Was the language devised in one go or has it grown organically. How do you you cope with new words, other than spelling them out?
ASL's roots can be traced back to 16th Century France where monks used it as beneficent service to deaf parishioners and as a backdoor to talking during vows of silence. What we now see in ASL (as opposed to French Sign Language) is due to ASL's hybridization after it came into contact with the sign languages of regional areas in the United States (roughly 1820's). In fact, Martha's Vineyard, Mass., had an extraordinarily large deaf community several hundred years ago; most everyone, deaf and hearing, had fluency in both English and ASL.
As for adding to the ASL lexicon, there are general avenues that exist, such as compounding with existing signs, functional shifting, fingerspelling, fingerspelled loan signs (where the fingerspelling is modulated until it becomes its own sign), and the use of classifiers. Most, I feel, come into being through the last avenue, classifiers, because it offers the most freedom and flexibility in creating signs. Further, a classifier is more easily recognized and duplicated because the sign has inherent meaning (within the context of the whole signing system, of course).
For example, MICROWAVE is a former classifier (but is now a legitimate sign) where the fingers on each hand simultaneously classify, or give visual meaning to, the action of waves moving to a central location for the purpose of heating.
I've rarely seen anyone fingerspell INTERNET. Two signs have common use. One is a modulation of the verb sign for CONTACT or NETWORKING. The other is a classifier of fiberoptic cables transmitting loads of data (that actually looks like an "information superhighway").
Are there any other sign language users meandering through these threads?
