This morning someone on my local NPR station said that English is a very implicit language, while American Sign Language is a very explicit language.
What the heck does that mean?
The speaker, who interprets into ASL at stage productions, cited the example of translating the phrase “a cosmopolitan city”: “Well, you can finger-spell ‘cosmopolitan,’ but what does that actually mean? It’s a diverse city that has money and culture. So you have to expand on that, you don’t just finger-spell ‘cosmopolitan.’ “
That’s a good example of strategy for interpreting and translation, and an interesting insight about ASL. But does it show that ASL is “more explicit” than English?
What this example seems to indicate is that ASL has a smaller vocabulary than English. This occurred to me because I have a small French vocabulary and it causes me to have conversations like this:
Me: Hello, I would like to pay to have a car for one day.
French person: Ah, you would like to rent a car, Madame.
Now, most people would say, “That lady doesn’t know a lot of French.” Et oui, c’est vrai. But you could also say something like, “That lady’s French idiolect is more explicit than standard French. She mentioned payment and a limited time period, both of which are merely implied by the word ‘rent’.”
Somewhat analogously, ASL has a smaller word bank than the major spoken languages. Apparently this fact often leads to underestimation of its value and is therefore a sore point – see for example this post on Quora or Wikipedia’s assertion that “ASL users face stigma due to beliefs in the superiority of oral language to sign language.” Honestly, this is news to me, because I’ve never seen ASL portrayed as anything but super cool, but any linguist who’s made small talk has encountered the idea that the language with the most words is The World’s Best Language, so I get that an apparent paucity of vocab in ASL could be seen as a marker of inferiority.
OK. So ASL doesn’t have one word that is the precise equivalent of “cosmopolitan.” It probably doesn’t have the words “antediluvian” or “postlapsarian” either. But guess what? All those “words” are compounds made up of smaller words. A cosmopolitan place is a “world city” (Greek cosmos + polis), while antediluvian things happened “before [the] flood” (Latin ante + diluvium) and postlapsarian things happened “after [the] fall” (Latin post + lapsus). In other words, if ASL has words for “world,” “city,” “before,” “flood,” “after,” and “fall,” it can recreate all those compound words – and because they’re not cloaked (as they are in English) in the sounds of other languages, their meaning will be plainer.
A language is a tool, and if you can use it to express what you want to express, it’s a good tool. You don’t need to worry about how many words you have. I get along just fine in France with my circumlocutions.
And no language has achieved perfect specificity anyway. What are glasses, for example? Do you drink out of them or wear them over your eyes? Once a news team at the mall asked my friend what she was buying her mom for Christmas, and she said, “Glasses…um, drinking glasses” and made a drinking motion as if she needed a kind of sign language to come to her rescue where English had failed. In German, there’s no confusion: a “Brille” is a pair of eyeglasses and “Gläser” are what you drink from. But then German has the same word for “lentils” and “lenses.” You just have to deduce from context that your friend isn’t getting a prescription for contact lentils, or inviting you over for a steaming bowl of lens soup. We all seem to be communicating pretty well despite these deficiencies in vocab, though.
Back to the person I heard on the radio: at first I thought this was one of the dumb generalizations people are always making about language, like “English is very precise” (people who say this kind of stuff generally only speak English). But now I think that person was getting a point across in a rather brilliant way. Being a specialist in ASL and therefore sensitive to concerns about how it is perceived, they didn’t want to frame this interpreting problem as “ASL doesn’t have as many words as English.” Instead they thought it through in a different way: one English word, like “cosmopolitan,” implies a whole set of characteristics, whereas in ASL you would specify each characteristic, so…”English is a very implicit language, while American Sign Language is a very explicit language.” Got it.