you'll often hear people talk about idioms in ASL and they sometimes do so in
precisely
so we're going to differentiate what a real idiom is as compared to other
special uses of language an idiom is a group of words whose meaning is not
deducible by looking at the meaning of the individual words that is if you were
to look at the meaning of the the ASL expression train gone or train go
you'd never really expect that means that i'm not going to repeat myself
because train and go have nothing to do with the conversation but because its
been used in a certain way for a long time it turns out to mean something
different than you would expect
sort of like the English idiom it's raining cats and dogs well you have to
know the meaning of each word but that doesn't give you the meaning
wow it's raining really hard it depends on the way that group of words has
been used together
so an idiom is always a group of words used in a certain way that means
something different than what you'd expect from looking at the individual
words and your instructor i'm sure will spend some time explaining some of the
ASL idioms that we have now that's different from simply a culturally laden
term or a term that is difficult to interpret there are lots of signs in a
ASL that don't have an English word and you have to use several different
English words to express them where there are sign in ASL that relate
to something cultural about the deaf community that is therefore
difficult to interpret to hearing audience
you just think of the sign deaf school or deaf institute if you will
well it's difficult to express what that means to a hearing person because a
hearing person who isn't familiar with the culture that doesn't mean that the
sign is an idiom
it just means it's a sign that's hard to translate between languages
there are lots of words in Spanish that don't have an english equivalent
there are lots of words in English that don't have a spanish equivalent that
doesn't make them an idiom that just makes them a term that's bound to a
culture and that might cause a little bit of trouble for a translator or
interpreter
finally we sometimes see metaphorical uses of language we talked about
metaphors already in this course and how it is sometimes expected that a
certain idea will be expressed in a certain way
lots of signs use the idea of height or moving upward to indicate the idea of
having more power
so a person might talk about their job and wanting a promotion using the sign
promote and they might sort of indicate in some way that they're struggling to
climb a ladder and you say well there's no ladder really involved but it's a
metaphor
remember metaphors when you make a comparison without telling the person
you're talking to that you're making the comparison
you just expect they'll know so because in ASL movement upward is associated
with gaining more power
getting more money getting more prestige the idea of a person struggling to climb
a ladder would very clearly indicate that the person is trying to move up
given the context of work and wanted a promotion
on the other hand if you talk to a person studying for to maybe write a
difficult term paper they might talk about doing research and they might talk
about using the Sign analyzed using the Sign deep to talk about getting too in
depth into the material and then they might act as if they're using a shovel
now the sign shovel has nothing to do with with research per se but it does
have to do with this metaphor of digging to indicate the idea of doing research
or finding out more information about a topic so they're just expecting you
understand the metaphor
It was as if they were digging into a book so to be clear an idiom group of
words that you would not be able to understand the meaning of by looking at
the individual words
that's different from a culturally laden term which just is hard to translate
between one language and another and that's different from metaphorical
language which is not said it's not
there's no set use of it but it comes up from time to time and it's
based on these metaphors that all the users of a language know and expect