Stefan, I'm glad I could help out a little. Your question was a fantastic one and I appreciate you making me think. Might I inquire as to what got you curious about the nature of aesthetic appreciation?
And please forgive my poor manners. Welcome to the forum
It is a pleasure!
Likewise. Speaking generally, my interest in aesthetics (and languages) goes back a long time, to when I studied Philosophy at Cambridge. And although I ended up focusing my attention on Mathematical Logic - for the simple reason that this branch of Philosophy struck me as less speculative than the other branches, like Aesthetics, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind and so on - I nonetheless have always continued to enjoy thinking about the latter in my idler hours.
My more specific interest in whether & how deaf persons appreciate the aesthetics of sign languages was the result of two (entirely separate) conversations I had with two friends: the one friend told me that he had recently listened to a folk song, sung in a language he did not speak, so that - in a sense -
all parts of that song appeared as nonsense to him. But
certain bits of the song gave him the distinct impression of being nonsense even in their original language (the sort of stuff that is best translated as "hey-nonny-nonny" and the like). He wondered on what his impression might have been based (his ulterior motive for asking the question was speculations about how babies learn to talk). This got me to thinking about Hawaiian, a language I do not understand at all & which I know of only through the lovely music of the Hawaiian singer Iz. Hawaiian words & sentences sound entirely like nonsense to my ears, yet somehow give me the distinct impression of being meaningful in their original tongue. And this in turn, because I find Hawaiian so delightful to listen to, led me to think about the aesthetic qualities of different spoken languages.
My other friend, as I wrote above, had earlier alerted me to a video of a couple performing Bob Marley's "One Love" in sign language. Neither my friend nor I can sign, but she & I agreed that performing this song in sign language seemed to give it a greater depth, more feeling, than the merely spoken version has.
And these two separate conversations somehow merged in my mind, leading me to wonder about - I repeat myself - whether & how deaf persons appreciate the aesthetics of different sign languages.
I always assumed that the answer would be what it turned out to be. Because, quite apart from my belief that all humans, deaf and hearing, share the same innate ability & need to appreciate things for their beauty, there was also the fact that my second friend and I were quite able to appreciate the beauty of sign language. And if we, as non-signers, see the beauty in sign language, then surely those who are fluent in it do, too. And do so to a greater degree, with much more insight & specificity. Which you & others have now confirmed.
There is, however, another aspect to sign languages - and how deaf persons react to different ones - which intrigued me. It is this: it seems to me that the opportunities to compare languages are likely to be somewhat more limited for deaf persons than for hearing ones. Sign languages, being visual forms of communication, would seem to require the visual presence of another speaker; i.e. a person I can see, standing next or near to me; or else seeing that person on TV. Spoken languages, by contrast, seem to offer further possibilities for comparison: one can listen to a speaker in person, see them on TV, but one can also listen to them on the radio, on CDs and on other auditory media. It is even possible to piece together the approximate sound of a spoken language one is unfamiliar with through the written word, provided that this language is sufficiently similar to a language one already knows & is a language which shares the same alphabetical notation.
Would you say that this draws an accurate picture? Or am I way off the mark?
Anyway, forgive me for rambling on. I have surely taken up too much of your time already. With best regards. Stefan
