[nrclark]

Signs and spoken language feel very different, at least to me. ASL is definitely not "english, but with signs instead of verbal words".

In ASL, there are some words where you just spell it out. But most things have their own dedicated sign, or maybe a compound of a couple of signs, or a sign that looks -almost- like a related concept but with a modifier (it almost feels like Chinese in that respect). The sign usually represents some aspect of what you're describing (as an example, "banana" is signed by peeling an imaginary banana).

ASL grammar is nothing like English, and has concepts that have no verbal equivalent. Conjugation works completely differently, and it's common for sentences to have a directional component and/or a facial-expression component.

[scarmig]

Do the meanings of mouth morphemes ever correspond to the mouth shapes associated with spoken morphemes in the local spoken language? (Sorry if that's incorrectly/confusingly phrased; been awhile since I cracked open a linguistics textbook.) Curious about both ASL and other sign languages, if you happen to know.