One of the big differences between ASL and many other sign languages is that ASL primarily uses only hand gestures, whereas most types of sign languages, such as BSL, rely heavily on facial expressions and other physical expressions outside of hand and finger gestures.
ASL places a lot of importance on facial expressions and body position to express tense and grammatical concepts. Many signs are a combination of a mouth morpheme and a hand gesture.
If you just do the hand-shapes, fluent signers will probably be able to understand you, but it would be the equivalent of mispronouncing words in a spoken language, or constructing sentences awkwardly.
I agree. Saying ASL only uses hand gestures is like saying speaking only uses vibrations of molecules in the air. The world would speak like those strange text-to-speech animated bear videos.
Yeah, that comment didn't really make sense to me either.
I'm fluent in ASL, and I have a working knowledge of BSL. What I can tell is that ASL is more conceptual than BSL. BSL tends to track the English language more closely. For example, ASL will have one sign that expresses an entire sentence, but BSL will most likely have individual signs reflecting the individual words in the sentence. (This is not always true, of course.)
All of sign languages depend primarily on gestures and facial expressions.
One of the big differences between ASL and many other sign languages is that ASL primarily uses only hand gestures, whereas most types of sign languages, such as BSL, rely heavily on facial expressions and other physical expressions outside of hand and finger gestures.
ASL places a lot of importance on facial expressions and body position to express tense and grammatical concepts. Many signs are a combination of a mouth morpheme and a hand gesture.
If you just do the hand-shapes, fluent signers will probably be able to understand you, but it would be the equivalent of mispronouncing words in a spoken language, or constructing sentences awkwardly.