English with ASL Gloss: "You make me so frustrating [si

beneficii   Sat Aug 25, 2007 9:19 am GMT
A lot of people assume that American Sign Language (ASL) is just English vocabulary and grammar applied to signs, like Japanese Sign Language is that of Japanese, or British Sign Langage is that of English, but that is not actually the case. Though ASL's vocabulary is about the same as English's (with a few usage differences), its grammar is actually based on French grammar, from what I understand. Its word order is object-subject-verb, for example. Well, as a relay operator (q.v. "IP-Relay" on Wikipedia for more info), I come across a lot of bad English sentences typed by our native ASL users that use deviant structures. They say things like "I want go to store," etc. Well, it's not uncommon for them to type things like "You make me so frustrating!" which should be, if proper English, "You make me so frustrated!" Well, I wonder, perhaps it's the ASL that influences and causes that, or maybe they get bad grammar instruction, and they just don't get enough input? Perhaps they're used to making these mistakes over and over again and our oblivious to the input now? There are native ASL users that use correct English forms, but there are a lot who don't.