Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
MORNING
“morning”
Rest your dominant forearm on the fingertips of your other flat hand and raise it, palm up — the sun coming up.
Where the sign comes from
IconicThe sign visibly depicts its meaning — a present-day resemblance, not a historical claim.
The flat base hand is the horizon; the rising arm is the sun. DAY, NIGHT and MORNING all use this horizon.
- 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
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.
Moves from the weak hand to the chest.
The dominant hand acts on a still base hand.
Palm facing up.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from MORNING in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.