Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
UNCLE
“uncle”
How to make it
Hold a 'U' hand beside your temple and give it a small shake.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
Initialized with U, at the male locus beside the forehead.
Sources
- Battison 1978 (initialization)Battison, Robbin. Lexical Borrowing in American Sign Language. Silver Spring, MD: Linstok Press, 1978.
- Frishberg 1975Frishberg, 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.
Location
Temple
Made at the temple.
Movement
wiggling fingers
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing out.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from UNCLE in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.