Tipos de Canales de Distribución para Productos de Consumo

The Meaning of the Thumb

In both ASL and LSF, the extended thumb can have several meanings. It can represent an extended, pointy, or thin object such as a knife (ASL butcher, LSF boucher [ butcher]), a scalpel (ASL surgery, LSF opérer [operate]), a cylinder (ASL science, LSF chimie [chemistry]), or the neck of a bottle (ASL pour, LSF vinaigre [vinegar]).

In LSF, the extended thumb also represents the number 1 and, by abstraction, the notions of unity and singularity. This symbolism was transmitted into ASL in several signs, but it is not used for the sign one; instead, the ASL one is made with an extended index finger (see “un (One): The Hidden Number,” p. 239).

The extended thumb in LSF also depicts the idea of one person in movement, which has carried over to a number of ASL signs. These include —assistant (one person placed under another), chase (one person pursuing another), far (one person separated from another), follow (one person following another), race (two people running a race), as well as behind, challenge, commute, each other, game, live apart, and socialize. The rupture in the etymological link between the form and its original symbolic meaning allowed for an expansion of its use in ASL to include animate and inanimate objects (for example, a car, a house, or even an abstract concept like work, as in “catch up on my work”). Likewise, as was the case for behind and under, the reference to a person in movement eventually became unnecessary. In ASL, then, the extended thumb became a sort of all-purpose tool.

The cases where American authors interpret the extended thumb as a person are quite rare.

Higgins (1942) recognizes the form in his entry backbite: “right hand is trying to beat the left thumb (a person), down and out of place” (11). Another example is found in Michaels’

(1923) entry sweetheart (see entry), where he interprets the bending of the thumbs as the bending of heads “like sweethearts do their heads when conversing or courting” (119). But this latter interpretation emerged after transmission to ASL; an altogether different symbol-ism motivated its French etymon petit(e) ami(e) (sweetheart). The imbued cultural trans-parency of the LSF extended thumb became lost as the extended index finger slowly replaced it in ASL. That the extended thumb refers to two very heterogeneous categories—“one” and

“person in movement”—could only foster its erasure from Americans’ consciousness.

ASL challenge ASL science ASL backbite

(YD from Higgins 1923)

64 daughter

daughter

This form was originally a compound of two signs: girl (see entry), which derives from the LSF sign femme (woman), and baby. The contemporary sign exhibits a change in form from its original components. The handshape of girl is no longer visible due to assimilation with the flat handshape of baby. Additionally, the reduplicated movements in girl and baby have been reduced into one sweeping move-ment of the hand from the cheek to the arm. The male counterpart, son, is the result of a similar evolution; it began as a compound of boy (see entry) and baby, and the handshapes and move-ment changed. son is similar in form to daughter, except that the first part of the sign contacts the forehead rather than the cheek.

day

This sign first appears in Ferrand (circa 1785). He describes the move-ment as “tracing the index finger following the course of the sun’s movement across the sky from rising to setting.” Clark (1885) first documented this sign in the U.S., saying that it indicated the “path of the sun in the heavens.” In the contemporary form, the movement has been truncated to a quarter circle that shows only part of the sun’s course. This change has reduced the iconicity of the original LSF sign.

ASL daughter

ASL day LSF jour

( Pélissier 1856 )

deceive, fool 65

deaf

The form and meaning of this sign hails directly from LSF. Blanchet, the doctor at the school for the deaf in Paris, cited its use in his 1850 dictionary, where he described it as the extended index finger pointing to the ear and then the mouth. This sign likely emerged from a gesture Deaf people used to quickly identify themselves by pointing to their ear and mouth while shaking their heads to indicate they could not hear or speak. In France it is still culturally acceptable to use the term “deaf-mute,”

which is also a direct translation of the sign’s original meaning. However, American Deaf people consider the term outdated and offensive, even though the ASL sign maintains the original reference to “mute” by touch-ing the index ftouch-inger near the mouth.

ASL has two additional variants of this sign—in one, the direction of movement is reversed, and in the other, only the upper cheek is touched ( Lucas 1995).

deceive, fo ol

➊ This sign is one of many derived from the evil eye gesture used by hearing people in the Mediterranean region to project injury or ill will on another person (see cheat, ironic, mock, and wrong). The gesture con-sists of pointing the horn handshape toward an adversary. In nineteenth-century France, the right hand was placed over the left hand to produce the sign tromper (deceive, wrong). Clark (1885) describes it in his entry cheat

ASL deaf

LSF sourd-muet ( Lambert 1865)

ASL deceive 1

66 decide

as “an underhanded exchange.” In a similar variant used in Colorado, the right hand passes under the left hand (Shroyer and Shroyer 1984).

➋ In this variant, the index finger of the left hand represents the person who is being deceived. In old LSF, the sign tromper could be directed toward the location of a person who was wrong.

The directional movement of deceive 2 is the sole remnant of the LSF etymon.

decid e

The etymology of the contemporary sign is clarified by Long’s (1910) description of a compound, where the signer first produces think and then, “after balancing hands as in [ judge], bring them to an abrupt stop exactly opposite.” This is very similar in form to the semantically related ASL sign justice (see entry), which itself derives from the LSF sign balance (scales). The motivation behind this contemporary form and LSF balance draws from the metaphor

“thoughts are objects,” particularly ones that are to be “weighed” before a decision is made. Today, the only trace of judge or justice is in the ring handshapes.

LSF tromper ( Pélissier 1856 )

ASL deceive 2

ASL decide

defend 67

defea t

Here the fist, a symbol of force and power (see can, try, and brave), thrusts towards an adversary to defeat it. Long documented this ASL sign in 1910 and it is very similar in form to the French sign vaincre (defeat). The distinction between the LSF and ASL forms is in the difference in movement and left hand configuration. vaincre bends at the elbow while touching the left fist, whereas defeat bends at the wrist while touching the left extended index finger. The ASL sign, then, appears to be a reduced form of the LSF sign. Both contemporary signs can be directed away from or toward the signer, depending on who experiences the defeat.

defend

Early documentation of this sign in France describes the form as being iconic, representing a knight’s or sol-dier’s shield. The signer would depict the action, and “put the left hand on the chest of the [signer] like a shield, and with the other push away the enemy”

( Ferrand circa 1785). Later, the two hands assimilated, adopting the same movement and handshape, so that now both fists push away from the body.

Although this sign is no longer used in France, it was transmitted to Belgium and the U.S., where the form remains unchanged to this day.

ASL defeat

LSF vaincre ( IVT 1986 )

ASL defend LSF défendre ( Belgium; CFLSB 1989)

68 delicious

delicio us

➊ In this very iconic sign, signers “draw extremity of right tips across the lips as if licking them one after the other”

( Higgins 1923). The sign was inherited from the LSF délicieux (delicious;

Lambert 1865), in which the signer must

“pass the tips of the fingers of the left hand over the lips as if licking them” (de Gérando 1827). This form and meaning is maintained in contemporary LSF.

➋ The sign’s evolution reduced the movement to a single contact on the lower lip with the right middle finger (the same handshape used to indicate taste and touch, see entries), fol-lowed by the sign smooth (where the thumb glides along the fingertips of the bundled hand, from little finger to index). The two components further reduced into a new sign in which the thumb and index finger of the modified ring handshape contact the mouth and fingers then close into a fist. The move-ment away from the mouth is the sole trace of smooth, the second part of the original compound.

demand

According to Long (1910) and Higgins (1923), demand was once produced as an emphatic form of owe, which came from the LSF sign devoir, dette (owe, debt; see owe 1). The movement was directed toward the signer to indicate that one was owed something.

Eventually, demand became a distinct ASL sign independent from its etymon.

The subsequent evolution of owe 2 (see

LSF délicieux, ASL delicious 1 ( Lambert 1865)

ASL delicious 2

ASL demand

depend 69 entry), where the tip of the index finger

taps the left palm, facilitated this sepa-ration of demand and owe and allowed them to become two different signs.

deny

An emphatic version of not (see entry), which comes from the LSF rien (nothing), deny is produced with both hands. Because of its etymon, this contemporary sign could be literally translated as “not, not,” a forceful denial of an accusation.

depend

We find the etymology of depend rooted in the form documented by Sicard (1808), who describes the sign dépendence (dependence) as “ feigning the attachment of one thing on another thing that is higher than the thing being attached.” Higgins (1923) confirms the link in his entry, explaining depend as the “left hand pointing outward, palm rightward, and then right bent index hanging on upper edge of left hand.”

This sign, then, is an iconic rendering of “hang on,” which corresponds to the etymology of the word depend from the Latin verb pendere, meaning “to hang from.” Over time the handshape of the right index finger (originally bent) assimilated to match that of the left, and the movement of both hands became the same, obscuring the iconicity that had originally motivated this form.

ASL deny

ASL depend

70 deteriorate

deter io ra te

➊ This sign is motivated by the meta-phor “down is bad.” Using the arm to represent a measuring tool, the right flat hand makes successive jumps down the left arm, an action that Higgins (1942) interprets as the “downward stages of degeneration.” The sign’s antonym is produced with the reverse movement, and is glossed as improve (see entry).

➋ In an altogether different form with the same meaning, both hands in the thumb handshape are brought down to signal the deterioration of states experienced by an individual.

The raised thumbs are inherited from the French number un (one), which is commonly used to stand for individuals (see “un (One): The Hidden Number,”

p. 239). The movement of the hands employs the spatial metaphor “down is bad,” which is common in both French and American cultures.

die

Sharing the same meaning and very similar in form to the LSF sign mort (die), this ASL sign has been docu-mented as both one-handed (Clark 1885; Long 1910; Higgins 1923) and two-handed ( Higgins 1923). Today, the two-handed variant is the most com-monly used form. In the early ASL sign, both hands began with palms up and then turned over. Today, the sign begins with the right hand palm up and the left hand palm down, and then the hands turn over so that they reverse their respective orientations. Clark (1885)

ASL deteriorate 1 ASL deteriorate 2

ASL die LSF mort

( IVT 1986 )

difficult 71 describes the image behind the sign as a

living entity being “knocked over, such as the sudden falling of an animal on being shot.”