In the first week of class I was over whelmed because of many different parts of signs and how complicated the sentence structure was to learn because it was different than English. What I mostly expected the class to be was a lot of memorizing of signs. Although, that was a small part of the class there were many other things that I would have to learn in order to fully understand and communicate in ASL. The first part of understanding ASL was its history. Like any other language ASL had a

My next revelation of ASL as a language came after I read the first reading assignment, “Signs Have Parts: A Simple Idea” by Robbin Battison. After reading the assignment I learned how each sign can be made by combining four parts; location, hand shape, movement, and hand orientation. If one part of a sign is changed then it will have an entirely different meaning than the first sign. This is also seen in English, when you change a part of the word, like a letter, it has an entirely different meaning and the words may not have any thing in common. An example of this would be if you were to take the word cat and changed the c to an h the new word is hat. Just like in ASL when you change a part of a sign, like location, when you make the sign for summer its location is across ones forehead if you were to move the location to the middle of your face the meaning changes to ugly. In making connection like these I am able to see how ASL is different from spoken languages. This chapter also described how signs are more like pictures than spoken words. Signs are like a picture because they are visual, involve space, and represent an entire object. This may not the most important aspect of a sign because people that do not know ASL have a hard time guessing what a signs meaning is by relating it just a picture. All this time I thought that ASL was only picture symbols used to communicate English with the deaf. But that’s not true one does not have to know English, or any spoken language to understand and communicate in ASL. The reading assignment also covered how signs have constraint and rules just as any other language. An example of a constraint in ASL is that the more complex a sign is the closer it is to ones face. Also, when using your dominate hand your non-dominate hand is either stationary or in the same shape.

history of changes and obstacles that it had to overcome to shape what it is today. The main idea and root of where ASL originated was my first realization that ASL was a language. When I first learned that ASL was the same as it was in France I didn’t understand why a form of English could come from and be the same as in France. How could this be I thought? Looking at the chronological history helped with my understanding of how ASL could have came from and is the same in France. I found out that when Thomas H. Gallaudet was asked to educate the daughter of Mr. Cogswell, Alice, he traveled to Europe to find methods to teach sign language. Gallaudet then returned a year later with a deaf teacher, Laurent Clerc, a student at the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris. After establishing a school for the deaf, the main form of communication that was used was a mix between French and American signs. After time ASL started to become standardized and was used in schools across the country as the means of communication, and this was the birth o

Some topics in this essay:
Complex Meanings”, Robbin Battison, Sign Language, Eugene Hairston, Hoffmeister Lane, Changed Deafness, Journey Deaf-World, French American, African Americans, Cogswell Alice, spoken languages, asl language, sign language, deaf people, deaf community, reading assignment, deaf culture, complex meanings, understanding asl, true language, american sign language, asl spoken languages, acquired understanding deaf, signs express complex, understand communicate asl,