Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
AIRPLANE
“airplane”
How to make it
Hold out an 'ILY' hand (thumb, index and pinky) and bounce it forward twice through the air.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The extended fingers are wings and fuselage. One long sweep is FLY (the verb); two short ones are AIRPLANE (the noun).
Sources
- ASL-LEX (iconicity)Sehyr, Zed Sevcikova, Naomi Caselli, Ariel Cohen-Goldberg, and Karen Emmorey. "The ASL-LEX 2.0 Project: A Database of Lexical and Phonological Properties for 2,723 Signs in American Sign Language." Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 26, no. 2 (2021): 263–277. link
- Supalla & Newport 1978Supalla, Ted, and Elissa Newport. "How Many Seats in a Chair? The Derivation of Nouns and Verbs in American Sign Language." In Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, edited by Patricia Siple, 91–132. Academic Press, 1978.
The sign, taken apart
Every ASL sign is built from a handshape, a place it's made, and a movement. Learn to see these three and you can read and store any sign.
Location
Neutral space
Made at the neutral space.
Movement
a straight path
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing down.