30 May 2009
Today was the first of two days of presentations by Malaysian and foreign academics and practitioners in the linguistics field. Some were hearing, some were deaf. They spoke of a broad range of issues, some of them technically focused on linguistics, some of them focused on the linguistic environment in the deaf community.
The delegation from the Cambodian Deaf Development Programme at the seminar: Tashi Bradford, Heang Samath, Chea Sokchea, and Justin Smith. The venue for the seminar was the linguistics faculty of the University of Malaya, the oldest university in the country.
At one of the breaks: Charlie Dittmeier who spoke on Sunday morning; Dr. Liza Martinez, from the Philippines, who spoke Saturday morning; and Justin Smith and Tashi Bradford from the Deaf Development Programme.
Heang Samath (red shirt) and Chea Sokchea brought several sets of the Cambodian sign language handbooks to sell. Three of the four countries in the Nippon Foundation sign language dictionary project (Cambodia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines) were represented at the seminar. Only Vietnam did not attend.
About 130 persons from Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and the Maldives attended the seminar. Many of the people from Malaysia were hearing students, like these young women, who are taking sign language or other linguistics courses.
A surprising number of Catholic deaf representatives from Malaysia were present. Charlie Dittmeier had met almost all of them before at meetings over the years of pastoral workers with Catholic deaf people.
In the evening the organizers and most of the seminar participants from outside Malaysia had dinner together in a hotel.
An interesting addition to the dinner was a Malay wedding that took place in an adjoining ballroom. Here the bride and groom and attendants process into the wedding hall.
