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Ugh, stop twitching
ASL
life Posted 2010-01-20 23:06:20 by Jim Crawford
Elena pointed out to me one way in which American Sign Language is awesome:

<Elena> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEjRHFom1Kk
<Elena> i'd especially like to bring your attention to the line "we met all kinds of people and we, we fucked everyone"
<Elena> in ASL, the sign for "meet" is two fists with the index fingers extended, brought into contact at the base of the hand
<Elena> and ASL allows a type of syntactic marker that oral languages can't
<Elena> ie, you can set an object or person in a location in space, and then refer to them by signing in/at that location
<Elena> (very useful when you're talking about a number of people)
<Elena> so, the line for "we met all kinds of people" is expressed by signing "meet" in multiple locations
<Elena> excellently, the sign for "fuck" is the same as the sign for "meet" but with the middle finger raised as well
<Elena> so "we fucked everyone" is expressed by signing "fuck" at each of the locations where "meet" was just signed
<Elena> to me, that seems really poetically done

(Elena has a more thorough writeup of this over on her Livejournal.)

[link to this] [See more on “life”]

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