AFTERLIFE: The American Sign Language (ASL) sign for "afterlife"

Question: How do you sign "afterlife?"

Response:
An approach is to sign:
DIE+AFTER (Using the version of after that means "from now on")

See DIE: https://youtu.be/p3V2KIhpr-Q
See: FROM-now-on: https://youtu.be/rIE6pSjWh6A 

If you sign "LIFE+FROM-now-on" that would generally be interpreted as meaning "from this point in life forward." It doesn't include the concept of having died.

To create the meaning of "the afterlife" we need to indicate that regular life has ended. To do that the ASL equivalent is the sign "DEAD."

If for some reason a person wants to keep both languages intact you would need to engage in translanguaging by doing additional work to use both languages in some approach such as by spelling AFTER and signing LIFE or signing AFTER and spelling life, and then signing DIE+FROM-then-on. Some interpreters might add mouthing of the term "afterlife" while signing DIE+FROM-then-on.

Or we can just make the jump into ASL and go straight for the concept DIE+FROM-now-on but accept that it may not be easy for someone to reverse interpret from that back to "the afterlife."

It is an interesting challenge to consider if you were signing ASL through an interpreter to a group of Hearing people and you wanted the Hearing audience "for sure" to get the English words "the afterlife" -- you would have to use extra signs, fingerspelling, a white board, a PowerPoint slide, or some other method to bridge from signing the concept in ASL to reaching the goal of the meaning and specific phraseology of "the afterlife" minds of the Hearing audience.
 

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