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I read about MCE in Yule’s The Study of Language and it raised my curiosity on how different MCE is from ASL.

TRiG
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Hidden Markov Model
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1 Answers1

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American Sign Language, like all sign languages, is a fully fledged natural human language. It is not some form of American English.

Manually Coded English uses the signs from ASL to communicate the English language. It could be considered a kind of relexification, as well as a pidgin. In practice it has as much similarity to ASL as if someone replaced every English word with one from Chinese.

curiousdannii
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  • i.e., MCE uses ASL words with English grammar, whereas ASL has its own grammar (such as different ways of ordering words and of forming copulas, questions, and pronouns). – amI Nov 18 '18 at 05:00