Be specific and document your answer. No guessing or you’ll defacto not get best answer.
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Sign Language Lessons, Information, Product Reviews and Tips to Get Started Learning ASL
Be specific and document your answer. No guessing or you’ll defacto not get best answer.
.
American Sign Language (ASL) is a complex visual-spatial language that is used by the Deaf community in the United States and English-speaking parts of Canada. It is a linguistically complete, natural language. It is the native language of many Deaf men and women, as well as some hearing children born into Deaf families.
There are 26 signs as in american english and plus ten signs for numbers from 1 to 0.
The ‘Gallaudet Survival Guide to Signing’ (1987) boasts ‘more than 500 of the most commonly used signs’. I don’t happen to have the more compendious dictionaries at hand, but you can be sure that ASL has many more than 500 signs.
What counts as a distinct and individual sign is relative to the criteria chosen, just as one may or may not choose to count English words like ‘capacity’ and ‘capability’ as two distinct words, or to count them as one word with two derived forms.
Similar examples are unavoidable in all sign languages. For example, the signs in ASL for ‘defecation’ and ‘diarrhea’ differ principally in duration. Whether to count these as variants of one sign or as two distinct signs depends on the linguistic approach chosen.
The question ‘how many signs in ASL’ is thus moot.
How many words are there in English? Or in Japanese? You can’t just definitively say how many words there are in a language. ASL is a full language with a large number of separate signs. In addition, as the world changes and new technology emerges and such, languages create new words to talk about new things. Languages are always changing. You think “download” was a word 50 years ago?
To the one user that said there are 26 signs: there are 26 signs for LETTERS, that’s for sure. But, there are more than 26 handshapes used to create signs, and there are multiple signs that use similar handshapes.
There are generally four components to a sign: Handshape, location on the body, movement, and palm orientation. These help differentiate between signs the same way that phonemes differentiate between sounds.
You can’t say “there are X number of signs,” but there are a lot. Another user described one of the problems with identifying the number of signs, I would say there are more. “TOLERATE” and “SUFFER” are signed the same way, but are clearly different words and the one that is being used is often determined by context. Does this count as one sign or two? Also, there are many regional variations within ASL, which makes choosing one number difficult or impossible.