After establishing a school for the deaf, the main form of communication that was used was a mix between French and American signs. After time ASL started to become standardized and was used in schools across the country as the means of communication, and this was the birth of modern ASL. .
My next revelation of ASL as a language came after I read the first reading assignment, "Signs Have Parts: A Simple Idea" by Robbin Battison. After reading the assignment I learned how each sign can be made by combining four parts; location, hand shape, movement, and hand orientation. If one part of a sign is changed then it will have an entirely different meaning than the first sign. This is also seen in English, when you change a part of the word, like a letter, it has an entirely different meaning and the words may not have any thing in common. An example of this would be if you were to take the word cat and changed the c to an h the new word is hat. Just like in ASL when you change a part of a sign, like location, when you make the sign for summer its location is across ones forehead if you were to move the location to the middle of your face the meaning changes to ugly. In making connection like these I am able to see how ASL is different from spoken languages. This chapter also described how signs are more like pictures than spoken words. Signs are like a picture because they are visual, involve space, and represent an entire object. This may not the most important aspect of a sign because people that do not know ASL have a hard time guessing what a signs meaning is by relating it just a picture. All this time I thought that ASL was only picture symbols used to communicate English with the deaf. But that's not true one does not have to know English, or any spoken language to understand and communicate in ASL. The reading assignment also covered how signs have constraint and rules just as any other language.