Wednesday, February 21, 2007
day with fumiko
We had a really interesting day today. We had lunch with the deaf japanese woman, Fumiko, who we met at the Kyoto Deaf Film festival. She taught us a lot of Japanese sign language, and about Japanese Deaf culture. She is incredibly kind and generous.
One interesting thing I learned was about the Japanese hand alphabet. We, Yukie and I, were trying to learn it before meeting her today, and i noticed that many of the letters resemble those in ASL. the vowels are the same, and "ka"=K, "sa"=S,"ra"=R, and "ma" and "na" are very close to M and N. We were willing to chalk this up to pure coincidence, but it turns out that a teacher of the deaf in Japan went to the US and was so impressed with deaf culture here, he borrowed the 26 letters of the occidental alphabet and converted them to the 55 two-letter combinations of the Japanese one. However, one should beware of the letter T...unfortunately it's a swear word in JSL!
One interesting thing I learned was about the Japanese hand alphabet. We, Yukie and I, were trying to learn it before meeting her today, and i noticed that many of the letters resemble those in ASL. the vowels are the same, and "ka"=K, "sa"=S,"ra"=R, and "ma" and "na" are very close to M and N. We were willing to chalk this up to pure coincidence, but it turns out that a teacher of the deaf in Japan went to the US and was so impressed with deaf culture here, he borrowed the 26 letters of the occidental alphabet and converted them to the 55 two-letter combinations of the Japanese one. However, one should beware of the letter T...unfortunately it's a swear word in JSL!
Labels: deaf
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