Con Language Geekiness

[justben]

Learned something at the Con. Was babbling randomly with people after a roundtable and ran into a couple of people who knew ASL. Apparently, they report, facial expressions have a grammatical function in the language. The same hand gestures can be interpreted as a statement, a yes/no question, or a broader question of fact, distinguishable only by

Comments

[justben]

All of those prepositions and conjugations get annoying after a while anyway.

[justben]

That's awesome. *happylanguagegurgles*

[bheansidhe]

I have wanted to learn ASL since I was six years old and taught myself finger-spelling from a poster in the school library. I checked out a few books but the medium didn't work for me, and there weren't any VCR tapes or internet downloads at the time *cough*. I can still fingerspell, though.

It's still my goal to learn ASL. And I just discovered I can take cheap classes at the Atlanta School for the Deaf. It's odd how I found this out; it's because I'm getting to know my third cousin - she also lives in Atlanta, but I've seen her maybe four times in my life. As part of our get-to-know-each-other campaign, she invited me to her children's church dedication ceremony this Easter sunday (at the Unitarian church; it must run in the family). During the ceremony I was sure I saw her signing to her 2-year-old son - who can hear perfectly well. When I asked her later, she said she'd been teaching him ASL since birth; he signed for months before he started talking