Words in Hand

Did you notice the contrast between the way that the hearing people gave the meaning and the signs deaf people used? A couple of the hearing people needed to stand up to give their sign and their meaning and sometimes they produced quite elaborate mimes; but in contrast the deaf people's signs were short and more precise. We could still say the signs look a little bit like what they mean, but in a much more controlled way. The BSL sign TEAPOT still gives us the idea of the spout and the handle and the pouring action, but it doesn't look anything like the large gesture that Ian gave us. One point to notice is that the sign TEAPOT uses a handshape that comes into a lot of BSL signs, for example TELEPHONE, PLANE, PIPE and many others.

Those first three examples are also partly pictorial. They look a little bit like what they mean, so that you could say that TELEPHONE shows the two extensions, or the two ends of the telephone and PLANE shows the two wings; PIPE shows the bowl and the stem in the mouth. But there are other signs in BSL which also use the same handshape and they don't look anything like what they mean. For example PARTY or PERHAPS, or the Irish sign THAT and also the sign SOMETIMES. Obviously it can't look like 'sometimes', we don't know what it looks like. I wonder if you've seen the new sign for 'Vistel', the telephone, teleprinter used by deaf people? That uses the same handshape to show that there's a telephone included but I've recently seen that sign used with two hand shapes similar hand shapes, and that's probably because it's easier to use that sign in that way.

And that shows how signs can change from their pictorial base, where you understand it very clearly and they gradually change and become less and less closer to the picture. We could go through the whole list of signs in the panel game making similar comments. The hearing people used elaborate and large mimes, but the deaf used short and precise signs. You remember how Gordon explained driving? He was trying to show traffic lights but he stopped and he drove, and he drew on his hand and added so many things to show how many things there were, but what about the deaf person? They just showed it very quickly and simply. And again that same hand shape in 'traffic lights' comes up in other BSL signs. Some of those are also linked to the idea of light, for example LIGHTHOUSE, AMBULANCE, or another one that came up in the panel game DISCO. But again the same handshape comes up in other signs that are not related to light, for example TERRIFIED.

Let's look now at three final examples from our panel game. We thought that these particular examples might make it a little bit more difficult for you because we weren't sure whether deaf people already had a sign for these words, so let's have a look and see what they do.