Knowing Sign Language is Pretty "Handy" Quiz

Answer: Socrates

"Cratylus" by Plato was a dialogue between two men named Cratylus and Hermogenes who converse with Socrates on the nature of language and symbolism. Cratylus believed that behind the names given to objects and people, there was a naturalistic reflection or reason for that word.

Hermogenes did not believe in that strong of background reason for naming things--he asserted that names are always in flux, that names and words would vary greatly from culture to culture, that in essence there would be much more randomness involved.

Answer: Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet

Gallaudet was a minister in Connecticut whose neighbor Mason Fitch Cogswell had a deaf daughter named Alice. He attempted to teach her but wasn't making much headway, so he decided to go to Europe where the practice and theories of educating deaf people had taken some hold. Learning from innovative educators of the deaf such as Abbe Sicard, Jean Misseau and Laurent Clerc, Gallaudet returned to America accompanied by Clerc.

They established the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817.

Answer: French sign language

ASL is most similar to French Sign Language having been derived directly from it. Experts have said that American Sign Language is a creole language of French Sign Language. When Thomas Gallaudet studied sign language in Europe, his teachers were French, such as the French priest, Charles Michel de l'Eppe who founded a public school for the deaf in Paris in 1755, the first of its kind.

Although Great Britain and America both speak English, the two country's sign languages are very different.

Answer: The alphabet can be signed with one hand in ASL, but the German and British sign language uses two hands for the alphabet

Fingerspelling as it is called requires only one hand to represent the letters of the alphabet in ASL. Different English-speaking countries however have different fingerspells for the same alphabet. Using two-hands for signing the alphabet is used in Australia, New Zealand Great Britain, and some other countries.

Despite having the same manual alphabet as the Germans, ASL and German sign language are very different.

Answer: Elephant's shoes

Contrary to dramatic television shows with scenes showing the good guys (or bad guys) using a deaf person to lip read from across the room to obtain information, the truth is about 80% of lip reading is guess work. Come to think of it, comedies exploit this myth also now I think of it (famous deaf actress Marlee Matlin playing Laura in that 1993 episode of "Seinfeld" called "The Lip Reader")

Answer: Hold up hand palm facing out, with pinky, index finger and thumb extended out from the closed fist. Then shake the hand a bit

There's also a somewhat more intuitively direct way of signing "I love you." And would be to point to yourself, and then with closed fists, cross your arms across your chess forming an "X", and then pointing out to the person you're saying this to. To spell out the word "love", make an "L" symbol with one hand (index finger up for the vertical part of L and thumb out for the horizontal part of the L), then make an "O" shape with one hand (as though you were miming a looking glass that one might peer through), then make the proverbial Peace sign like you were a hippie for the "V", and then for the "E", make a closed fist facing outward, but with your thumb across the outside of the closed fingers, not inside of them.

Answer: Wiggle their hands in the air

Although deaf people can certainly clap as well as hearing people, they more often use what is called a "silent applause"; the deaf employ a more visually expressive sign of clapping, and they do this by waving or wiggling their hands in the air. This form of applause became popular in the United States during the 1980s.

Answer: Age 2 until puberty

The linguist/neurologist Eric Lenneberg wrote "The Capacity of Language Acquisition" in 1964 and "Biological Foundations of Language" in 1967. He theorized that there was a critical period in which language must be acquired to take hold, and it basically is the same for sign language as it is for spoken language, from age two until puberty, according to his 1967 work.

Answer: A who-what-where-when-why question / a yes or no question

As mentioned, facial expressions are an integral part of American Sign Language as well as other sign languages. A facial expression can provide the adjective describing the object or concept being signed. Eyebrows are one of the most important elements in helping describe the feelings/intentions of signing, and there are basically two key eyebrow movements.

Raising the eyebrows indicates asking a question, so for instance if you signed "want dessert" without an eyebrow indicator, it would come off as saying "I want ice cream" instead of "Do you want ice cream" which would be conveyed by the raised eyebrows. Lowering the eyebrows, as in a furrowed brow expression, indicates one of those 5Ws (plus 1 H) questions. So, by lowering the eyebrows and signing "Exit" a person would know you are asking "where" the exit is instead of just saying "exit" blankly as though you were going to add something to that statement. It might even come across as a command to someone to exit, so now we see how important the eyebrows can be in avoiding very confusing situations.

Answer: With 9,000 paid-job sign language interpreters in the U.S, over 80% are male

There are between 2,000 and 3,000 sign language interpreters employed in the United States, and about 68% of them are women. The average age of an interpreter is 44 years old, and the salary is about $48,500 a year. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says the demand for interpreters is expected to increase by 19% by 2028.
ASL is among the 6 most popular languages in the U.S. (some sources say the 4th most popular), the others being English, Spanish, Italian, German, French, and Chinese.
William "Dummy" Hoy was a baseball player on the Chicago White Sox in the early 20th century. He was deaf, and therefore couldn't hear the calls shouted by the umpires, so Hoy and his third-base coach devised hand signals to indicate balls and strikes. The signals caught on with other players, managers and umpires.