Comment by elevaet
1 year ago
I believe that bit about sign language in Brazil. When I spent some time there years back I was impressed that most people seemed to know a bit of sign language. There is also a lot of informal hand gesture-slang culture. I remember some things like "let's go", "robbery/rip off", "it's crowded"
Is the informal gesture slang based on the sign language, or Are they just gestures?
Cause I'm Italian and we have a ton of those but they have nothing to do with the Italian Sign Language (LIS).
I'm curious to see Italian Sign Language now. I bet it's way bigger and more urgent than most.
Here's a video that demonstrates LIS (Italian Sign Language) after a short intro in (spoken) Italian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Y2a8WZDOo&t=30
It doesn't seem significantly different from other sign languages to me but I'm not fluent in any of them so YMMV. Sign languages always feel a bit "big and urgent" to me.
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Good question. I always assumed they were unrelated to the official sign language but I don't actually know.
I wonder if there are many commonalities between the informal gestures used in Italy and Brazil.
Many gestures are shared across cultures even without an obvious shared history (e.g. some simulation of an erect penis will mean "f*ck you", which you can do by raising a finger or by raising your forearm) so I bet there are some :)
One gesture I know of which existed in Brazil and Italy is the "fig" sign[0]. AFAICT nobody uses it anymore in Italy, but it goes back to the Etruscans!
Some years ago I came across a nice book (pdf) by some academic cataloguing a bunch of gestures across cultures, but I am failing to find it again ATM :(
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fig_sign
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In my university (public university in Brazil), sign language was an optional class for all majors. It surely must have helped that./