Fingerspelling

Jellybean how has a bicycle. Last Sunday he jumped at the chance to go riding in a nearby park -- at least until we got to the park. The slides were more adventure than the bike once we got there. One of these was a new slide, probably put in last fall. He found a friend from school already there and played away. I stood with the bike and examined the new playground equipment.

It was a very nice arrangement with lots to climb and a taller slide than had previously been there. Down in an area "for 2-5 year-olds" that I am sure Field Pea couldn't traverse, there was a sign depicting fingerspelling of a phrase (click on the image to see it larger):

It took me a couple of minutes to read this: Can you sign your name?

This troubles me unduly. I see no sense in putting fingerspelling on a sign, for several reasons. The spelling is in English. (Well, in this case it was English -- by the way, I'd guess half the people in the park that day were fluent in Spanish, including a number who probably don't understand English.) The alphabet is much easier to draw than the image of a contorted hand. I would expect people who can read the fingerspelling could read the alphabet, since the spelling of the words is the same. I am sure this was some attempt at inclusion of the deaf community or raising awareness by the manufacturer, but one I think is misguided. Fingerspelling is not sign language.

Still, it should also trouble me that it took as long as it did to read the sign. Trying to run through the alphabet afterward, I realized that I still didn't know how to make a proper "F" and that without an example I probably wouldn't get "G" or "H" right, either.

When Jellybean was young and I was buying into the "sign with your baby" craze -- that is, before I experienced that it would be work -- I would run through the alphabet daily. Of course, I was learning to make the shapes, not to read them. . . And obviously, learning it poorly. (No, I did not intend or expect Jellybean to fingerspell at that age -- but if I was going to learn to sign, I was going to be thorough about it.)

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To make the image of the fingerspelled sign above, I had to find a suitable font and screen capture the text in that font so I could save it as an image. The font is called Gallaudet. If you're interested, do a search for "Gallaudet font" or simply look here, where I did. While I was looking for it, I ran across a suggestion that one way to learn to read fingerspelling would be to make this font your browser's default, and lurk in chat rooms. I'm not going to be doing that.

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