I’ve come across a thesis written by a student at the Department of English, Lancaster University for her MA degree. Her topic was the influence of British Sign Language (BSL) on the style of english written by BSL users. She called this deaf english.

Her argument was that BSL has a profound effect on the style of english written by BSL users and used various sources to back up her points, such as emails from a closed mailing list Deaf-UK, and a blog called Fintan’s Ramblings. For Deaf-UK, she approached the list owner for “permission” which she got, but never went on to contact the original authors for permission. She analysed their writings and quoted them at length in her research. Many of the authors were none the wiser.

The same tactic was employed with Fintan’s blog – she took a lot of examples from his blog, without his knowledge, and made the assumption that he is a BSL user when he is not at the time. If she had contacted him, letting him know what she wanted to do, she’d have discovered that he is not a BSL user (although he is about to learn BSL) and would appease Fintan for the respect of making him aware of her work.

So a critical amount of her examples of Fintan’s writings to support her notion that Fintan’s writings have a strong BSL influence due to his style of English is shot right out when Fintan is not a BSL user. Ooops.

What about the rest of her research? Well, she “anoynmised” people in the quotes from the mailing list but I still could identify them by searching a text string in my email client. That’s anonymousity shot out of the window. Oops.

With that aside, what about her arguments? Does it hold water? Not in my opinion. The examples she cited – I often write like that, especially when I’m writing a casual email rather than a professional document. I suspect its true for a lot of people – their english is more casual when emailing people they are comfortable with. She never mentioned this.

BSL users are not always people who have signed from birth and some grew up with English only and learnt BSL later. Does that mean their style of english suddenly change to “deaf english”? I don’t know, I doubt it, but she never considered it.

There are many deaf people with only English as their language, and those who use both. The former has a lot of examples of “deaf english influenced by BSL” and I’ve seen the latter group with perfect english with no “influence of BSL”.

Here are few of her examples she used to back up her points…

The following writers seem to use the verb in the first clause in the standard way, but leave out the copula from the second clause (the relevant areas are bolded):

…he will be base in London on project which funded from the council.
…we have returned back to the UK and settling down well!

Above: I’ve made mistakes like that. I’m not a BSL user.

Below, she pointed out the use of have/has/had is consistent within deaf english by BSL users. Well, I do it too, I suspect my blog is full of it. Fintan is the same and he’s not a BSL user. So why do we non-BSL users do it? Well, it is in a large part due to us not hearing every word in spoken english. Have/has/had all sound identical to our deafened ears in running speech. I personally do not make any distinctions of have/has/had when I’m listening to people.

The theme is similar throughout her thesis with the usage of of/the/for/with/be/becoming/become In spoken english, many of these words are missing to my ears unless the speaker is extremely good and familiar to me. To be fair to the student, becoming is not a word I would make a mistake on very much as a result of my being deaf, so that one is perhap unique to BSL users, as a result of no equivalent of it in BSL (or so I’m led to believe in the thesis – correct me if she and I are wrong).

The findings on modals are not perhaps as clear or suggestive of BSL influence as those for copulas, but one consistent feature is the non-standard use of have, has, and had, even where most other tense and verb agreements match:

…I am writing to inform you all the members that I has been neglecting of the policy regarding to copyright issues…
…Anne have sent an email saying that nokia is about 359 pounds.

I’m not going to cite more examples or I’m going to be guilty as her in research ethics by pulling in more quotes written by people. I hope the few quotes I’ve put in above amounts to fair use.

So, if you’re going to do some research, take a course in research ethics, and I think the Department of English at Lancaster university need to pay more attention to their students conducting research in a proper scientific manner as it seems to me that the student either not have had sufficient guidance and/or training in ethics or she ignored them – I suspect its the former as she does come across as a nice person, but didn’t realise the consequences of her work – one of the people studied is now embarrassed about the style of writing he/she is using and is put off, despite her assurances otherwise.

The excuse she used is that the examples are on the internet and therefore in the public domain – well that is not true. The contents of emails remains the property of the author, and a mailing list owner do not have the right to act on the author’s behalf. Similarily, blogs, many are copyrighted, and if they are not, it not only polite to ask for permission but gives respect to the guinea pigs.

No body likes to be under the microscope, certainly not unwittingly and without the respect of consideration for their feelings.

If anyone want to research on my site, drop me a note before doing it. I’m for research, but only if it’s done right!

Apologise if I’m vague on the details – the organisations involved took steps to rectify the situation so there’s no need to point out their names.

A while ago, I took part in a training exercise to test a set of procedures. There were many volunteers from charitable organisations – many of them playing different roles.

I was tasked to come in as myself, but only able to communicate in BSL (even though I don’t sign, I just play the part). The idea was that one of the charity volunteers, representing their charity would come along and try and communicate with me and explain what is going on. A few did manage to do some very basic signing to ask if I am ok, and a few resorted to writing notes, indicating a charity interpreter will be coming along as soon as she could (1 hour).

While waiting, and left to my own devices, another charity volunteer, playing a support volunteer, an old man of about 70 years of age, if not more, approached me. He asked (verbally) if I was ok, I said yes, but nobody is telling me anything and I have nothing to do. Now, I must point out that I was a 25 year old blokey bloke with a stubble at the time.

He took me over to the children’s play area, and gave me a Barbie doll and gestured me to sit on the play mat with the kids and he walked away, absolving any responsibilities in the matter.

Rather than being speechless, I laughed at the sheer idiocy of the whole situation. Rest assured that the relevant charity boss has been made aware embarrassed about the situation and will look into deaf awareness training.

The scary thing was, the guy thought he was doing the right thing and saw no problems with it. Now, is it any wonder why deaf people have a harder time getting a job than criminals who’ve done a stint at Her Majesty’s pleasure?

It is surprising to find that my digital hearing aids coped really well in the desert, with daily temperatures of 45c on average, topping out at 48c. Meanwhile, a package containing an Intel Xeon 3.8Ghz processor chip was left in the sun before it was known to us – while it worked ok, it would hard crash randomly on a static computer system.

Dust proved to be more of a problem, building up around the ear moulds, clogging up the microphone and getting in the way of switches and battery contacts. Out here, it definitely need attention at least twice a day.

In the Saharan Libyan desert, the humidity is very low, at around 7-11%, I’ve not had to remove moisture from the moulds at all, and with the heat, sweat is evaporating as soon as it appears so my hearing aids remain bone dry.

Which leads me onto the batteries – they last an astonishingly long time out here, I’ve only replaced the batteries once for each hearing aids in two and a half weeks, and that’s wearing them constantly for about 18 hours a day. This contrasted with maybe four days back home in the UK with less usage as I sleep more at home! The low power drain is such that I can go for days with warning beeps before having to change, whereas back in the UK, it goes dead very quickly and sometimes without warning.

Meanwhile, according to Grumpy Old Deafies, an article appeared in the Times newspaper suggesting that hearing aids should be treated like glasses and therefore a paid-for service. I think it is crazy – an assumption is made that hearing aids are a 100% effective correction device like glasses when they are nowhere near that – while I do hear with hearing aids, even at £275 each for analogue would make me think twice about bothering to have any at all (never mind the running costs of owning them). Leave comments on that blog if you have on an opinion about it.

In one of those long periods of nothing to do at work… I thought about all the airlines I flew with. Nothing terribly interesting I must admit… it passes the time…

In no particular order:

Britannia

Air UK

Monarch Airlines

British Airways

ThomsonFly

Easyjet

WizzAir

Cyprus Airways

Afriqiyah Airways

Buraq
no picture

Tunis Air

Air France

KLM

Jet2.com

Thomas Cook

Air Lingus

Air Portugal

Conviasa

Medevia

Thai Airways

As a deaf person, it is difficult to imagine a more challenging job that could be realistically be undertaken than mine.

I work with a crew of around 150-250 people. The vast majority speaks English as a second language, and loaded with their own strong mother tongue accent. The crew consists of people from Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan, Niger, Turkey, Russa, Kazashstan (sp), Croatia, Greece, Italy, Germany, France, USA, Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Bangladesh and Indonesia.

It is really is difficult to understand someone who is talking in English as a second language, I’m usually hopeless and often resign to writing it when I’m at home for the occasional time I do meet someone like this. However, out here, it is on a daily basic and have no choice but to really concentrate.

My technique is to get them to repeat about three times, and remember that their pronounciation of the vowels is greatly exaggerated and changed. “Donk ga to bithraam – ah dirtee!”. I’m sure there’s a British accent somewhere that resembles this. The word “salary” gets me stumped every time – “saal – aal – reeh” when pronounced by north Africans. After a while, it gets easier as my ears become accustomed to funny pronounciations.

The worst people to listen to, for me as someone from the north of England are those from western Australia, specifically Perth, and the French from France. The Russians and eastern Europeans comes a close third.

The biggest surprise to me is understanding Texans remarkably well. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing to hear someone from the Lone Star state.