<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; ">SignWriting List<DIV>July 31, 2005</DIV><DIV><BR><DIV><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV>On Jul 31, 2005, at 8:41 PM, Stuart Thiessen wrote:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Monaco">Actually, in ASL, you can show two different aspects of a verb where the movement changes to convey the aspect. One uses a slow elliptical movement and one uses a small circular movement.</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Monaco"> </FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Monaco">Klima and Bellugi in their book Signs of Language describe some of these movements. I'm looking into them, but since they don't use any notation system to describe it other than line drawings and English movement description, it is hard to tell exactly what they mean.</FONT></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><BR></DIV><DIV>Actually, Stuart, Karen van Hoek and I wrote verb modulations in SignWriting that captured the grammatical requirements that you mention here..perhaps not the eliptical circle per se, but we did differentiate between...continuously sick, sick over a long period of time, sick every since, and so forth...I also did a dictionary that was American Sign Language - Danish Sign Language, with no spoken language in the whole dictionary, and that dictionary we had a verb-conguation section that show charts on the way these verbs were written...so please show me the illustrations or refer me to the specific pages in Ursula's book and I can write those for you, if you wish...Ursula Bellugi lives and works right around the corner from me too, so I could always ask her what the best book is, to refer to...and yes...it can be written for research use...We could start a special section in SignPuddle just for conjugation of verbs...Val ;-)</DIV></DIV></BODY></HTML>