You hear a faint typing noise.

#the last intentional crime i committed was nervously stealing books from a very wet dumpster #that was fun but a very guilty kind of fun

Knowing English will help you learn ASL in at least two respects: First, words which are the right combination of both short and rare are often fingerspelled instead of having their own signs.¹ ² Examples of these include: air, fog, fry, glue, lab, roof, and zoo to name a few.

Second, there’s the practice of initialization: using the fingerspelled letter that represents the first letter of an English word as the handshape for a sign. A few signs that do this are: family, aunt, yellow, blue, elevator, and protein.
 

flaksesomlys

There is, apparently!

I Am Not A Sign Language Expert, but the gist of it is that sign language speakers argue that initialization is often overused when coining new words, even to the point of detriment to the word’s understandability.

For example, there’s an initialized and non-initialized version of the sign for “single”. In the initialized version, it uses the handsign for “s” as part of the sign, whereas in the non-initialized version, it uses a single finger held up as the handshape. The argument is that the non-initialized version of this sign is more intuitive, conveying more information via its shape without the need for English language knowledge to interpret it.

I think I generally agree with this position? For most of the examples I’ve seen of signs with two competing versions, the non-initialized version has more inherently encoded information. (Take the proposed sign for “amino acid”. It’s just “a-a”. Why not have a sign that shows, say, the shape of an amino acid, instead?)

On the other hand, some people want to get rid of initialized signs altogether, and I think I disagree with that at least somewhat. If the choice of handshape is arbitrary, as in the case of “yellow”, it doesn’t seem to me like there’s any reason not to pick an initialized handsign. Yellowness doesn’t have an inherent shape, after all, so you might as well use the shape to encode the English word, since you don’t have anything else in particular you want to put there.

However, if the initialization is competing with other useful information, then I agree that the initial should definitely be the one to go.

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A true story, yes really, [Wayback], in reply to someone feeling bad about forgetting their Morse:

If it makes you feel any better, I mixed up the ASL letters for “f” and “s” for several months when I was learning to fingerspell.

And then I realized, and I was like, “ffs”.
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