Elliptical circle vs. True circle

[Stuart Thiessen]

Well, if you want the specific text I am looking at, it is their book 
The Signs of Language pp. 243-271. I am working on a paper for my class 
that describes some of these movements and, of course, I'd prefer to 
note them in SignWriting than use English verbal descriptions or assume 
they know what I am talking about. :) But the small circle vs. somewhat 
larger ellipse movements got me stuck on those representations.

The small circle movement is described on pp. 247-255 and the ellipse 
is described on pp. 256-257. If it is not clear, Valerie, maybe I can 
call you briefly on VP to illustrate the movements sometime tomorrow?

Thanks,

Stuart

On Jul 31, 2005, at 23:12, Valerie Sutton wrote:

> 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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