The sign language actually makes sense because the majority of people who are born without hearing will not learn how to read. Without the association between phonemes and graphemes you're essentially just trying to associate a series of seemingly random glyphs to concepts.
That's hard to understand, because it seems like that would tremendously compound their limitations. You can't read signs at stores telling you what things are, 99% of the internet is unusable, computers are mostly unusable in general, you can't read for pleasure or read textbooks to learn so your education is going to be very limited, you can't watch TV shows or movies unless they have special ASL versions, the vast majority of jobs would be simply beyond you- office jobs are out entirely and even a lot of manual labor stuff is extra dangerous if you can't read warnings or instructions, and that's just off the top of my head. It just seems like it would be hard to ever live independently while being illiterate and deaf, but it's not very hard at all to imagine living independently while only being deaf. It makes sense that it would be harder to learn, particularly at first, but the cost of being illiterate is probably higher than the cost of being deaf, especially these days that more stuff can be done through text via the internet, so surely it would be worth nearly any effort to avoid having not one but two significant disabilities.
Some do learn to read (I've heard numbers from 5-15%) but they read like speed readers going straight from a string of graphemes directly to meaning without translating to phonemes. You may be underestimating the difficulty. It would be like trying to learn to speed read Arabic without ever having heard it spoken. And it's not like they generally don't try; most profoundly deaf people can read "2 apple for $1" or "Caution" or "Restroom" but that's not literacy.
I don't see how that's different than sign language... or any language at all. It's always just a whole bunch of symbols together or not, be it written, spoken, or by gesture. Learning what the letters "Hello" together mean, or what that specific hand gesture means, is about the same.
Also, some 'exotic' languages (like Chinese/Japanese Kanji) are very hard to learn and basically a whole bunch of lines and shapes in all directions, and yet billions of people still know those languages perfectly well.
Since all books are written, as well as the internet, and a lot of medias, you may as well learn to write/read even if you don't know the actual pronunciation.
The sign language actually makes sense because the majority of people who are born without hearing will not learn how to read. Without the association between phonemes and graphemes you're essentially just trying to associate a series of seemingly random glyphs to concepts.
That's hard to understand, because it seems like that would tremendously compound their limitations. You can't read signs at stores telling you what things are, 99% of the internet is unusable, computers are mostly unusable in general, you can't read for pleasure or read textbooks to learn so your education is going to be very limited, you can't watch TV shows or movies unless they have special ASL versions, the vast majority of jobs would be simply beyond you- office jobs are out entirely and even a lot of manual labor stuff is extra dangerous if you can't read warnings or instructions, and that's just off the top of my head. It just seems like it would be hard to ever live independently while being illiterate and deaf, but it's not very hard at all to imagine living independently while only being deaf. It makes sense that it would be harder to learn, particularly at first, but the cost of being illiterate is probably higher than the cost of being deaf, especially these days that more stuff can be done through text via the internet, so surely it would be worth nearly any effort to avoid having not one but two significant disabilities.
Some do learn to read (I've heard numbers from 5-15%) but they read like speed readers going straight from a string of graphemes directly to meaning without translating to phonemes. You may be underestimating the difficulty. It would be like trying to learn to speed read Arabic without ever having heard it spoken. And it's not like they generally don't try; most profoundly deaf people can read "2 apple for $1" or "Caution" or "Restroom" but that's not literacy.
I don't see how that's different than sign language... or any language at all. It's always just a whole bunch of symbols together or not, be it written, spoken, or by gesture. Learning what the letters "Hello" together mean, or what that specific hand gesture means, is about the same.
Also, some 'exotic' languages (like Chinese/Japanese Kanji) are very hard to learn and basically a whole bunch of lines and shapes in all directions, and yet billions of people still know those languages perfectly well.
Since all books are written, as well as the internet, and a lot of medias, you may as well learn to write/read even if you don't know the actual pronunciation.