Yes.....if there was one global sign language which unfortunately there isn't. Today, even the (deaf) sign language you learn in the UK differs from that in the US.
I love the opportunity to practise my German and revel in it for the first few hours, especially after a few glasses of wine, but I have found myself in many situations where I just get tired of not saying everything I really want to say due to lack of vocabulary. It's really hard when it's all in Swiss German but I have to say once reminded that high German would be easier for me, most happily switch back and apologise profusely for slipping back to Swiss.
You have a point. With some 400million people speaking English as a main language and some 1 billion more speaking it as a second or official language it has a head start over Esperanto. The problem is getting the French and Germans to buy into that like the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes have. Maybe we just need to call it something else. Anglo Saxon was basically a German dialect which was heavily influenced by French after the Norman conquest. Words of French origin account for 45% of modern English and Anglo saxon words another 30%. So if you set out to invent a German/French hybrid language you’d end up with English anyway. All we need to do is brand it differently. Stop calling it English and call it Franglo-Saxon. Then the Germans and French can claim it as their own, buy into as a second language and bingo all our problems are solved. It’s all a question of perception. We just need to downplay the link between the Britain and the English language As Homer Simpson said “Pfft English. Who needs that. I’m never going to England”
It seems even that every country has it's own sign language (according to a quick look on WIKI)... in the case of Switzerland there are even 5 different "sign"-dialects (german), not to mention the other three languages...
I think it would take a while to unite those languages, not sure if there is already and international sign language??
Never thought about dialects. That would be a problem. Sort of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. But if we pulled our fingers out a standard sign language would not be impossible? Might cause some confusion during the transition to the new one - everybody would be all fingers and thumbs for a while. But if we worked our fingers to the bone wouldn't a standard sign language give us the upper hand?
luckily for me, I grew up with this situation coming up alot, when I was learning, I understood plenty (since I heard swiss-german often growing up) so if I understood the question, I would just answer in english, most people understood or if they didn't someone did and translated my answer
It's ~80% (commute-in) Germans, so all conversations are in German. If I need to ask something, then I can always do it in English. At lunchtime I sit at a table with a few people and occasionally I'll be asked a question in English, answer, but then it changes back to German. Sometimes I listen and translate in my head, other times I zone-out. I can only understand the basic elements of the conversation - "On the weekend I in Basel ****". Maybe I'll eventually learn more and more, but for the moment it's very isolating.
Nowdays (and for the previous 4 months) I really only talk to Mrs Wibble, and while she's my best mate, it would be nice to be able to converse with other people, even something as simple as those in-train conversations that you have with strangers.
To be honest, It it gets me down.
One of my friends is from Serbia, she speaks to me in a mix of English and German. I think I've learned more German words (nouns at least) talking to her, than from weeks of books && classes.
Like every other challenging situation, there are 3 choices. Fight: Join in with English. Learn conversational French/German fast. Just speak it without bothering about grammar. Faint: Various examples above! Flee: Some examples above. I was a fighter and learnt German and French through immersion and mimicry. Continuously listened to local radio and only watched local TV.
A man was sitting in a bar and noticed a group of people using sign language. He also noticed that the bartender was using sign language to speak to them.
When the bartender returned to him, the man asked how he had learned to use sign language. The bartender explained that these were regular customers who had taught him to sign. The man thought that was great.
A few minutes later, the man noticed that the people in the group were waving their hands around very wildly.
The bartender looked over and signed, 'Now cut that out! I warned you!' and threw the group out of the bar.
The man asked why he had done that, and the bartender said, 'If I told them once, I've told them 100 times -- NO SINGING IN THE BAR!'
Some years ago, my husband Swiss and I went to talk at the local hospital for birth preparation and before they started, the man asked if he should switch to SGerman- and my husband put his hand right up so they ended up doing whole talk in German on my behalf. Forgot to mention they were like 100 people there
In these cases, when I hadn't yet begun my "Deutsch Kurse" I was very thankful for buying a grammatik and conversation book published by Berlitz (bought in Cali.) In this book it writes out how one should best ennunciate german phrases or words; BRILLIANT! My accent was off but therefore I was able to hold my own and it was descently sized so that I didn't feel too ashamed to carry it around, plus it gave us one more thing to talk about