ASL sign names have to be given to you by a deaf person. It's not always easy to come up with a sign name for someone. Sign name is usually based on a person's personality and have to follow ASL grammatical rules. And, ASL sign name isn't like English name. Two person with English name 'Jonathan' don't have the same sign name. There's no ONE sign name for all persons named Elizabeth, John, etc etc. So that's why we deaf people cannot create a sign name on a spot for a stranger. We have to get to know them first, and getting a sign name is a huge deal- it's like naming a baby hah.
Also, yep, Brits have different sign language than US. I couldn't really understand a deaf brit signing.
Long story cut short: Brits refused to help U.S. establishing the first deaf school. French did. This is why ASL is based on LSF. (langue des signes française aka french sign language) To this day, ASL and LSF do still have some same signs but ASL has diverged a lot from LSF.
I love how sign names can have a lot more meaning than English/etc names, tbh :) I was given my name as a baby but my parents didn't know anything about me back then!! how's that
My sign language teachers tried to give us sign names but it was like...the second class? and we didn't know anyone that well, so it didn't work out u_u
short and quick comics about my life as a deaf trans masculine genderqueer person.
'qq' is a code for question mark, used in old hey day of TTY. TTY is a device (that you can see younger me using in the banner) we deaf people used for making phone calls. Nowadays we use videophone.
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