“We hear a lot about the rights of speakers of Ulster-Scots and Irish, but for these people communicating in spoken English is always an option when they need medical attention.”

This letter in the Belfast Telegraph hits the nail right on the head. 

“Someone who wants to talk to the Irish language officer about the needs of the Irish language community will be capable of speaking temporarily in English, but most deaf people simply do not have the option of communicating in spoken English. There is a greater need for one of the officers to have BSL, or ISL than there is to have fluent Irish.”

Good news! I've made my booking form less of a horrible pain in the neck. It should now be much easier to complete, and you really do only have to fill in the minimal information I need for the booking. The mandatory fields are marked with an asterisk*.

I am interpreting the Run Briefing and the Intro for New Runners at Exeter Riverside Parkrun this Saturday (May 12th). The briefings are at about 8:45 and the run starts at 9:00. Meet at the red and white buoy-thing. Come and have a go. You do not have to be fast. You do not even have to run (you can walk it if you want). It is very friendly.

If you have not done a Parkrun before:

• It is free.
• You need to register on this web page.
• You then get a bar code to print off and bring with you. The bar code says who you are.
• When you finish your run they give you another bar code. That bar code says what position you finished in.
• They know the finish times for all the positions.
• You show BOTH bar codes to the scanning person in the Quay Climbing Centre. This tells Parkrun which runner goes with which finish position.
• You keep YOURS, and they keep the POSITION bar code.
• Your finish time will be on the website in the afternoon.
• You keep your personal bar code so you can use it the next time you run.

Ian Sanborn just uploaded a new video. I don't get it. But I love it. Is it deep? Is it daft? Is it both? Is it great? Definitely.

Atlas Obscura has an interesting article about a guerilla project to redesign the globally-utilised and instantly recognisable "Wheelchair Symbol".

Designed in 1968, it has come to unquestionably represent any and all disability, and of course that is problematic from the outset as well as unavoidable. This mysterious new image began to appear around 2009 and has led to interesting debate about identity, representation and attitude.

“We really like the situation we’re in,” Glenney says. “It gives visibility to the context of people with disabilities. It keeps them ‘in the market’ of ideas, so to speak. Our symbol is most successful when it’s not fully legal—when there’s lots of wrinkles and questions.”

Read the whole article here.

There's an interesting article in the Green Bay Press Gazette today about a "sign language" developed over the last hundred or so years in a lumberyard on the Menominee reservation. I put "sign language" in quotes because my first smart-arse reaction was to doubt it. Bloody hearing people. It's probably cultural appropriation. Or something. I dunno. However, while I entirely expect that it is not as sophisticated or fleshed out as sign languages evolving over thousands of years within large Deaf communities, it certainly meets all of Hockett's "essential characteristics"* of human languages that BSL or ASL does, and it is certainly an interesting thing!

“It sprung up organically through the force of several generations of workers struggling to make themselves understood in the noisy environment of a sawmill over the last 110 years, and it’s something to behold.”

— Paul Srubas, Green Bay Press Gazette, April 5th 2018

Apparently nobody has ever studied it, or done any more than one or two little press-pieces about it. I think it would be a wonderful opportunity to produce a unique piece of linguistic research. An interview with a couple of generations would cover the entire language history.

Their sign for 'drunk' looks great too.

* Hockett, Charles F. (1960), "The Origin of Speech," Scientific American, 203, 89–97.