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I think that ASL follows the type of grammar that naturally develops when a manual language comes into being. Much moreso than French or any other spoken language. Yes, originally it was the sign language used in France that they brought over, which was one of the early seeds of ASL (lots of home signs from all over the country gathered together was another big contribution) but I think mainly that just means that we see a portion of ASL *vocabulary* in common with LSF.


But if you're getting more deeply into ASL, you're diverging so starkly from the grammar of *any* spoken language, it seems irrelevant to worry about French vs Enlish. For example, if you're using classifiers to describe that a huge number of people came to an event, you're setting locations up in space and using motions and handshapes that communicate the action of people swarming to the event. You're dropping grammatical structures from spoken language completely and communicating in a way that is much more natural for someone communicating manually.


I went to a presentation on BSL once, and during the Q and A asked about comparative grammar between ASL and BSL. The speaker thought about it for a minute and just started in with examples. I have not studied this subject (comparative grammar) but it seemed (to me, to the speaker, and I think as far as the general impression in the audience) that the grammars were pretty similar.


If anyone does have any good references on comparative grammars between different signed languages, esp if ASL is one of them, I'd love to know about them.


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