Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
BROWN
“brown”
How to make it
Slide the index-finger side of a 'B' hand down your cheek.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
Initialized with the B of 'brown', placed on the cheek. Why the cheek rather than neutral space is not explained in our sources.
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
Cheek
Moves from the cheek to the jaw.
Movement
downward
One-handed.
Palm facing left.