From A to Zed or Zee with your smart hands!

If you've been reading my blogs, whether here, or on FastCupid or BadSumo, you know my love for Sign Language.

So I put the DeafRead feed on this blog. There's also the link to DeafPulse, another source of infos. While primarly for the deaf and hard of hearing people, hearing people would benefit too.

Today on DeafPulse, there was a link to a fun YouTube videoclip from http://www.mysmarthands.com/ . To hearing people who must learn ASL and have to teach it to their kids.

Believe me, your hands are smart. A lot smarter than you think!

Cheers!

Footnote to my hearing friends: In ASL, -even though this is a sign language-, the 26 letters of the alphabet are present.

Letters are commonly use when there isn't a sign for the visual concept that you want to express, or that sign isn't known to you (which is likely my case!!!). So you have to rely on English words for those visual concepts, and you "fingerspell" those words.

There are other usage for fingerspelling. For instance in the US, the 50 states are often fingerspelled using their 2-letter abbreviations. Imagine a vacation trip on Cape Cod, it would be insane to fingerspell that I'm currently in M-A-S-S-A-C-H-U-S-E-T-T-S. With a state with a name _that_ long, it's a lot easier to sign "M-A".

(External link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMQHd1UBkeI )