Elliptical circle vs. True circle

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
July 31, 2005

> On Jul 31, 2005, at 8:41 PM, Stuart Thiessen wrote:
> 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.  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.

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 ;-)
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