Kinship Terminology in Czech Sign Language1 Klára Richterová, Alena

Kinship terminology in Czech Sign Language1 Klára Richterová, Alena Macurová, and Radka Nováková 1. Introductory remarks Little is known about Czech Sign Language outside the Czech Republic. The purpose of this chapter is to describe kinship terms used in Czech Sign Language (abbreviated as CzSL; in Czech český znakový jazyk). After the introduction (section 1), this paper provides, firstly, background information on the Czech sign language linguistics, the stratification of CzSL, and approaches to deafness (section 2); secondly, an outline of general character- istics of the kinship system in CzSL (section 3); and thirdly, an overview of appellative signs for members of the family: consanguineal relatives in the nuclear family (section 4.1), consanguineal relatives in the extended family (section 4.2) and affinal relatives (section 5). Within these three divisions, generations are used as the main criterion to establish subdivisions, with particular kin terms analysed in the following order: ascending kin terms – descending kin terms – horizontal kin terms. Fourthly, general findings concerning the forms of the data are suggested (section 6) and superordinate terms are discussed (section 7). Lastly, we focus on kin terms of CzSL from a diachronic viewpoint (section 8). In addition to the repertoire of terms for relatives, their formal makeup is also taken into consideration (especially to accentuate formal relations among them, which is why signs for the members of opposite-sex pairs, such as FATHER and MOTHER, are discussed together), as well as their origin (indigenous signs vs. borrowings from other languages) and their motivation (e.g. signs motivated by other signs, visually motivated signs). Since no relevant historical data are available at present, we have resorted to recording the widely known explanations of motivation provided by members of the deaf community. We are fully aware of the tendency toward folk etymology, that is, the fact that the users of all languages tend to “interpret, search for and clarify meaningful connections, and to find them even where there are none” (Rejzek 2009: 22). Some of the recorded visual “motivations” probably are of 164 Klára Richterová, Alena Macurová, and Radka Nováková this nature, so some reservation is necessary in accepting them, especially if folk etymology is understood in the broader sense (i.e. as etymological rein- terpretation with no change of the form of the lexeme; cf., for example, Jeffers and Lehiste 1979) or if associations, lying at the roots of most folk etymolo- gies, are understood as including both associations with another lexeme and associations with an entity, action, etc. from extralinguistic reality. The core of the material for this study has been gathered through controlled elicitation performed in a group of five native users of CzSL,2 and part of the data published in a bachelor thesis (Vojtechovský 2012) has been used as a supplement to broaden the spectrum of variants in our material. The bachelor thesis is focused on comparing kinship terms used in Slovak and Czech Sign Languages. Only data elicited from twelve deaf or seriously hearing-impaired second-generations users (eight of them from Bohemia, four from Moravia) have been utilised in this paper. All the gathered data have been validated by two native deaf users of CzSL (descended from deaf parents) through comparison with signs used in spontaneous and semi-spontaneous communication (in particular, the multimedia DVD Multimediální cvičebnice pro předmět Český znakový jazyk [Multimedia exercises for the course of Czech Sign Language], by Macurová and Nováková et al. 2011, proved as a valuable source). Generally, we will leave aside the relation of kinship terms in CzSL to their equivalents in other sign languages, even though it would be possible to quote a number of formal and motivational parallels (compare, for example, a widespread cross-linguistic correlativity of the signs BROTHER and SISTER with the sign SAME, or the motivation of FATHER or GRANDFATHER by the metonymic concept of beard or moustache; for more detail see e.g. Wilkinson 2009). However, like other contributions in this book, our paper implicitly refers to these relations. 2. General background Czech linguistics started focusing on languages and communication of the deaf only in the mid-1990s. Deafness was (in the former Czechoslovak Socialist Republic and in the subsequent Czechoslovak Federal Republic) in the hands of medicine, special pedagogy and logopaedia. Even in the Czech Republic (established in 1993), deafness was often approached (and, sadly, sometimes is even today) as a deficiency, a defect which may be cured, remedied, removed. The official attitude of the Communist regime, prior to 1989, was strictly uniform and dominated by what has been called Kinship terminology in CzSL 165 the “demutisation”3 of the deaf, that is, the endeavour to teach the deaf to talk and to lip-read (if not hear) at the very least. If the opinion that human beings can develop a complex system of communication not based on sound existed at all, it was strictly a minority belief before 1989. In the early 1990s, the only institution opening new approaches towards deafness and towards the deaf as a linguistic and cultural minority (and thus initiating the interest of linguistics) was the Federace rodičů a přátel sluchově postižených (Federation of Parents and Friends of the Hearing-Impaired)4 and its (now defunct) counterpart, the Institut pro neslyšící (Institute for the Deaf).5 On the institutional level, the interest of Czech linguists in deafness was manifested in the creation of the programme Čeština v komunikaci neslyšících (Czech in the Communication of the Deaf, accredited 1998) at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague (since 2013 at its Institute of Deaf Studies).6 While realizing the dilemma of sign language linguistics (Brennan 1986), the programme focuses both on theoretical and applied fields, especially (1) the specificities of the lingual and communicative situation of Czech deaf people; (2) Czech Sign Language, and its structure and use; (3) the written Czech of the Czech deaf people, and in the applied field; (4) the current state of affairs in educating children with hearing impairments (profoundly deaf children in particular); and (5) interpreting between spoken Czech and Czech Sign Language.7 The linguistic approach to these fields and research is intrinsically linked with a certain amount of “edificatory” work.8 Still at the dawn of the new millennium there existed, even among deaf education professionals, the opinion that sign language has “a small vocabulary” and “little grammar”, and that early acquisition of sign language impairs the ability of children to learn the majority language, etc. Among the repeated arguments ranking Czech Sign Language as an non-natural language is also that of its “dis-unity”. There can be no doubt that Czech Sign Language (as any other language) is stratified, socially and geographically; its geographic stratification (pronounced particu- larly in the area of vocabulary), as in the rest of the world, is determined by the regions where there are schools for deaf or hearing-impaired pupils/ students. The variants of Czech Sign Language signs are even more determined by the historical division of the Czech lands into Bohemia (the western part) and Moravia (the eastern part). This type of regional stratification (Bohemia vs. Moravia, or Bohemian signs vs. Moravian signs) is markedly reflected – among others – in the area of kinship terminology.9 The following diagrams (1 and 2) provide a general idea about regional differences among kinship terms in CzSL. All elicited single and compound forms are divided here into three groups: forms only used by Bohemian signers, forms only used by Moravian signers and forms used by both. It 166 Klára Richterová, Alena Macurová, and Radka Nováková is to be stressed that in this overview, each form counts as one item, i.e. the boundaries between phonological and lexical variants – which are not quite clear-cut in many cases – are ignored. The comparisons among the three sets of kin terms (Bohemian vs. Moravian vs. Bohemian/Moravian) indicate that the Bohemian and Moravian signers share less than 50 per cent of kin terms: 40 % single kin terms and 21.7 % compounds. Diagram 1. Geographic distribution of single kin terms Bohemia Moravia 17 20 13 (34 %) (40 %) (26 %) Diagram 2. Geographic distribution of compound kin terms note: The numbers in brackets denote the number of the compounds that have also been recorded in the reversed order of their parts. Thus, for example, 10 (6) means that six out of ten compounds exist as two variants differing in the order of their parts. Bohemia Moravia 28 (20) 10 (6) 8 (8) 60.9 % 21.7 % 17.4 % 3. Kinship system in CzSL This section attempts to provide a glimpse into the general structure of CzSL kinship terminology and the functions of these terms. In more detail, we describe which relatives are distinguished in CzSL and what the distinctions indicate from the point of view of anthropology. We will also outline the main types of signs of kin terms and add a short note about typical situations in which they are used. Concrete forms of the signs will be introduced and analysed in the following sections. The kinship system in CzSL is primarily based on a detailed classification of consanguineal relatives. Within this category, lineal and collateral relatives are distinguished. In some classical anthropological typologies, this is characterised as a lineal terminology or the Eskimo/Inuit system. The lineal terminology, in Lowie’s classification, takes into consideration the termino- logical distinctions in the generation of the Ego’s parents (cf. Lowie 1928). Kinship terminology in CzSL 167 The Eskimo/Inuit system is part of Murdock’s typology based on termino- logical distinction in the Ego’s generation (cf.

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