I like to use analogies to illustrate a point, and admittedly, I may be stretching this one too thin… I’ll give it a ‘Y’ handshape swinging down! (‘that!’)
17 Jewels
Let’s start off with manual wind watches. Since the 1970’s, they’ve had 17 jewels to help facilitate the inner workings of watch movements. You can actually see the inscription of ’17 Jewels’ on the watch movements.
Watch movements are incredibly complicated; truly works of art. Many components work together in unison to create a clear construct: Time. All of those gears, levers, and springs translates into the hour/minute hands, and usually with a sweeping seconds hand.
Even with all the movement involved, it is still imperfect; an average watch can be as much as ±10 seconds off per day. This is the nature of using analog watches. The user usually adjusts his/her watch once a week.
ASL Analogy
Now… Onto ASL. From my calculations, one hand has 17 possible combinations of movements to represent a sign language ‘phoneme’. There are three digits for each finger, multiply that by five fingers. Then add one for the palm orientation and add one for the hand movement. That’s 17 in total. How convenient.
Deaf people use their hands to communicate. No matter how complicated the movements are, a clear unit of language is transmitted. The brain works continuously, encoding/decoding all of those 17 different combinations for each hand, creating distinct ASL ‘morphemes’.
And, yes, ASL is an imperfect language. It is only a little bit more than 200 years old. It is a young language and its users are continually interacting with the language, creating new signs, depreciating old signs, etc. ASL is continually evolving as a language, and will do so in the future.
The number to ASL, perhaps?
I’ll admit that I got the 17 Jewels inspiration from recent spate of articles covering the number 42 being the sum of three cubes. Douglas Adams of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy referred the number as the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
Move, over, 258! There’s a new number in town… 17! Or did I just break the analogy? 🙂 I’m aware that I’ve glossed over facial expressions and mouth morphemes, a vital part of ASL.
Image Credit – Flickr – Shane Lin – Omega Cal. 321 Chronograph
