American Sign Language
The Structure of Silence: Time space and Force
Learning any new language can be tricky. Culture matters. Norms and regional differences familiar to the native speaker are often elusive to the outsider. When the language is neither spoken nor written, and used exclusively by the deaf community, mistakes will be made by the hearing learner.
After teaching ASL and serving as an ASL interpretor for years, these are the core things I took away.
The hands are faster than the eyes.
Let me explain.
When interpreting from spoken word into ASL, beginning interpreters often make the mistake of trying to keep up with that which is spoken, rushing along, hands flying trying to keep the pace of the speaker and in the process forgetting that the primary responsibility is not to interpret that which is being said, but rather, the job is to effectively communicate to the deaf person, that which is being expressed. In other words, good interpreting requires a paradigm shift, you are communicating clearly the message, in a language full of nuances that are shared inside and among members of the deaf community. A community that, if you are not a native speaker, is in any number of ways, all but closed to you.
Syntax is tricky
ASL has its own syntax and it also shares many of its rules with spoken and written languages. But there are nuances that syntax, word order and choice that do not always come naturally to the student.
Early on as I was teaching and interpreting, I made the mistake of explaining that ASL was structured more like Chinese than English. First mistake was arrogance, I didn't speak Chinese languages and had only a passing knowledge of their structure. The second was trying to impose the rules of written and spoken English onto a langauge that lived in silence and in the air, where its cadence is defined by body postion, facial expression and shifts, and hand motion simultaneously, layered, as if stacked, something not possible while speaking.
Where volume is modulated by the hearing speaker by voice, for the deaf speakers, it is controlled, or modulated by movement in space, and time.
The elements of movement are: time, space and force (or speed).
Variance in time, use of space and force, (or speed), are the tools used for cadence, depending on many factors including but not limited to personal style, regional norms and dialects (accents, if you will) and random factors ( or so it sometime appears) that include where the last thought (sign) ended.