Yesterday’s post about languages which lack one or more tenses brought a couple of interesting comments from Jules (of the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog). Among the other talents and skills and enthusiasms on ample display at the “7 Imp” site, Jules has worked as what she sometimes refers to in terms like a “hand-flapper”: a signer, an interpreter of ASL.
Despite my own hearing impairment, I’ve never learned any form of sign language. So it fascinated me to read Jules’s description of what she called “simultaneous communication”:
There’s the sign for “day,” and there’s the sign for “three.” You can make the three handshape with one hand while, at the same time, signing day with the same hand to indicate “3 days.” Same for weeks, months, years, many other things. You can also use what are called classifiers in ASL […], which show the movement, location, and appearance of a thing. After a signer indicates a person or thing, a classifier can be used in its place to show where and how it moves, what it looks like, and where it is located. So, the classifier for “car” can be signed, and you can show the car swerving, swerving while driving quickly, while simultaneously showing the driver falling asleep….all of that, of course, indicating, say, someone falling asleep at the wheel and swerving from the road.
This leaves me dizzy, frankly. And it doesn’t begin to scrape the surface of the other notion which Jules introduced to me in her comments, to wit, “ABC stories” (or poems). Here’s how the term is defined at About.com’s deafness site:
ABC stories use each letter of the sign alphabet to represent something. For example, the “A” handshape is used to “knock” on a door.
(For reference, that’s the “A” handshape in the image at the top left of this post. See? Knocking on a door.)
Now, you might think that this limits the ASL “speaker” of an ABC story or poem to 26 words, concepts, expressions. You would think wrong.
