Words in Hand

Hello again how did you enjoy 'Football crazy'? I'm sure you've got some ideas of what it's like for a big, fat bear training to play football.

In this tape we're going to look at that piece of 'Football crazy' again, but before we do that we are going to discuss some of the types of signs that you can find in British sign language. Signs of BSL like the words of spoken language have parts.

We can separate them into different handshapes, different positions and different movements. We can also divide them up into different types of signs. Some signs are made with one hand, others with two hands and some signs use the left hand as the base to start the sign and where you start the sign from.

So let's look at some of the simple one-handed signs that came into Gerry's story. We had signs like AGAIN, MUST, WHAT? THINK, SCHOOL, RED, WHITE and WHY? What can we notice about those signs? First of all they all use different handshapes. We had a 'V' handshape and 'A' hand shape, a 'G' handshape, a 'B' handshape; they're all various handshapes and they're made in different places, some of them in front of the body and area we call 'Neutral Space'. But other signs were placed on or near to the body so we had WHITE, made on the chest, and WHY? There was also on the chest we had THINK that was at the top of the head and READ at the mouth.

Let's see if we can see the same kind of thing in the two handed signs that use different handshapes in different positions. Some of the signs that came up in that piece of tape were SUCCEED, STILL, FOOTBALL, MATCH, AGREE, STRONG, DETERMINED, GIVE UP and FINISH. There's something very special about those two-handed signs but we can notice is, that both of the hands seem to be doing the same thing, they have the same handshape, they make the same movement. And that is nearly always the case when we have two handed signs, when both hands are moving there's a kind of symmetry; both hands are the same.

There's one other group of signs that we can see in the 'Football Crazy' story and that's signs that have two hands but where the left hand is really not working, is stationary, for example JOIN or BEST, TRY, LAST. In those examples it's really the right hand that's doing the work and the left hand is staying still, or reacting slightly to the movement on the left hand. So let's have a look at that piece of tape again and see if you can see for yourselves the signs that we're talking about.