Notes, Notings, and Common Refrains

This Signmark video was the first on my YouTube subscription page, and since I know there are folk in my circles who are interested in signed languages, as well as music, I thought I'd share... Besides, half the fun of having an earworm is infecting your kith and kin, right?



"Signmark" is the stage name of Finnish rapper Marko Vuoriheimo, who composes and performs in both ASL/English and suomalainen viittomakieli/Finnish.


Here are links to related videos:

A 13-minute documentary explaining his motivation and how he composes the songs (including the phonetic principles of sign, and how signed rhyming works).

Videos featured in the documentary:

Against the Wall

Kahleet/Shackles (in Finnish w/English Subtitles)

Smells like Victory (I love this last one, because although the lyrics are typical boasting of the Rap genre, the visuals make it clear that "Victory," in this case, means "Peace breaks out around the world."

(and the problem with songs that are written in both Signed and Spoken Languages, is they get in through earworms and eyeworms... and they're doubly hard to shake... help me!)

This one's for trouble... I think she'll understand why this seemed to me to be zeitgeistly connected to what's going on with her, lately:



( lyrics, as provided by the channel owner )

Signmark (Wikipedia article, so expect a good dose of nonsense/irrelevance) is a Finnish rap/hip-hop group, and the lead artist, Marko Vuoriheimo, is a native Signer of Finnish Sign Language. However, I recognize most of the signs in this song as ASL (American Sign Language), which is fair, I suppose since its lyrics are sung in American.

But these are signs I don't (quite) recognize:

"SINCE I'm doing this for my people..." -- SINCE (because), here, has the position, movement and palm orientation as the sign that I learned, but a different hand shape.

and:

"You WON'T see me fall down..." -- WON'T has the same hand shape, and palm orientation as the sign I learned, but a different movement and different position.

Finnish Sign Language is (according to linguists) part of the British Sign Language family. So maybe that's where the change comes from? Or maybe this is just the natural evolution of changes in the way languages are "pronounced" (I mean, to be fair, the last time I studied this stuff was 20+ years ago, and that's plenty of time for phoneme shifts)? Or maybe this a sign that's used in "Street lingo," or something, that doesn't get recorded for dictionaries and classrooms?

All of the above?

Sign: I know just enough to know half of what I don't know... :-P

Made with extra-normal's movie maker site, with generates computer voices and computer animation from text, which is why the voices are so stilted.

( description of the visuals, in lieu of a full transcript )

Earlier today, trouble commented that most of the ASL music videos out there on YouTube are by hearing students of the language, not native signers -- that's mostly just a question of numbers. Think that there are about an average of 30 students in every ASL class, multiply that by all the ASL classes in the country, and that every one requires you to translate a song, and put it on YouTube for your final exam. And so -- yeah. A lot of (literally) sophomoric efforts out there.

So here are a couple of vids for her (and all of you):

Sean Forbes became deaf in early childhood, he's oral and from a hearing family; he's also a native signer, and the founder of D-PAN (Deaf Performing Artists Network), dedicating to hiring deaf performers, and making music vids in ASL.

Signmark is Deaf from a Deaf family. He competed in Eurovision, 2009, and signed a contract with Warner Music in May of that year. He composes his raps to "rhyme" by hand-shape and signs in rhythm by following the vibrations of the baseline.

Came upon this just this afternoon / evening. And damn, if it don't make a metric buttload of sense to me.

Why Hearing Parents Don't Sign

Even if my posts on signing have, until now, all been outside of your interests, read this (brief, ~1,100 word) essay. At least, if you're one of those people who grew up with parents in your household, or had friends who did, you might find something to relate to, here:

[snippet quote]

There are many stories telling of how a parent got a new Deaf co-worker at the office, or comes into contact with Deaf people at church. All of a sudden, the parent is eager to learn sign language. Why NOW, after five, ten, fifteen, twenty years of living with their own flesh and blood? Simple: the new relationships with these Deaf adults are not stuck in the quagmire of power and control.

[snippet ends]