Some of the sign languages are surprisingly old, and came about before universal communication was really considered much of a concern. ASL, for example, predates Esperanto by almost 75 years, and ASL's ancestors go back to the 1750s. As for the newer languages, it comes down to the question of what language you base it on.Pl4t0 wrote:Oh god, that would be awesome.Drake wrote:I always thought he was practicing his sign language but then started doing Ninjutsu seals, which is why Misha started laughing.
Yeah, I seem to have heard this elsewhere, what a missed opportunity to have at least some form of universal communication on this earth.ultrarare wrote:If I recall, sign language is not universal surprisingly.
And then there's Nicaraguan Sign Language. There's a fascinating story there, because the first school for the deaf in Nicaragua opened before there was a local sign language, and so they essentially crammed together a bunch of students who had previously only had their own ad-hoc systems they'd used at home, and out of this a language just sort of happened which isn't related to any spoken language at all. Linguists, needless to say, love it.