BSL notes

[kaberett]

I'm doing an eleven-week beginners' BSL course with me_and; in lesson #1 we covered fingerspelling, a brief conceptual overview of BSL grammar and BSL as distinct from sign-supported English, and asking people's names. Homework was to practice finger-spelling three- and four-letter words slowly, correctly, and steadily, to get used to moving our hands while making correct mouth-shapes/facial expressions. Particular notes to remember: move vowel fingers forward not backward while finger-spelling (faster!); don't bother linking little fingers for s (ditto).

This week we moved onto a pile of vocabulary.

Some notes on finger-spelling:

• there's a standard sign for the combination ck
  
• for letters with a closed left hand in the formal sense, closing the hand looks very definite/tends to signify the end of a word -- it's fine to leave it open mid-word

Words/concepts that happened while I was present (writing down vocab list and doing each of them as I go):

hello (currently trendy - but informal! - to salute)
how are you?
goodbye
please/thank you (please tends to be shorter; signs can be emphasised in the ways one might expect)
good
bad
morning (shoulders, who knows)
afternoon (n down from chin)
evening (in between!)
day/light (sunrise/opening curtains)
night/dark (sunset/closing curtains)
time (wristwatch!)

what
who
when (chin!)
where
why (index finger extended, opposite shoulder)
which (thumb + little finger i.e. good + bad, hand horizontal, move l to r)
how (backward w)
pronouns
possessive pronouns
favourite (two variants: lots of good, or crossed thumbs down from chin; former more general)
best
worst
travel (legs!)
arrive
??from
go (~reversed h!)
with (gather together)
have (close hand)
sorry (mea maxima culpa...)
learn (gather things to head/chest -- no practical/intellectual skill distinction)

fruit (across under chin)
apple
banana
cherry (hook stalks over your ear!)
grape (single; bunch)
lemon/lime
orange
melon (whole; slice)
peach/plum/apricot
pear
pineapple
strawberry (shape down from face; plucking off spider, which is also tomato; crossed fingers tap side of mouth)
cake

poison/whiskey/medicine (ink pot!)

Homework: practice making small sentences with all of these; get words I missed (because lungs) off A.

eta lnr provides an online BSL dictionary (if somewhat patchy nonetheless a resource!)

Comments

[silveradept]

Sounds interesting. Hooray for new communication methods.

[vass]

Thanks for writing this up.

I'm curious about what it's like to learn a spatial language, especially one where facial expressions are an important part of the grammar.

Are you like me with the having poor motor planning?

[davidgillon]

Are you like me with the having poor motor planning?

I was thinking the same (as dyspraxic+bendy, so doubly poor proprioception), plus wondering how it's working out for bendy hands in general.

[shehasathree]

Thirded.

[ex_we935]

this is really cool! the idea of using a kinetic language sounds kind of exciting and daunting at the same time, tbh. good luck!

~avory

[cadenzamuse]

I took a year of ASL and am planning to take more and eventually get my interpreter's license. I love, love, love learning a spatial-kinetic language, both because it uses a different part of my brain so I don't get anxiety-related apraxia of speech with ASL when I do with English. Also apparently my brain just groks spatial-kinetic language better than audio-verbal.

Access request: could you cut any general and linguistic thoughts separately from vocab? Because I would love to hear the general stuff but am afraid that since I can't be in ASL classes at the moment that reading BSL vocab notes might mix me up. (It's okay if that's asking too much, since this is your journal, but I thought I would ask.)

[kaberett]

Yeah, sure :-) (I mean -- I think one of my two bullet-pointed notes there is BSL-specific-vocab, and the other is not? But where there's a clear separation I'll separate them.)

[fyreharper]

Oh interesting, the fingerspelling is two-handed! I guess I shouldn't have expected ASL to be similar to BSL in the same way that American English is similar to British English, since they're their own languages... :p