I wouldn’t normally completely dissect a post, but OP is spreading incorrect information in this post as well as others, and advertising that they teach ASL. This is deeply inappropriate, and I want people to understand why so I’m going to correct this one.Â
Let’s be ABUNDANTLY clear: I am also an ASL student and should not and would never teach ASL. My purpose here is to show the mistakes so OP and others can see why they should be looking to highly skilled teachers and Deaf people, not being nor looking towards a young kid looking for attention.
Time signs do always go first when relevant, but interestingly you ignore that throughout this post. ASL has complex grammar that can’t be reduced down to a single grammatical rule, but the common grammatical structure I think you’re trying to describe here is subject object verb.
“this structure is commonly called glossing.”
This structure is called grammar. Glossing is a uniform and organized way of labeling signs so you can transcribe a visual language. As a spoiler for the rest of this post, everything you glossed was incorrect except for the fact that you did put it in caps.
say i pick a sentence from a song
“i just cant stop loving you.”
by glossing, you have a reorganized sentence.
“I NOT STOP LOVE YOU”
Avoiding altering your translation too much, there are other and more fluent ways to express that concept. “I” is never used in gloss.
there is also active and passive signing.
if the subject is your topic , you are using an active voice.
if the object is your topic you are using a passive voice.
fun fact- a lot of people tend to use an active voice because of how similar it is to English grammar.
I kind of want to give points for that last part, because yea totally, and I like having something positive to say.Â
There is never punctuation in gloss, except as necessary for contractions as in CAN’T. That comma hurts my soul.
As to the overall message, sort of? What OP is calling active voice is English grammar. What they’re calling passive voice is ASL grammar. Because the sentence is so short, no one would get mad at you for doing it either way. As a general rule, if your sentence is 4 signs or less you can sign it either way, longer than that you HAVE to follow ASL grammar to be understood. To be strictly correct, it would be:
a topicalized sentence is using the object of the sentence as the topic and introducing it as a “yes/no question expression” ending with a comment.
“YOUR CANDY? I EAT YESTERDAY”
your candy is the topic and the sentence is in object-verb-subject word order.
“ I ate YOUR CANDY YESTERDAY”
God no, what are you doing? I’m asking I have no idea what you’re even going for here. There is no yes/no question in this sentence, you’re thinking of a rhetorical question. Time signs always go first in a sentence. There are never questions marks in gloss. The correct gloss:
YESTERDAY YOUR CANDY ME EAT
YOUR CANDY(rhq) YESTERDAY ME EAT
woahhh kaylee, you made an error. why is ate not capitalized but the rest of the sentence is?
well first off, i didn’t make an error. second, words that have a sign for them such as “SOUR” are in caps. words without a sign such as “of, ate,ran,” can be finger spelled but then you'd be using SEE instead of ASL. there aren’t past tense words, that’s why you say what time of day it is!! “YESTERDAY, I RUN” or “I RUN YESTERDAY”.
You did make an error here, along with all the others you made. “ate” belongs nowhere in this sentence, or anywhere in gloss ever. You are right that including “of, are, is” is SEE. You are dead wrong that “either way is fine” regarding time, time signs always go first in a sentence.
that is exactly what it sounds like. SEE is based on signs drawn from asl but is expanded using words that give a complete visual representation. “the girl had soft, silky hair.”
This is alright, just not the clearest explanation. SEE is signing exact English, it includes ASL signs but adds a visual representation of every part of English as well as initializing ASL signs. It is not a distinct language like ASL, it is a way to transcribe English on the hands. It was designed for the sole purpose of helping deaf children learn to read and write English better, and then misused horribly by hearing people who liked how easy it was for them and didn’t care how harmful it was to deaf people.Â
Fun note, looking through OP’s blog real quick revealed they used SEE signs a few times in their “educational” posts. I saw an initialized LATE for example, and without the NMM either. Many other errors besides.
Which leads me to why I dissected this post like this. Spreading misinformation about ASL is damaging and inconsiderate. It’s great that OP took ASL in high school and got excited about it. It’s not great that they then went on the internet and started spreading misinformation because they care more about gratifying themselves than Deaf people and the hearing people they’re “teaching”.
Trust me. If you’re an ASL student, just don’t post yourself signing online no matter how excited you are, and no matter how much attention you can get for doing it. Deaf people hate you and hearing people who are fluent in sign hate you. The only way you can possibly be excused is if you prominently and constantly display that you are a student and no one should be learning from you or following your example.Â
Basically just have some goddamn respect and self awareness.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that part of why I responded was because I only saw one person in the notes who knew that this was wrong. People were praising and taking notes from this. Sigh.
EDIT 2: I masochistically browsed OP’s ASL tag after responding to this so here’s some examples of their incorrect signs as well:
Signing NOT but I think they mixed up the sign for tomorrow with TODAY
No idea what happened here
Again I just want people to understand why you don’t listen to random strangers on the internet, especially not kids just out of high school. Go find a good ASL teacher, and if you can’t do that find a Deaf person online and follow them.
