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Huh? How was he communicating if he wasn't speaking and wasn't signing? You never say.

• shard 7y ago
  I expect it was through pantomime, common gestures, and facial and body expressions.
• mabbo 7y ago
  If I wink at you then raise my eyebrows suggestively, was I using English? No, English is a spoken language. Yet if you didn't know ASL, you'd know what I was saying, right? So which language was I using? Much of ASL communication- but not all by any means- uses this sort of communication that is very language agnostic. To really get good at Signed languages, you need to use a lot of these skills. That's what I mean when I say that ASL isn't a list of specific signs matching to words, it's a very complex system of communicating ideas. My professor, one of the most wonderful teachers I've ever had, was a master of communication. He could tell us hilarious stories without speaking English and without us knowing ASL because he could communicate without language. And my point to all of this is that saying that what Francis was doing isn't Signed Language misses some nuance in what Signed Language is.