ASL sign for HOW ;-)

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
September 25, 2005

Hello Ingvild!
Thank you for this message. It means a lot to me to hear from you on  
this subject.

> Several months ago I posed the question of the inconsistency of the  
> symbolset regarding the thumb. Now I know that Val - and Steve as  
> well- has put an enormous amount of work into making the system  
> consistent - and yeat we are not satisfied. Because I agree with  
> you, Charles - something seems wrong. But when I take a close look  
> at my hand with the thumb up, I see that if I strech the other  
> fingers of the hand, my hand is actually parallell to the floor,  
> not to the wall. So the problem seems to be in just one of the rows  
> of the  system - se illustraion attached.

Exactly! That is correct. The problem is not with the whole symbol.   
It is ONLY with the palm facings that are one-half dark and one-half  
light...in other words...the side of the hand positions. They need to  
see the direction of the thumb going up, with the palm as one-half  
dark and one-half light. And that is the inconsistency that confused  
people, and yet it wrote the signs correctly from a visual point of  
view, because the thumb up gives us meaning...there is meaning in the  
direction of the thumb, as well as the palm facing...and we lose that  
meaning, when the thumb is forced to the side to be like the L hand...


> The thumb is in a special position among the fingers - and if I do  
> this streching out of the other fingers, and thus do get an opening  
> in the symbols concerning the other finger, I do not get a similar  
> opening for my thumb - it is still parallallell to the wall. So  
> maybe there is a solution that is not too costly in work and time -  
> and would give us a possibility to write ASL 'not' and other signs  
> with thumbs up or down - se attached illustration

So you are saying that I should keep the old palm facing, for the  
symbols that are one-half white and one-half dark? Then maybe we  
should go back to the old symbol to begin with? Because the white  
palms and the dark palms were never the problem with the old symbol  
anyway...so then nothing got solved really...It is hard to teach this  
symbol no matter what...

Thanks for this diagram, Ingvild!!

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