Motion diagram. A Deaf-recorded clip from the PopSign corpus (CC BY 4.0) exists for this sign and can be placed here.
YELLOW
“yellow”
How to make it
Hold up a 'Y' hand and twist it at the wrist a couple of times.
Where the sign comes from
DocumentedDerivation traced in historical-linguistic scholarship.
Initialized with the Y of 'yellow'.
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
Neutral space
Made at the neutral space.
Movement
a twist of the wrist
One-handed.
Repeated. Palm facing out.
Easy to confuse with
These differ from YELLOW in one or two parameters — the minimal pairs our receptive drills use to make sure you can really tell them apart.