One OF the ancient languages of the world has finally come out of obscurity, with the National Association for Deaf People's publication of two CDRoms which teach Irish Sign Language (ISL). The discs are a dictionary of 3,500 words, and a library of 1,300 phrases for learners, with a tutorial. They don't come cheap - the two together cost £95. This, sadly, represents the development costs for the project.
"When voluntary organisations produce something like this it's very dear," says NAD's information officer Frank Hayes. "We're lucky that we've been able to piggyback on the structure of presentation used by Microbooks in their British Sign Language CD-Rom."
An all-Deaf production team from all over Ireland worked on the CD-Roms, with a film crew from Microbooks in England, which specialises in international sign languages. "You use the course by clicking on the word or phrase and getting the sign onscreen," Hayes says. "There's also a quiz section where you test yourself - click on a letter, then you'll see a sign model signing, and you choose from a list which sign it is."
The CD-Roms are not a substitute for classes, but a resource for learners; until now, the only ISL dictionaries have been the two printed ones produced by NAD themselves. "Because the CD-Roms use video, and can be run slowly or at normal speed, this makes for a much clearer and more useful dictionary," Hayes says.
The CD-Roms are usable on a 486 DX33 PC or better - you need about 12MB of RAM. The idea for the set was sparked when the NAD's project manager Barry Dunne met Doug McClean of Forrest Books, which represents the largest book service available in Europe for Deaf people and people working within the area.
"They put us in touch with Microbooks, who manufactured the CD-Rom for us and did the video shoot and assisted in the formatting," Frank Hayes says. "But the actual work for ISL has been done completely by an all-Deaf team. The sign-language gloss - the linguistic translation - was done by Senan Dunne (no relation to Barry), who is a Deaf linguist. The sign-language models represent a broad age spectrum from all over the country - which allowed a very broad representation of ISL as it is today."
Editing and corrections were done by Josephine O'Leary, who signs the RTE News for the Deaf, and by Lawrence Coogan. Irish, British, American and all the other sign languages are different languages - and all are different from spoken language, with their own grammar and figures of speech and shades of meaning.
"Humans probably used sign before they used speech," Hayes says. "As a parent and a grandparent, I can say that children sign to you before they speak to you - pointing to things and smiling, for example." Sign language is a complex and complete mode of communications but quite different from spoken language. "Sign language as used in Ireland belongs to a family of languages which is related to French and American Sign Language, and developed about 200 years ago in France; the British chose not to follow the French model.
"The language follows laws of human nature and of logic, which means that Deaf people have developed a sort of Esperanto, and can also use an international version of signing," Hayes says. "It's a very beautiful language, with its own poetry which can be translated but is far more beautiful in the original. In English it's beautiful, when performed in sign language it's stunning."
Lucille Redmond is at: lucred@indigo.ie