Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
BROTHER
“brother”
Make an 'L' hand at your forehead, then bring it down so both index fingers rest side by side.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
A compound of BOY (at the male forehead locus) and SAME (index fingers together): 'same-as-a-boy'. Over time the two parts have blended into one movement — the assimilation Frishberg described.
- Klima & Bellugi 1979Klima, Edward, and Ursula Bellugi. The Signs of Language. Harvard University Press, 1979.
- Frishberg 1975 (assimilation)Frishberg, Nancy. "Arbitrariness and Iconicity: Historical Change in American Sign Language." Language 51, no. 3 (1975): 696–719. link
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.
Starts as index up, thumb out — an l shape; ends as index finger up, the rest closed.
Also: letter L
Moves from the forehead to the neutral space.
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing left.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from BROTHER in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.