Are there specific signs for terms like “paleoclimatology”, “actinium”, “perissodactyla”, or are such words usually expressed as compounds, or in some other way? I don’t know very much about ASL, so I’m curious as to how such words are expressed.
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Specialized language, also called “trade language” is usually specific to the core of people who are using it, while the larger community generally fingerspells if they have an occasion to need to worry about what an actinium is.
That is, if two there are two deaf physicists who have occasion to converse frequently, they will have signs between the two of them for Quasars, including signs to distinguish types of quasars, magnitude of quasars, etc. These signs would not be recognized beyond these two and/or their immediate circle.two other deaf scientists, or two deaf students studying the topic will have other signs.
Because ASL is so young (50-200 years compared with nearly 1000 years for , say, english) many signs of such specificity simply have not been codified yet.
but with Youtube and other longer distance internet based video communication, more and more signs for “obscure” terms are being codified.