James.Womack@f14.n300.z1.fidonet.org (James Womack) (04/17/91)
Index Number: 14992
[This is from the Silent Talk Conference]
"The ASL Literature
Series"
presented by Sam Supalla on February 14, 1991
(transcribed by Patty Brown)
Today is my final presentation. We will be talking about
literature. What is literature? Do you know what literature means?
(Response: Matches are lit!) James says I ought to fingerspell the
full word. Deaf people often borrow long words from English that
don't have an ASL sign equivalent and condense the word's spelling
into a more abbreviated form such as I did with "lit". It happens we
have an English word "lit" too. So what can I do? Soon we will have
to have a real sign for literature. (Someone from the audience showed
Sam a sign for literature--the sign for dictionary made with an "L"
handshape.) You already have a sign for literature--like dictionary.
(Someone from the audience suggested a sign which combined th e sign
for enjoy and read.) That's interesting! If you want to start
thinking of a sign for literature, there are different processes we
use to create new signs. One is to invent a completely new sign that
is not based on an existing sign. Anothe r is to use initialization.
We can invent a new sign without using the base of another sign or we
can modify an existing sign by initializing it. There are two ways
new signs can be created. You chose the second process. If we were
to choose the first process, how would we sign literature? We could
invent a totally new sign.
Anyway, what does literature mean? (Responses: Reading and
writing.) Would you call the newspaper literature? Is literature
only the newspaper? There is a whole list of types of literature and
the newspaper is one of them? (Response: B ooks and stories are
literature. Short stories and poems are literature.) Anything else?
What about comics strips? Would you call them literature? (Response:
Yes, anything with a body of text.) What about a series of pictures.
Comic strips te nd to be composed of pictures, more so than words.
Literature includes writings of a variety of lengths.
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