Talk:American Sign Language/Appendix A: Handshapes

Does this table show all the handshapes of ASL?
I do not know ASL but am learning British Sign Language (BSL), which has about 58 different handshapes, many more than the number of letters of the alphabet, so I would have thought that ASL would also have many more handshapes than those of the fingerspelt alphabet.

However, I may be wrong. Fingerspelling in ASL uses only one hand, and to get 26 letters out of one hand requires (I think) 24 handshapes and 2 movements. Possibly there are fewer handshapes than this in the non-fingerspelling parts of ASL.

The situation is different in BSL, where fingerspelling uses both hands. The two hands can contact each other in many different places, so you don't need so many individual handshapes - in fact a mere 12 handshapes are enough for BSL fingerspelling; but for BSL as a whole (fingerspelling and non-fingerspelling) you need 58 handshapes or more.

Does anyone know how many handshapes there are in the whole of ASL? And does the table of fingerspelling handshapes cover all ASL handshapes?

UBJ 43X (talk) 17:03, 9 September 2010 (UTC)