True Biz Book Quotes

This time around, True Biz’s audiobook woke me from a dead sleep. I’d made my peace with audiobooks of my books, conceptually, and had kind of forgotten about the eventuality of this one. But this novel presented a whole new existential problem: in the writing itself, I had worked hard to make use of space on the page as a way to highlight the strength and clarity of ASL as a visual language. The result was just a small token of appreciation for what ASL can do—I had still flattened a 3-D language to two—but the signed dialogue looks and feels different than spoken dialogue in the novel, and I had no clue how they’d be able to make that distinction for a listener. I sent a low-key panic email to my editor. She said she’d flag it as a “challenge” for the audio team. Here’s what they came up with: The audiobook team would record the book as usual, and then record a signer performing the ASL dialogue in the book. Very sensitive mics would pick up the sounds of signing—the skin-on-skin contact, the mouth morphemes, the rustling of clothes. The listener would learn that these sounds beneath the dialogue were to mean the character was speaking ASL rather than English. We can’t capture ASL in sound form but, like the use of space in the printed text, it’s a token. I appreciate that a hearing team put some thought into the project, and were paying enough attention to notice that neither signed languages nor deaf people are silent. So yesterday, I went to the studio, rigged up with two heavy duty mics. When I first got into the soundproof room and looked around, I started to laugh. It was mostly foreign territory, but there was also a trace of the audiologists’ booths all of us deaf and hard-of-hearing people have spent so much time in".

LINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES Phonological: BASL signers are more likely to produce two-handed signs, use an overall larger signing space, and tend to produce more signs on the lower half of the face. Syntactical: A higher incidence of syntactic repetition appears in multiple studies of BASL signers. A study documented in 2011 also showed more frequent use of constructed dialogue and constructed action among Black signers. Lexical Variation: Some signs developed at Black Deaf schools diverge completely from standard ASL signs, mostly for everyday objects and activities discussed frequently by students. Linguists have also noticed an increase in lexical borrowing of words and idioms from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) among younger Black signers. Due to the prevalence of the oral method in white deaf education after the Milan Conference, many white deaf children were denied access to American Sign Language, and ASL was subjugated by spoken English. However, significantly fewer resources were dedicated to Black deaf education, leaving many Black Deaf schools to pursue manual language. As such, scholars note that some variations common in BASL, like a higher incidence of two-handed signs, are actually a preservation of the linguistic qualities of early ASL. (Jump to “ASL, origins of.”) NOTABLE PEOPLE Platt H. Skinner, abolitionist and founder of The School for Colored Deaf Dumb and Blind Children, circa 1858. (Jump to “Directory of U.S. Black Deaf Schools.”) Carl Croneberg, a Swedish-American Deaf linguist, was the first person to note differences between ASL and BASL in writing, as coauthor of the 1965 Dictionary of American Sign Language on its Linguistic Principles (see also: William Stokoe). Dr. Carolyn McCaskill’s 2011 book, The Hidden Treasure of Black ASL: Its History and Structure, features data from a series of studies performed by McCaskill and her team, and is considered a foundational work in the field.