Saturday, March 13, 2010

WAYK Arabic 2 - CraigsList Mine/Yours

As a followup to my initial What's That? video, I present a "Craigs List" of Mine / Yours / etc.

As before, this video is meant to plug in to a Where are your Keys game that you run, not to lead you in a game.  See http://www.whereareyourkeys.org to learn more.



Arabic words are often modified based on the gender of the person you're talking about. So, for example, "your"  is different for a boy or a girl. I don't know a good way to represent this in ASL. Ideally we'd develop some pidgin sign technique for this aspect of Arabic, which would apply through WAYK Arabic.

2 comments:

Willem said...

You're beginning to run into the heart of what WAYK begins demanding; because of the male/female split in possessives, you may want to "limit" to just "mine/yours", and then add the sign for Man and Woman along with the ASL possessive.

I think you can do this pretty easily, actually; the ASL sign for woman, for example, is your open palm facing to the side, and your thumb touching your chin. You then touch your thumb to your chest; but you could just drop your open palm against your chest after touching your chin.

It's always way more complicated to explain in text, but essentially, I think this is very doable.

When are we going to see you at a language night here in Portland? We'd love to help you with building the "bite-sized pieces" in arabic.

I'm so glad you're making these videos.

yrs,
willem

Jay Bazuzi said...

Hmm, that combination of signs could work. I was thinking about ignoring the gender rules to get going (Technique: Mumble). Now that I think about it, that's a grammar rule that could be described in the target language without learning a bunch of extra words. "When I say YOUR to a man, I say YOUR-MALE."

 
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