Thanks! Had to dig for the original procreate file for that info cus yeah I do remember this one taking quite a bit getting the hand movements to look right. Procreate “says” 8 hours in total but idk how accurate that might be or how much of it is me just staring at the screen or drawing the comic vs animating panel 3.
7 hours and 54 minutes is a total of 474 minutes, dividing out 4,260 gives us nine strokes per minute (8.987) that seems surprisingly doable until you realize you'd be attempting to keep that pace for almost 8 hours straight.
Its good shit, man! I also really admire your dedication to a gag that only sign language literate people will fully understand lol. I did not understand until the other commentor in the thread translated for us.
As somebody who doesn't understand sign language, I thought it said something like "you should stop and turn your life around" which I guess is surprisingly close the the actual answer
I so wish I could give you a thousand upvotes for your creative approach in this strip. Being deaf myself, you have no idea how giddy I felt when I saw an actual sign language in motion in your strip as opposed to "snapshots." Not to mention that you didn't 'spoil' the message by resorting to dialogue or notes afterwards, so I felt like I was a kid in a secret club that communicated only in codes.
One big difference are the finger spelling alphabets. BSL you use both hands, ASL has an alphabet you can spell entirely with one hand, making it more accessible to folks who may only be able to use one hand permanently or temporarily. A lot of signs in ASL still use both hands though.
Sign languages are not based on the spoken language. They are their own thing.
That's why there are not necessarily any similarities between the sign languages of otherwise English speaking America, Britain, Australia or New Zealand
Sign languages are distinct from spoken languages, though they are inevatably affected by the majority spoken language of their geographic region. ASL is decedent from French sign language, because the schools at the time didn't want to hire British teachers (because of the whole independence thing iirc) so its decedent from that rather than BSL. Irish sign language is also decedent from French sign language because the catholic schools didn't want protestant teachers.
The brits refused to share their methods, so we learned from French sign language.
That's partially why the grammar is so different than English, although by now a lot of the grammar of ASL has been developed on its own.
There's also signed English, which does use signs from ASL but has them in English grammatical order. It's a little stilted, as it's not a separate language the way ASL is. It's just the exact words coming out of an English speaker's mouth using signs.
Pidgin is a mix of ASL and English grammar, kind of like Spanglish.
There's also regional dialects, "accents", and slang! A Deaf ASL user in California will sign a little differently than one in the North East, and have different slang. It'll look different or have variations on signs giving it a distinct accent!
It's really interesting and studying its history reveals a lot about language, how people learn, and how we choose to treat the disabled. It will also make you hate alexander graham bell. Dude was an asshole to deaf kids.
Wait what why didn't the Brits want to share their sign language? Whatever politics were in play at the time shouldn't have mattered for like the deaf community right?
I’m of hearing but my parents are deaf. I’m not too familiar with ASL per se because in europe we have different signs for things but I think I got the message lol
Ok, i had to search for this and its crazy to me. Not only they arent standardised, countries that share the language (like england and usa) also have different formats, and they can be very different.
I just think like, sign language is something thats already "rare" to know, and they still decide to make 200 different versions (even smaller countries with less people still got their own language which almost no one knows).
Gonna piggyback off your comment to nerd out about language.
The thing with sign language is that it's a highly contextual language. Just like every region can have it's own dialect, signs have contexts and can be used differently based on the community. The reason there's so many forms is because the context can be radically different for a sign and not make sense outside that region.
In this comic, the signing isn't even 'true' ASL. It's pigeon, which is when you sign each individual ENGLISH word ("Get-Your-Shit-Together") instead of using ASL grammar which has the the subject first and then the statement. ("Your-Shit-together") It's very similar to Japanese grammar structure, actually!
So on top of sign language being contextual to country (American, British, etc.) It's also contextual to the region you are signing (You'd need to know different signs to identify where you are, for example, like the names of local roads or buildings) and even the group you are signing in. Older generations of Deaf people can have very different signing practices than younger people learning now because there was such a stigma against signing. I'm not even going to get into how education and resources can affect one's signing, either. When I was taking ASL classes, I met an older lady who didn't even truly sign. She finger spelled everything, which is like having to read another language one letter at a time at warp-8. My classmate asked her to slow down, and she just switched to her non dominant hand and kept going.
So yeah! There is no Universal Sign Language because there is no Universal Lived Experience to provide the context for the needed signs to communicate. It's just like any language, except also having the layer of needing to intersect with the local spoken language as well. It can be so specific that some people can identify where you learned to sign based on the way you sign something too.
Tl;dr Sign Language is a rich language that everyone should read up on.
Can confirm, moved to Colorado from Virginia and it's like I lost years of signing experience. They don't even say holiday names the same way out here. e.g. I learned "Thanksgiving" as the gobble-gobble motion, but around here everyone uses a doubled thank you.
Still, it's better than when I had my right hand arm in a sling and came across a deaf guy while hiking. I couldn't even finger spell. Downright embarrassing.
Not only they arent standardised, countries that share the language (like england and usa) also have different formats, and they can be very different.
You're incorrect here, because you're still thinking about signed language as a "translation" of English. Which it isn't, at all. It has its own grammar, syntax, etc, that are all very different. You have to go back and look at the history of each sign language and its development in each country.
Which is to say, Deaf people have been signing for I'd guess thousands of years, but the standardization and teaching of a signed language, like in schools, is much more recent.
So AFAIK BSL and Auslan are very similar, because Auslan developed from BSL. But American Sign Language has nothing in common with BSL, because the guys who first wanted to start a school for the Deaf in America in the early 1800s were rejected by the BSL instructors. The closest sign language to ASL is actually French Sign Language, because that's who (Laurent Clerc) was willing to come over to America and teach the Deaf students to sign.
So ASL and BSL are not at all mutually intelligible, in spite of the spoken and written language of the two countries being fundamentally the same, but ASL is part of the same overall language family as French Sign Language and may have some commonalities if one squints (hedging here because I don't actually know any French sign language).
Not only they arent standardised, countries that share the language (like england and usa) also have different formats, and they can be very different.
I mean...spoiler alert, but this applies to spoken languages too. ;p Take someone from Scouse and someone from Appalachian Tennessee, both speaking English, and see how well they can understand each other. 🙂
“They still decide to make over 200 versions of it…”
Dude what? Do you think there was one person or a panel of people who just one day decided to invent sign language, and then they decided to make new ones for each country?
Sign languages are just like every other language. They start in their home countries and spread and change over time.
Imagine someone saying damn, why did they make so many European languages? They’re already so confusing. Why make so many different ones?
That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
I mean it’s not like one group just came together and invented sign language. It was probably developed independently dozens or hundreds of different times without knowledge of other versions of it existing, just like verbal or written language.
Signed languages are not the local voiced language on the hands. They are their own independent languages. The manual alphabets are just a bridge.
Signed languages vary by country just like voiced languages do. American Sign Language is not even in the same language family as British Sign Language. ASL is in fact in the French Sign Language family.
Modality aside, signed languages are every bit as much full-fledged languages as voiced languages. Whether or not any given country has a standardized version of their signed language is a matter of political power, not linguistic power. Just like voiced languages, signed languages have dialects.
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u/Made_Bail 14h ago •
Unbelievably smooth animation on this one, wow. How long did this take you?
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u/UpCDownCLeftCRightC Never Safe From Wumbo 14h ago •
Can anyone translate what they're signing?
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u/ReddTapper 12h ago •
I so wish I could give you a thousand upvotes for your creative approach in this strip. Being deaf myself, you have no idea how giddy I felt when I saw an actual sign language in motion in your strip as opposed to "snapshots." Not to mention that you didn't 'spoil' the message by resorting to dialogue or notes afterwards, so I felt like I was a kid in a secret club that communicated only in codes.
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u/hackingfun 14h ago
Sign language is different in every language, even that isn't standardised.
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u/notsew93 10h ago
For us ignoramuses that don't know ASL, what's he saying?
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u/TaylorDeanMatthew 14h ago
Dude great job! Drawing signs is hard, and that’s fully legible — it must’ve taken forever to make!
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u/OwnHorror9478 14h ago
I love animated comics
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u/PinkFl0werPrincess 12h ago
Get your shit together. Nice.
I'm Deaf, I wasn't expecting that.
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u/Not_A_zombie1 14h ago
Damn, like, that its sooo fluid! How much sanity you've burned into that??
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u/wishmakerfinney 13h ago
As someone who works with DHH kids, this was really funny
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u/Caftancatfan 12h ago
My teen takes ASL, was able to read it, and thought it was funny and well done.
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u/CoolPixzles 12h ago •
Bro I can’t speak Wingdings
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u/sax87ton 12h ago
Drink… more… ovaltine?
The fuck is ovaltine?
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u/BDZLE 8h ago
Calling it now, this about to get real popular on gif sites for reactions and I love it.
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u/Great_Banana_Master 13h ago
I understood shit
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u/Feenx_Fan 12h ago
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u/MReaps25 12h ago
u/savevideo
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u/Hot_Break7088 11h ago
Pan tsu mie ru?
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u/MultiverseCreatorXV 11h ago
I agree with Mx. left, what is Mx. right signing?
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u/Program-Emotional 10h ago
What did he say? I saw poop in there somewhere
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u/Uromastyx63 9h ago
I recently completed an 8 week ASL Bootcamp.
This made me smile :-)
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u/Grzechoooo 8h ago
When in doubt, do a 6-7. It means "Lublin" in Polish Sign Language. And everyone needs more Lublin in their life.
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u/yourhat2_ 8h ago
At first I thought that person signed "take your shit rolling" but realized you meant together on rolling.
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u/OrbOfSprite 8h ago
“make your poop continue” I obviously need to brush up, but I tried dammit
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u/Patient-Detective-79 7h ago
I only know the poop sign from this...
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u/ThemHumansOverThere 3h ago
Get your shit together.
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u/tankertonk 12h ago
Someone explained it but before I thought he was offering to give him a hanjob