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ASL Grammar: Phonetics: Articulatory clarity, gravity, and body mechanics
A brief look at an aspect of ASL linguistics in response to a question from a student:
Question:
A student asks: “What is up with the signs for RIGHT, KEEP, SISTER, BROTHER, (and I'm sure that there are more signs that use this L or R or P shape)? Every ASL teacher goes so fast that I can't see which shape letter the fingers are in. Why do so many signs do this action of bring one hand in whatever letter shape down onto the stationary hand?”
Name removed to protect student privacy.
Response:
Have you looked up each of those signs at Lifeprint.com?
RIGHT, KEEP, SISTER, BROTHER each have their own page at Lifeprint.
https://lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/b/brother.htm
https://lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/s/sister.htm
https://lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/k/keep.htm
https://lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/r/right.htm
There you will find freeze frame screen grabs making it easy to see the individual handshapes.
As to your question regarding why so many signs bring the dominant hand down onto the stationary base hand there are a number of reasons:
1. Articulatory clarity: Signers benefit from signs being comprised of an articulatory bundle of information that is distinctive and relatively clear to the viewer from a reasonable distance. (Or in simple terms: Such signs are easy to see.) To you as a beginner it might not seem like it is easy to see those signs but the large movement and firm ending of the signs can be paired with context to make the meaning obvious to skilled signing partners.
2. Gravity: The fact that things tend to move downward more easily than upward is a widespread phenomenon and as such influences how many signs are produced. For example, gavels generally swing downward. Most paperweights move downward onto the paper to "keep" them in place.
3. Body mechanics: If a sign starts near the head and moves forward it generally also needs to move downward due to the way our arm joints work. Thus if the beginning of a sign uses one hand to refer to a concept such as "male" (due to the iconicity of a baseball cap" or "female" (due to the iconicity of bonnet strings) near the head and then uses some other two-handed concept that is typically signed near the neutral signing space in front of the body -- the dominant hand will naturally start high and move lower to meet the other hand.
The sign brother is based on a combination of the concepts "male" and "same." Sister is based on "female" and "same." The concept of same in ASL can be signed different ways. One of the ways to sign "same" is to place the right index finger alongside the left index finger. (As in, "Gee, look, this finger is the same as that finger!) Over time the combination of MALE+SAME and/or FEMALE+SAME evolved to instead look like "MALE+RIGHT" and "FEMALE+RIGHT." This evolution was a natural process of the sign becoming more efficient to do at high speed.
Warm regards,
Bill
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