History
The beginnings of Taiwan Sign Language date from 1895.
The origins of TSL developed from Japanese Sign Language during Japanese rule. TSL is considered part of the Japanese Sign Language family.
TSL has some mutual intelligibility with both Japanese Sign Language and Korean Sign Language; it has about a 60% lexical similarity with JSL.
There are two main dialects of TSL centered around two of the three major sign language schools in Taiwan: one in Taipei, the other in Tainan City (the Taichung school used a sign language essentially the same as the Tainan school).
After the retrocession of Taiwan to the ROC, Taiwan absorbed an influx of Chinese Sign Language users from mainland China who influenced TSL through teaching methods and loanwords.
Serious linguistic research on TSL began in the 1970s and is continuing at present. The first International Symposium on Taiwan Sign Language Linguistics was held on March 1–2, 2003, at National Chung Cheng University in Minxiong, Chiayi, Taiwan.
Read more about this topic: Taiwanese Sign Language
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)