What is the correct syntax for saying “I see your father at the gym” in American Sign Language? I know the individual characters, but am wondering if the whole sentence might have different syntax than English.
A couple of general rules:
Most important item first.
Then give it in the order it happened.
It’s pretty tricky to rewrite your sentence without knowing exactly what the person is trying to say. What is most important? ‘I’ or ‘gym’ or 'father?"
e.g. ‘father yours, at-gym see me’
Hmm. Doesn’t the construction “father yours, at-gym see me” risk confusing the subject and object? I mean, that sounds like I am saying, “Your father sees me at the gym.”
I guess the most important word in what I am trying to convey is “father.”
Is “at-gym” just “at” + “gym”, or is it a compound sign?
I’m with Handy on this.
Depends on what the most important part of the sentence is; what IDEA the signer is trying to convey.
Whereas, in English, one would say (emphasis on quotated words)
‘I’ saw your father at the gym
or
I saw ‘your’ father at the gym
or perhaps
I saw your father at the ‘gym’.
In english same syntax can be used but different words can be emphasized to convey the most important part of the sentence.
In ASL, whatever is emphasized is put at the beginning of the sentence.
Not that you asked, but in British Sign Language I’d probably use “Father yours saw me gym”.
But Francesca, when you write, “saw me”, by using the object case “me” and not the subject case “I”, you’re confusing the subject and object. The subject is “I”. I saw him, not he saw me.
Did you mean to write, “Father yours saw I gym”?
Yes, “Father yours saw I gym” is what I meant. I take “me” and “I” as the same sign.
“Is “at-gym” just “at” + “gym”, or is it a compound sign?”
I prefer using a sign for ‘at’ but few use it, being it’s only two letters and you really just fingerspell anything three letters or shorter. ‘at-gym’= is like one sign, gym with some directional indicator pointing to it.
There are a lot of ways to sign the same thing. Just get the message to the person is all that’s important.