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Re: CHAT: My new treasure

From:Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...>
Date:Tuesday, January 22, 2002, 11:13
>From: jogloran <exponent@...> >Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 10:26:50 -0000 > >Hmm, I'm not too familiar with asian sign languages; how do they work >in comparison to others? > >Imperative
Well, you sorta move your hands around and make faces and point at stuff. *ducks LOLTHHFO* *serious face* Well, the only Asian SL I can say anything about the grammar and phonology of is Taiwan Sign Language. Grammatically it's pretty similar to ASL. It seems to be topic-focus which means its alot closer to Chinese than ASL is to English. It makes use of placement like ASL but to a lesser degree it seems. Facial expression is improtant, but doesn't seem to covey quite as much meaning as in ASL and I haven't found any minimal pairs distinguished by facial expression yet. It has lots of loan characters just as ASL has fingerspellings and loan signs. It doesn't seem to have a standard differentiation between nouns and verbs like ASL does (eg. Y-hand against the jaw = call, tap it against the jaw twice = telephone). There are plenty of different handshapes -- the extended middle finger, the WC-hand, cross-hand, airplane-hand, etc. The ASL E-hand doesn't seem tobe used, neither does the closed-A, nor the I-love-you-hand (actually, I think I *have* seen it as a variation of "airplane"). It's not easy to discribe without visual contact. But I'd be glad to try to answer specific questions. Adam _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx