FYI: Sing Language Exhibition, ILLC, Alsic
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LOT (Sibylla Nijhof)
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SIGN LANGUAGE EXHIBITION AT UTRECHT UNIVERSITY Starting Friday 26 June (and lasting until February 1999), the University Museum of Utrecht University (the Netherlands) hosts: KIJK ! TAAL An exhibition on aspects of Sign Language Until comparatively recently, educational environments and conditions for acquiring sign language were far from perfect. In Europe during the firs half of this century, the use of sign language was often prohibited in schools and institutions for the deaf, out of the noble but essentially mistaken belief that learning to speak would be the deaf person's doorway to society. Fortunately, these ideas are now considered outdated and detrimental to the deafs' cause. In the Netherlands, Nederlandse Gebaren Taal is on the verge of being officially recognized by the government as a minority language on Dutch soil. This exhibition is presented from the point of view that Sign Language is an extremely `visual' form of language. It takes the opportunity the provide general information about language, and languages, to a relatively lay public, and emphasizes that sign languages are the natural languages of the hearing impaired anywhere in the world. In a simple fashion, and by dint of a number of specially developed games, it discusses some basic linguistic notions such as the language faculty in the brain, the process of language acquisition, and the building blocks of words and sentences. And i addresses some common misunderstandings about sign languages: they are neither completely `iconic' nor universal, they are not simply the word-by-word signed counterparts of the spoken languages of the same cultural community, you can perform poetry in them, make jokes, and so on. "Kijk ! Taal" is a joint production of the Utrecht University Museum, the The Hague Vi-taal Foundation (Tony Bloem and Ruud Janssen), and the Utrech Institute of Linguistics (Wim Zonneveld and Inge Zwitserlood). Museum open: 11-17 hrs. daily (Sa/Sun 13-17 hrs.) The Lange Nieuwstraat 106, where the museum is situated in a beautiful new building in the Utrecht "Museum Quarter", is a 5 minutes walk from the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics at Trans 10. From Trans, rather than turn right towards the Inner City and the Dom Tower, turn left: this is the Korte Nieuwstraat which inevitably spills into the Lange Nieuwstraat. Utrecht is a 20 minute train ride from Amsterdam. The museum's location is a 20 minutes walk (or a 10 minutes bus ride) from the central railway station: go through the Inner City towards the Dom Tower, then proceed as above. - ------------------------------------------------------------ LOT Landelijke Onderzoekschool Taalwetenschap Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics Trans 10 3512 JK Utrech Phone: +31 30 2536006 Fax: +31 30 2536000 - ------------------------------------------------------------ |
