Is the transfer of content as effective as the spoken word without the use of prepositions, conjunctions, and the myriad nuances of English?
But ASL has pretty much the same parts of speech (syntactic categories) that English or Russian has. Signers say that English lacks some of the finesse that ASL has! It's like trying to argue whether French or Farsi is the more expressive language. ASL is pretty much its own language. (You can even tell which region of the US an ASLer learned their language in based on regionalisms or dialectal differentiation.) You cannot translate English word for word and expect to be signing grammatical ASL. One thing that is quite interesting is that the pronominal system allows for more "persons" than we have based on physical location in front of the signer. You can sign for different people (there names or a description of them) and then merely store them in a location relative to you and simply point to one of these locations to refer to that person as a subject or object of a verb in a sentence. Just holds for that conversation.
