Words in Hand

Well, what did you get from that? We'll be taking a closer look from a longer extract from the same story in the second tape and that time we will give you a voice over. We'll also be discussing the signing used in that tape in more detail, but for the moment I just want to talk about one particular aspect of Clark's signing. We could say that what he's doing is using gesture. BSL is sometimes called a 'Visual Gestural Language' because we receive it through vision and produce it by making gestures, so what kind of gestures are they? To what extent are they like the gestures that hearing people use when they're talking, or what they use instead of talking? We know that hearing people do wave their hands about and shake their heads and use different facial expressions. Just look at some of these photographs of politicians. From those photographs you can see the politicians do seem very keen to use their hands and use a lot of facial expression when they are communicating.

Desmond Morris has noticed that when speakers are talking, or giving a lecture, they often beat time with their hand. They might use a pointing gesture or a fist, or other hand shapes, to emphasize what they're saying. Sometimes it's hard to decide whether these movements are adding information, or whether they're just helping the speaker themselves to feel more relaxed. There are also other kinds of gestures which we might think of as universal gestures throughout the world, for example, if people are happy, or if they've won a victory, they might raise their hands above their heads. If they raise their hands above their heads and open two of their fingers, then we can say that's a definite 'Victory' sign and that 'V' sign is quite famous in our culture especially because of the way it was used during the Second World War. Many other countries now use that same gesture, but often those countries don't realize that if you make that gesture in a slightly different way, like that, then it has a very offensive meaning in Great Britain. It's the same with a gesture like this: the thumbs up. We think that that's good or a positive meaning, but in other countries that is seen as an insult.

Of course there are very few specific gestures like that, that are used by hearing people, there are probably only about five or six that are used regularly, whereas BSL has thousands of individual signs. So what are the signs, the gestures of BSL really like? Perhaps they're a little bit more like the gestures that hearing people make if they want to give a meaning to someone, perhaps they can see them, but they can't hear them. Imagine if you're sitting on the bus and you want to tell somebody on the street down below that you forgotten to turn your lights off, what would you do? You make gestures and you hammer the window. Sometimes they're understood but sometimes they're not and they can't understand you, they can't grasp the meaning. So we thought it might be a good idea to see how people created their own gestures for objects and ideas. Would these gestures become like BSL signs, or would they be completely different?

The following extracts are from two panel games involving deaf and hearing people. In these examples the hearing people are trying to create signs for the words on the cards and the deaf people are trying to guess what the hearing gesture is and what they mean.