How do the deaf interpret rhyme?

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Is anyone here deaf, or do you have any experiential insights into this? I'm thinking about someone who's been deaf since birth (or early early childhood), encountering the idea of rhyme in poetry/verse. I have no idea how it might translate.

― Hurlothrumbo (hurlothrumbo), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:31 (twenty-two years ago)

that's like "how do the blind interpret colour?"

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:33 (twenty-two years ago)

Except that poetry is widely, easily accessible to the deaf (on the page), and is not considered exclusively an aural experience.

But that's why I'm asking -- does rhyme become somehow conceptualized non-aurally, or is it incidental to the other pleasures of poetry (meter, language, imagery, etc.)?

― Hurlothrumbo (hurlothrumbo), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:37 (twenty-two years ago)

huh, that is a puzzler.

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:46 (twenty-two years ago)

I don't have any bright ideas myself but I'd be interested in hearing what people have to say.

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:47 (twenty-two years ago)

A better question might be "how do the def interpret rhyme?"
Word

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:52 (twenty-two years ago)

There are entirely different patterns by which poetry & narrative are constructed in the deaf community. A deaf person can of course read conventional poetry, with rhyme and all that, but it tends not to carry the same weight or interest that sign-specific stories & poetry do.

There is an enormously rich "oral" tradition (ie, carried on exclusively through signing and not written down) in the deaf community that is pretty much entirely unknown to the hearing world. I recently wrote a screenplay for an animated program for deaf children my ex is producing for p b s. I wrote the scenerio, which was then translated into ASL, by her and by the deaf actors doing improvisations (they filmed it in rotoscope). My original script almost completely vanished, since the puns and jokes and signifiers and the interesting patterns they can be put into are so hugely different from written speech.

The deaf world is really a self-sustaining alternate universe, with its own cultural codes and achievements. Hearing-based formal elements, like rhyme, are largely irrelevant to them and it's a common mistake (one I used to make as well; I'm not trying to scold you) to assume they value, or should value, the same things we do.

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:52 (twenty-two years ago)

Hmm.. interesting question. People who have been totally deaf since birth are pretty rare but I guess that doesn't make it less interesting.

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:53 (twenty-two years ago)

If someone has been deaf from birth and has never heard human speech, what language does that person think in? I have often wondered about this.

― C J (C J), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:55 (twenty-two years ago)

Chester I don't think Hurlothrombo was implying that deaf people should neccessarily value rhyme; he was just curious about how they interpret it.

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Short version of my post: Why SHOULD the deaf feel the need to interpret rhyme when it is a) irrelevant to their experience; b) there are so many OTHER things that are relevant to their experience to focus on instead.

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:56 (twenty-two years ago)

Yes, slutsky, but asking "how do deaf people interpret rhyme" is implying that there is a reason for them to do so. Most deaf people do not feel this need.

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 15:58 (twenty-two years ago)

Replace SHOULD with WOULD in my above post. This is similar to asking "How to blind people interpret color?" Why would anyone feel the need to "interpret" something that is irrelevant to their experience?

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:05 (twenty-two years ago)

http://www.handspeak.com

Sorry to get mentalist on your thread, Hurlothrumbo. It's a good question, but a hearing-centric one, and if you're curious about why the deaf do not perceive their relative inability to comprehend verbal rhyme as a deficit, then this site is a good resource.

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:18 (twenty-two years ago)

The difference is that a blind person can't experience a non-textured painting which relies on color to convey its meaning; a deaf person can read a poem which relies equally on rhyme. (There's nothing about necessity in the question.)

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:19 (twenty-two years ago)

(Might not be clear what I mean by what I just said -- I mean that the answer to both questions might be the same, but it isn't necessarily intuitive to realize that. And the experiences are as different as "what does a cream pie taste like when you can't taste anything" vs. "what does a cream pie taste like when you can't taste sweet.")

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:24 (twenty-two years ago)

And, for instance, the use of rhyme in poetry is essentially -- usually -- tied to meter, which is rhythm, which is something the deaf can experience through other senses. So the function of rhyme, the pattern and existence of rhyme, is something which I'd think they can understand much more readily than a blind-since-birth person could understand color, which doesn't have a handy analogue in other senses that I can think of.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:27 (twenty-two years ago)

I left myself a get-out clause by saying they were "similar" and not "the same". The point I was trying to make, rhetorically, was that different value systems place different emphasis upon which elements in a poem or other work of art deserve interpretive effort. Why would a deaf person pay attention to verbal rhyme?

The implication in the question - in all questions about non-essential deaf behaviors - is that being unable to interpret rhyme is a deficit. When there is so much else of value within the scope of deaf poetry/storytelling/word games, why would it be?

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:31 (twenty-two years ago)

Tep I don't get the rhyme being tied to meter thing. The existence of regular rhyme and meter in the same poem is a common convention, but it's hardly essential.

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:33 (twenty-two years ago)

I think you're reading the deficit-implication (does that make sense? You know what I mean) in too strongly, is all -- I mean, I understand your point, but I don't think asking "how do the deaf interpret rhyme?" automatically implies "because if they don't at all, that's shit luck on them." Rhyme is, if not present in every spoken language, at least common enough that it's present in all the ones I'm aware of, and so it's a major part of a hearing person's language experience. It's pretty natural -- even if it is hearing-centric -- to wonder if there is an equivalent experience in sign languages (for instance, are some signs considered more aesthetic than others, the way we find some words better-sounding than others?)

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:39 (twenty-two years ago)

Oh, as for rhyme and rhythm -- well, I did say usually. The word "rhyme" is derived from "rhythm," after all (or they share the same root word, I forget which off the top of my head). Meter doesn't require rhyme, but when they're both present, they affect and play off each other -- whether through the usual thing of placing the rhyme at the end of a line, or putting rhyming pairs in unstressed parts of sentences, etc., whatever the poet chooses to do.

It isn't the same thing as just percussive or optic rhythm, but it certainly makes it easier to explain than if I were to try to tell a blind friend the difference between blue and red. You can explain the difference between two different rhyme schemes to a deaf person -- that doesn't mean they'll care, or have any reason to, but the capacity for explanation is still there.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:43 (twenty-two years ago)

I think you're right to an extent, these kind of questions do inspire defensiveness in people who are anxious that deafness should not be considered a disability (I'm also hungry and still on edge from the near-accident I had this morning). It can be a sisyphean battle to convince people that things they take for granted as valuable might be negligible to others, and that's a shark I jumped a little early here. Anyway, sorry everyone.

Tep I finally started your novel and am really enjoying it. The first 6 or so pages anyway :)

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:45 (twenty-two years ago)

Don't apologize, you answered the question! :)

I think that unfortunately hearing-centrism is probably one of the most difficult *centrisms to shake because it's so ... hard to be aware of, I guess. I mean, it's not skin color or sexual behavior or anything under discussion, it's language, which is so fundamental that you forget how much it affects you. Now I really, really want to know more, though (which is hearing-centric in its own right, I know). Maybe I'll take one of the ASL courses in the spring.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:51 (twenty-two years ago)

As to the question: how a totally deaf person would interpret rhyme, I'm not sure. I've had extensive conversations about this with ASL-fluent hearing people, and their answer is... pretty much what I did above, they try to change the emphasis of the question! I think it's somewhat similar to translation from an alphabetical language to a, umm, pictographic or whatever the various Chinese writing systems are called. The formal elements are so different it's hard to stress similarities, and translation often changes the original beyond recognition.

(This is of course a bad example to use for rhyme, since alphabetical and non-alphabetical languages both use it. i'm thinking more about how you'd show a Chinese speaker what a sonnet is in their language while keeping the elements that make it valuable and unique in the first place.)

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 16:54 (twenty-two years ago)

See, this gets into all sorts of issues of "translation," and the science and philosophy thereof, which I've been thinking a lot about because I've been reading so many authors whose works weren't originally in English (and too much languagehat.com). Given that you have -some- kind of loss of meaning or nuance in translating between any two languages (verbal, written, signed, whatever), what is the upper limit of that loss, and how do you deal with it?

And so on.

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 17:06 (twenty-two years ago)

Wow, I'm glad that you guys have turned this into a real discussion in my absence! Pardon the two-hour lunchbreak, but it;s Friday and sunny...

Chester, I definitely didn't mean to imply that the deaf should value rhyme at all -- I meant to be admitting total ignorance as to whether it had any value at all to the deaf, perhaps by some reinterpretive aesthetic. Thanks for your in-depth transmission; I knew somebody in this joint would have something informed to say.

I've been reading in translation, too; that's actually what got me started on this question in the first place. I was wondering about things that are untranslatable LITERALLY (idiomatic speech, say), but can be approximated/reinterpreted to have a similar (not identical) impact on the reader; vs. concepts that are truly untranslatable (ie, have no value or meaning in the culture of the secondary reader).

― Hurlothrumbo (hurlothrumbo), Friday, 25 July 2003 17:53 (twenty-two years ago)

continued...

What I'm hearing from you, Chester, is that to the deaf, rhyme falls firmly in the latter camp, right?

― Hurlothrumbo (hurlothrumbo), Friday, 25 July 2003 17:57 (twenty-two years ago)

Exactly! That's what I was trying to get at. Deaf vs. hearing is probably the most obvious distinction, but I'd bet there'd be differences in color words across languages, for instance (no word for orange, etc.)

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 17:57 (twenty-two years ago)

(Whoops, "exactly" is re: your first post there.)

― Tep (ktepi), Friday, 25 July 2003 17:58 (twenty-two years ago)

It falls into the latter camp based on conversations I've had with those who've been intimately involved with the deaf community, and my experiences watching ASL storytellers and TV programs (mostly for research purposes). So I wouldn't say "firmly" but that has been my impression.

Sign language is about much more than just hand symbols too. Facial expressions, body movements, etc., often in a very exaggerated manner, are totally essential to communication, much more so than for spoken conversation. Which further distances it from the written page as well.

― chester (synkro), Friday, 25 July 2003 18:19 (twenty-two years ago)

Chester I think you know what I'm saying (from your exchange with Tep)--I think this is a very innocent question about perception and brain function, and it's an interesting one. I'm familiar with the signed English vs. ASL debate and so on. Which is also very interesting.

― s1utsky (slutsky), Friday, 25 July 2003 18:43 (twenty-two years ago)

nineteen years pass...

CHat GPT seems to not fully understand the concept of rhyming

― | (Latham Green), Thursday, 13 July 2023 14:45 (two years ago)

was this really the thread to make that comment

― linoleum gallagher (Neanderthal), Thursday, 13 July 2023 14:46 (two years ago)

it's interesting to think of some AI implementations as being more purely shut off from modalities like hearing and vision than people would be.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, 13 July 2023 15:01 (two years ago)

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