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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

Folks that use ASL use fingerspelling which is of course just written english, no?

https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/fingerspelling/fingerspelli...

Fingerspelling is just a path for borrowing individual words from English. It is not a part of native ASL vocabulary or grammar; that is to say, ASL does not consist of fingerspelled English sentences.

Nope. https://www.signingsavvy.com/article/45/The+difference+betwe...

Here's a fun example. ASL allows, maybe even requires, negation after the statement. An interpreter friend of mine was interpreting Wayne's World in a mixed crowd. The whole "<statement>... NOT!" joke gets laughs from the hearing audience and the Deaf audience doesn't understand why.

I think that could be interpreted. Statement + NO is the standard word order in ASL, but there would usually be a suprasegmental element. That is, the negation is also (or, sometimes, only) shown with a headshake which spreads over the entire length of the statement. Leaving out the suprasegmental, making it a flat statement, and then pausing before the NO might perhaps work. Maybe.

However, ASL also makes much, much heavier use of rhetorical questions than English does. You might even introduce yourself with "MY NAME WHAT? [NAME]" (i.e., "What is my name? [Name]"). So perhaps it would just look like you're doing that.

(Disclaimer: I don't know ASL. I know some Irish Sign Language, which is related, but dropped out before completing my interpreter training. I have a bit of a fascination with sign language linguistics, but I'm no expert.)

No. Fingerspelled words are not written English, but literally spelled out English words.

For example, it would be like me saying, "'h', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o'" instead of whatever translated 'hello' in ASL.

I have only basic ASL and am by no means an authority. But I think between native ASL speakers its use would be very rare, mostly just to clarify an exact spelling for something that was going to be written down in english.

Native ASL speakers who are completely illiterate in english certainly exist, and I'm not sure at all if they know or use finger spelling.

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