Deaf Jam*

I'm traveling later today -- not to a foreign land, mind. OK not wildly foreign. Jen and I are off to the small western Pennsylvania town where my father lives. 

That's Daddy, in 1955, doing his best to impress and entice mia madre. It worked.

Traveling while deaf is always stressful -- for this babe anyway. I'm seeing so many folks whose lips I'm unaccustomed to reading. It's exhausting to say the very least (HAH, looky there -- I did NOT overstate or engage in Olympic gold medal winning levels of hyperbole! Waddya know. It CAN happen!).

Jen's going with me, thank Bast! She can fill in, with ASL, what I can't otherwise pick up.

Above right are the Chinese characters for deaf and deafness. At Sinosplice you can find the fingerspelling alphabets for Chinese, Japanese, British English, American English and Russian. Fascinating stuff!

Below is the word deaf in a bunch of cool languages. I couldn't find the Pittsburghese translation -- guess I'll have to wing it.

Croatian -- gluv
Czech -- hluchý
Danish -- døv
Dutch --  doof
English - Deaf
Estonian -- kurt
Finnish -- kuuro
French -- sourd
Frisian -- dôf
German -- taub NOT Traube (grapes) and not Taube (pigeon) either, as I discovered while fumbling through an exchange with a nice, very patient shopkeeper, in Berlin while visiting my cousin Della.
Greek -- κουφός
Hungarian -- süket
Ilongo (more formally -- Hiligaynon, a language spoken in  by more than 7,000,000 people in the Philipines) -- bungol
Indonesian -- Tuli
Italian --sordo
Polish -- głuchy
Portuguese -- surdo
Romanian -- surd
Russian --  глухой
Sanskrit -- akarNa
Serbian -- глув
Slovak -hluchý
Slovenian -- gluh
Swahili -- kiziwi
Swedish -- döv
Tagalog -- bingi
Turkish -- saDir
Urdu -- behra
Vietnamese -- diec

* Deaf Jam is a documentary about sign language poetry. I SO have to see this!

Aneta Brodski, a deaf teen living in New York City, discovers the power of American Sign Language poetry. As she prepares to be one of the first deaf poets to compete in a spoken-word slam, her journey leads to an unexpected collaboration.