Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
TOMORROW
“tomorrow”
How to make it
Touch the thumb of an 'A' hand to your cheek and arc it forward.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
One step forward along the time line — into the future. YESTERDAY is the same thumb moved back.
Sources
- 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
Cheek
Moves from the cheek to the neutral space.
Movement
an arc
One-handed.
Palm facing left.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from TOMORROW in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.