Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
BLUE
“blue”
How to make it
Hold up a 'B' hand and twist it at the wrist a couple of times.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
An initialized sign: the B is the first letter of the English word. Most ASL color signs made in neutral space with a twist are initialized — BLUE, GREEN, YELLOW, PURPLE.
Sources
- Battison 1978 (initialization)Battison, Robbin. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok 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 twist of the wrist
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing out.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from BLUE in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.