There were a few things in these readings that I didn’t relate to because ASL isn’t a spoken language, but I really enjoyed the “How we mean” section. Crystal mentions the relationship between words and things, naturalist vs. conventionalist. The naturalist theory typically doesn’t make sense, because words rarely “sound” like the thing they refer to, but this makes a lot more sense in ASL. The signs for words are typically related to how something looks or what you do with it. For example, the sign for bird is putting your thumb and forefinger together in front of your mouth, like you have a beak. This is not true for every word, but it certainly helps remembering things much easier.
I was also interested in the quote, “Sentences exist to enable us to ‘make sense’ of words,” because ASL is not a language that is spoken in complete sentences. You combine signs to make a sentence, but you need to “fill in” some of the words yourself, because they will not be explicitly signed. ASL does not use “to be” words or articles.
Learning ASL may also be easier in some ways, because it is based on English, which I already know. I will not have to learn new idioms or new customs, except for those explicitly related to the deaf community. There are also signs for common English idioms (like “on the fence). This is not true for all idioms, but it will be easier to learn because I already know the idioms and what they mean.
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