Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
LATER
“later”
How to make it
Rest the thumb of an 'L' hand on your other palm and pivot the index finger forward, like a clock hand.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
Initialized with L, and moving forward along the time line into the near future.
Sources
- Battison 1978 (initialization)Battison, Robbin. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press, 1978.
- Cogen 1977 (time line)Cogen, Cathy. "On Three Aspects of Time Expression in American Sign Language." In On the Other Hand: New Perspectives on American Sign Language, edited by Lynn Friedman, 197–214. Academic Press, 1977.
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
Weak palm
Made at the weak palm.
Movement
a twist of the wrist
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing left.