[sw-l] FACIAL EXPRESSIONS... PA or PAH....

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
February 26, 2005

FACIAL EXPRESSIONS
Writing PA or PAH...

Stefan is having true success with the way Facial Expressions are used
in his classroom with Deaf students...So I am assuming that Stefan's
Deaf students can read this as PA, and that is all that matters!

As a foreigner like myself, who knows SignWriting, but does not know
what was meant in advance, by reading those Mouth positions...I would
not read this as PA...I would read it as the mouth moving from tense to
open, with no air coming out, no sound...just tense to open...of course
I could memorize it as meaning PA, and perhaps I should do that, and
then the Mouth Pictures work, of course, when they have a standardized
meaning...

So in ASL documents, I would include air exhaling, because for me, the
most important part of the PAH in ASL is the accent on the
exhalation...and the air coming out forcefully...In ASL we actually
couple the exhalation with the sign SUCCESS...so it becomes a sign
meaning that something got accomplished successfully...perhaps this is
culturally based and specific to ASL...When I looked up the sign for
PAH in the ASL SignPuddle, this is what I found...the sign for SUCCESS
with air coming out of the mouth...and I would read that as PAH...


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: pah.png
Type: image/png
Size: 1297 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20050226/35a014c8/attachment.png>
-------------- next part --------------