happy to back-translate but visually it doesn't work at all. I think part of this is because the sign TELEPHONE is old enough to come from the time when it was something hearing people used. TELEPHONEs are things you put to your ear. Sure, i-phones can be put to your ear (not that ones sees it that often) but for members of the Deaf commnity the i-phone has no history of being a telephone. It carries none of the baggage of being a barrier to the world of hearing people. The word 'phone' and the sign TELEPHONE are almost coincidentally linked to the i-phone.
Then there's the 'i' bit. We can discount wordplay like EYE+PHONE, despite the wide open phonological niche where it could comfortably sit. There is a proud pedigree of BSL compounds where the first sign is SEE - SEE+MAYBE =CHECK, SEE+NEVER = STRANGE, SEE+SHOW = EXHIBITION, SEE+CATCH = DISCOVER and SEE+SWEAR-THE-TRUTH =WITNESS as just a few examples (there are plenty more in the BSL-English dictionary). And they all move away from the head and downwards, so that makes the perfect model for EYE+PHONE. But it's too clever by half. I+PHONE uses a closer letter-to-meaning link with the 'I' but that won't work as a compound because it moves upwards and in towards the head, and anyway it looks like a verb phrase "I phone [somebody]".
Most prosaically and functionally, then, if we want a calque we can simply fingerspell the -i- and then use PHONE. Again there is a linguistic niche open as wide as the sky (that's a Dot Miles allusion - watch her poem The Cat) for a manual letter and a sign to create BSL calques from English. We only have to think of -c-WALL (Cornwall), -c-WELL (Camberwell), CAT-f- (Catford) and –c-BRIDGE (Cambridge). It's all right, but no better than all right.
Maybe the ASL loan could help. We have a history of borrowing from other sign languages, including ASL, and sometimes we don't even notice it. Take the sign TREE that most BSL signers today would use. Not many are aware that it's a loan from ASL. But for the i-phone there's a major clash because the ASL manual letter corresponding to the letter 'i' uses the same handshape as the BSL morpho-phoneme 'bad'. Thus, instead of a sign that looks like a foreign sign for an i-phone we have a sign that looks like a native sign for a bad phone.
So we give up on loans from any other language and look to a visually motivated sign that doesn't even acknowledge that the i-phone is a telephone. Why would it, when Deaf people don't use it as a phone anyway? It is phonologically appropriate; the non-dominant base hand is a flat B hand and doesn't move. It might be more "visual" if the handshape were a handling classifier to show how one holds an i-phone, but that would be against Battison's dominance and symmetry constraints. So, instead, the handshape is an entity classifier focusing on the flatness of the i-phone. There is something deliciously elegant about using the open-8 handshape for the dominant hand. A 5 or 1 handshape (or G handshape for old fogeys like me) would do and maybe even be more visually accurate, but would have none of the charm of the open-8.
How can you not love this language?
(And from what I can make out, the only difference between the signs for an i-phone and an i-pad are in the size of movement)
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