Difference between British Sign Language and English Essay

Difference between British Sign Language and English - Essay Example This is because everything in BSL including the phonetics defines elements such as the hand shape, location, motion, and orientation. However, in English, it is different in that the phonetics of English language are defined by the phonologic characteristics like voicing; that which makes the sounds either silent or voiced, also the lip shape, and the position of the tongue. From other studies in linguistics, people have also established that the English language follows a given order of the three main components of a sentence; subject, object, and predicate. However, the grammar of BSL is different whereby the order used is the topic-comment structure of a sentence. In BSL also, some words are treated as different parts of the sentence as it ends up splitting a sentence into different parts. For example, in a sentence like; why was the brown cow eating grass in your garden yesterday? When we translate this into BSL, then the order of the sentence will follow the order of; timeline, location, object, subject, verb, and finally the question. Thus in BSL, the sentence will be, yesterday your garden grass brown cows eat why?, These are some of the differences between BSL and English. It is said that at there is a significant difference between the British sign language and the English language. According to( Sutton-Spence and Woll 1999) an example like; I take some plates from the table if this sentence is translated into English, the order of the sentence changes. As stated earlier, BSL has the structure of topic-comment whereby the main topic is placed first, and the doer comes at the end of the sentence. In this sentence then, the main topical subjects are a table’ and plate’ and the doer of the action is ‘I’. the I in the sentence comes at the end of the sentence, and it is equal to pointing in BSL.  Ã‚