LL-L "Etymology" 2008.06.25 (01) [E]

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From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Idiomatica" 2008.06.21 (02) [E]

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Idiomatica
>
> Hi, Sandy!
>
> This is all interesting stuff. You wrote about German signing for
> "toilet":
>
>    o    shaking a telephone receiver at the side of the head while
> mouthing "shhh" (this strikes us British as a very strange and
> intriguing sign indeed!);
>
> My immediate reaction to this description was that it means "Someone
> is calling me (on the phone) ... but not really, you know."  Of
> course, we need to remind the youngsters among us that all telephones
> used to have landlines and were in certain rooms of houses (typically
> hallways), so that people usually had to leave to make or receive
> calls. The shaking receiver sign may mean "ringing telephone". The
> "shhh" sign may be a classifier for "taboo replacement" (saying it in
> place of something that ought not be said). I have no idea if any of
> this is factual. All I can say is that the sign didn't seem strange to
> me when I read your description. It would be interesting to see if the
> "shhh" sign is used for other euphemisms as well.

You have to be careful, of course, as there's never any guarantee in
sign languages that a sign or facial expression means what it looks
like, unless you're interpreting it through the grammar of the sign
language.

I don't know what the "shhh" mouthing means in DGS (or ASL either). In
BSL it expresses something like the idea of existence. For example,
there's the sign for "there". If you add to this the "shhh" mouthing, it
means something like "it was actually there".

But sometimes the combination doesn't work in a way that's clear to me.
For example, there's the BSL sign for "wait". Sign this with the "shhh"
classifier and it means "not yet". I'm not sure I see how "wait" +
"exists" comes to mean "not yet": perhaps it's purely idiomatic.

I'm not sure how interesting this is to other Lowlanders, but if you
feel like having a bit of a think, then here's some more semantic
data...

Some mouthings seem to just go with particular signs, but other typical
concepts that can be added to a wide range of signs by particular
mouthings in BSL are "intense", "unsatisfactory" and "as normal". This
is without getting into simultaneous qualifiers that can be added by
cheeks, eyes, and suchlike.

Those three, executed simultaneously with a hand sign result in meanings
like:

walk + as normal = just walking along minding my own business
drive + as normal = driving along without a care in the world

poor thing + unsatisfactory = patronising
a small amount + unsatisfactory = a disappointing amount
to clean + unsatisfactory = to clean up something revolting
mistake + intense = just have to put up with it
work + intense = very intense, demanding work
recently + intense = just a moment ago
expect + intense = expecting any minute now

This is of course just one of the things that go up to explaining the
question, often asked by non-signers, of how sign language interpreters
seem to be able to interpret so many spoken words with so few signs.

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/

•

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