[sw-l] Is this Spelling Correct?

[Sandy Fleming]

Hi Val and Charles,

> If you choose the Top View of the hand, then you wrote that
> fine...Charles is right that the Front View may be better in this
> case...

Thanks for the lessons on these - I'd fallen into the habit of just using
the top view.


> Regarding the spellings for the sign FISH in BSL (see attached)...the
> first one...do you want just the fingers to move up and down from the
> knuckle joint, like in the sign for GOODBYE, with the fingers tight
> together? That is what you wrote. If you want the whole hand to go
> wiggling like a wave or fish, then you need to use a waving curved
> symbol for arms, rather than the Finger Movements...

It wouldn't surprise me if this varies between signers, but I find that if I
waggle my whole hand I tend to bend my wrist, which doesn't seem right for
the basic sign (though for directional variations might become necessary).

So it is the GOODBYE movement, but the knuckles don't bend so much - they
bend almost minimally. The feel of the movement is that the fingers are just
waggling back and forth, but when looking at it, the fingers don't actually
bend backwards (well, maybe very slightly, esppecially when signing the
FLATFISH variant), the movement just _feels_ symmetrical about the knuckle
joint. So what I wrote still seems closest to the actual sign, but I don't
know if there's something else in the system which would show it more
accurately.

Sandy