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As with most first year language classes, the hardest part is building your vocabulary. Voca You have to cover the basics, the mundane, the everyday before abstract ideas. We have gone over food, household objects, clothes, and animals in the last month. Now, at the end of lessons, after I recite a paragraph she has prepared for me I also write one out myself using the vocabulary we have learned. Signing it shows her how comfortable I am with the vocabulary at the end of the lesson. And over time she can also see how I’m able to maintain the correct eyebrow positions while expressing myself, using the correct pattern for forming sentences, and moving my body to talk about multiple things at once. Writing everything out lets her check my ability to “gloss.” 

Glossing is the written English that follows the same grammatical word order as ASL so as to best put it on paper. It is a transcription not a translation. That is, there is no standard written language for ASL, despite the great strides taken by William Stokoe. Instead we are taking notes on ASL in another language: English. Glossing uses only CAPITAL LETTERS to visually distinguish it from English. Anything not signed, but necessary in the gloss are written in lowercase. 

“YESTERDAY me-HELP-him.”

I would not sign ME, HELP, and HIM in sequence to show that action. Instead the sign is one fluid movement where me and him are implied based on the direction of the sign. So, in a gloss we need to understand who was helped and by whom. The unsigned words necessary for comprehension are in lowercase and hyphenated to show the phrase is one sign with a specific meaning. 

It is also worth noting that English words do not have ASL equivalents. Rather ASL signs correspond to meanings. It is a symbolic language. There is not a sign for “to.” If you want to sign “I gave a gift to her” it would go “me-PRESENT-her.”  The meaning is the same, but you do not sign each individual word. 

Another difference between glossing and written English is that verbs do not change tense. Rather, you would sign the time that an event takes place at either the very beginning or the very end of your statement and that would indicate when the event occurred. 

YESTERDAY WE SWIM 

PAST me-WATCH THAT MOVIE

ONE-WEEK ME GO GALLAUDET 

Repetition of a single sign may change it’s meaning. If I sign TREE multiple times, that usually means FORREST. I can then write FORREST in a gloss and know to sign TREE multiple times. However, since I’m still getting the hang of glossing and growing my vocabulary, I usually take the time to write things out multiple times. It reminds me what I need to do when I recite things back to Kimmi. 

You can also write out non manual markers in parenthesis. So, if I need to turn my body to show difference in things I am listing or show that I changed actions or show that I was talking to different people, I can write that out (turn body)/(shift left)/(look up). Again, this is more common for beginners than professionals. 

When the glosser needs to indicate that they finger spelled a word they did not know how to sign or a new name, is is glossed in all caps with hyphens between the individual letters. 

M-A-R-G-A-R-E-T 

Here is an example of a gloss I wrote the other day: 

MY FAVORITE OUTFIT? HAVE BIKE PERSON-MARKER SHORTS, SHOES S-N-E-A-K-E-R-S. COLOR? BLACK HAVE STRIPES PINK. SOCKS - THICK (C Classifier?), WHITE. S-W-E-A-T SHIRT FROM MY SCHOOL NAME? UNIVERSITY RICHMOND. SHIRT HAVE SCHOOL NAME. I LIKE MY CLOTHES. WHY? WARM and (turn body) LOOK SAME PRINCESS D-I-A-N-A 

Before you listen to this, be aware that I did go over time. I felt that it was worth keeping this length because the flow of our conversation and her answers improved and felt more developed towards the end of the interview once we had lost the jitters. Also, she is a mom and her two year old daughter joins us to share her opinion on hair clips and cookies around the 12 minute mark. Lastly, when I first used this software two years ago it was free and that is no longer the case. This interview cost me six dollars today; my Venmo is @RosaLovo, if you feel so inclined. Thanks for the listen! Have a good break!

Zencastr Podcast

We recently discussed listing objects and how to describe a three dimensional space. The former changes a lot depending on the situation. For example, if I have three children I would sign ME HAVE THREE KIDS. I would sign the number three with my dominant hand before switching to my non-dominant where I would hold out three fingers (thumb, index, middle finger). TO name and describe each child I would point to the corresponding finger descending from oldest to youngest. But after indicating which child I would use both hands to describe them before returning to the three finger list on my left hand to discuss the next.

However, if I am listing options for a meal, let’s say pizza, burgers, or soup, then I would not use the hand list. Instead I would shift my body three times and sign one option at each position. That is the same for discussing places to go or activities to do. My understanding is that you only need to make a list with your hands when you need to say something about each item on the list. I learned this the hard way. I did not need to make a hand list to talk about the different rooms in my apartment.

When working with three dimensional spaces, the concept of space in ASL overlaps greatly with the English language concept of spatial awareness. That is to say, we work clockwise, from the bottom up, and start with the things closest to the “speaker.” It’s one of those things that you don’t think about often, but imagine you are recording the interior of a renovated house about to go on the market; wouldn’t you orient yourself and direct the video as I have described above?

Clockwise works best because most people are right handed, regardless of the language that they speak. Bottom-up works because ASL is a visual language, so with our signs we are helping the viewer visualize themselves going through the space from where they would enter, which is usually the ground floor. Distance is important in ASL for both physical and metaphorical spaces.

I suppose that this commonality is not just between English and ASL, rather it is shared in Western cultures, broadly speaking. Our perception of personal space in the US tends to extend farther from our front and back than our sides. That is to say, our “personal bubble” is more oblong than circular. However, when I visited Sweden last year, I saw that people went out of their way to maintain an evenly spaced distance from one another to the point that on a busy train it was still common to find people standing rather than sitting beside a stranger.

Audism: discrimination or prejudice against individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing

Examples include interactions like,

Person A: Hi, my name is…I’m Deaf.

Person B: I’m so sorry!

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Staunton, VA. 1839: We have opened the Virginia Institution for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind to help the invalids learn English. 

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Hearing person to a HOH individual: Are you sure you can work the cash register? I’m just worried because you’re hearing impaired*.

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According to my instructor who is a CODA, discrimination against the Deaf and Hard of Hearing is based on the idea that they are “broken.” Most Deaf people do not feel this way, and despite being labeled ‘disabled’ by US legal conventions many would not consider themselves so. Thus, audism is a unique form of discrimination that intersects but does not fall under ableism. Yet, given that our higher learning institution is based in the American south, I feel that anti-black racism needs no introduction. “Incidents” at said higher learning institution and the corresponding Collegian articles speak for themselves. 

What I ask of the reader today, is to open their mind to the intersection of the two. If I asked you outright, “are there deaf black people?” You would likely say yes. It seems obvious. However, they were rarely included in the conversation around Deaf education, Deaf culture, and how to improve living conditions for the Deaf and HOH community because of their blackness and continue to be discriminated against for both reasons today. 

ASL as we know it is the “Standard” sign language used in the United States because of its availability in schools and the amount of linguistics research it has attracted in the last 50 years. However, it is still a predominately “White” language. That is to say, the spread of ASL throughout the United States in the past was a tool for forced assimilation by the majority population of European colonizers just like the English language. I discussed this briefly in an earlier post about Plains Sign Language, also called “Handspeak,” used by the Indigenous American communities in the Midwest. I recognize that the Deaf community at large was, for a long time, forced to learn English as best they could to assimilate into the larger hearing culture. However, ASL was still weaponized against Black and Indigenous Deaf communities for the same reasons. 

Black Deaf people, of course, also faced segregation in the Jim Crow south. BEcause they were not allowed to attend White Deaf Schools, they had to make their own and learn to sign on their own which led to dialectical differences. When schools did integrate, the two Deaf communities still could not communicate with each other because they had different signs, used space differently, and had different facial cues. Students who could attend these integrated schools learned ASL to use in class and for their White peers in an act of manual code-switching. Then, at home, they could use the language that was theirs: the language that continues to be a testament to Black innovation. 

Dr. Carolyn Mccaskill at Gallaudet University is a Black professor and head of the first ever Black Deaf Studies program. She spoke with ABC news on the subject last year in the first video I have included below. The second is from a prominent social media influencer, Charmay. She is a Black Deaf TikToker who went viral during the height of the pandemic for sharing videos of her and her grandfather signing in BASL to educate the community on this oft-ignored facet of Black American history. I have included her shorter video as an example of the differences between ASL and BASL signs.

*Hearing impaired is a very offensive term to the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community today for reasons discussed in my podcast. 

All signs have handshapes. They are one of the five main parameters for signing along with movement (left, right, up, down, diagonal), location (near the chest, near the eyes, etc.), orientation (palm facing out vs palm facing in), and non manual markers (eye contact, eyebrow position, head tilt, body tilt, smile, nodding, tongue out). The handshapes are simply what shape you make with your hands. However, some handshapes are used like pronouns in English where that which is being represented (or described) by a specific handshape must be "introduced" prior. 

Based on those handshapes, signers will recognize the type of objects being represented in a story. These specific handshapes are called “Classifiers.” The basic categories handshapes represent are nouns (objects, people, animals, vehicles, etc.), shapes of objects (including outlines, perimeters, surfaces, configurations, gradients, etc.), size of objects (amount, largeness, smallness, relative size, volume, etc.), and their usage (movement paths, speed, interactions, etc.). 

For example, holding your index finger and thumb beside each other in G shape is Classifier G. It is one handshape that can be used in multiple contexts, usually to describe how small/thin an object is. Held on top of your head it means “short hair” or “buzz-cut.” Held by the eyes, it shows the action of “winking” or “opening the eyes” or even “surprise.”

Classifiers Page on LifePrint

Now that you understand classifiers, I can discuss the ART of ASL storytelling. I have included a video by YouTuber, Dack Virnig. He best demonstrates how expressive and detailed stories and also conversations can be in ASL. It uses the entire body to convey multiple characters, multiple emotions, describe music, and sequential actions. It is a performance that goes far beyond the pantomime that most hearing people assume signed languages are. Classifiers make this possible by acting as placeholders for larger ideas. In the first part of the video where he portrays a scene from the animated movie, ANTZ, he uses classifier CL-B to represent the shoes threatening to stop the ants. This flat handshape shows the enormity of the shoe compared to the ants better than the actual sign for “shoes” which is signed by making two fists and gently tapping them together in front of you.  In this case, the classifiers also help display the size and shape of the object in question, the shoe. 

This is possible because classifiers can help to clarify the overall message by referencing specific details. Classifiers represent the object itself, as I have described: also, conveys how an object (in this case the shoe) relates to its environment. In the same clip we see him use the flat hand classifier to show how the shoe moves in long strides, stomping against the ground while the ant holds onto the loose shoelace flying behind the shoe.