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Thanks to Asger Bergman, I have learned something I have been wondering about for many years: the true story behind the Danish Sign Language sign 'tree' in Klima and Bellugi's foundational 1979 text 'The Signs of Language'.
When @DrAuslan and I were writing our book on the linguistics of #Auslan, like many others, we were going to cite this example to illustrate how form-meaning relationships in signed languages may be often iconic, but can vary from one language to the next
But I had heard a rumour that this example from the 1979 book was actually based on a misunderstanding, and so I decided to check the online dictionary of Danish Sign Language (once I had worked out to search in Danish using the word 'trae') http://tegnsprog.dk/
And I was immediately pleased I had checked because the sign I saw in the dictionary wasn't the sign from the 1979 book. In fact, the sign was very similar to the American Sign Language sign 'tree'.
I began asking people who had worked with Ursula Bellugi about this, and one of them explained to me that she had heard an anecdote which suggested that Ursula has a Danish deaf colleague visit her lab in San Diego from whom she had elicited signs from Danish Sign Language.
When he presented a sign similar to ASL, Ursula was a little disappointed and asked if there was another sign, so the deaf consultant produced a depicting sign illustrating the shape of a tree, not the actual lexical sign in Danish Sign Language. She put *that* one in the book!
Turns out this anecdote which I've believed for the last two decades isn't accurate either! I've just got an email from Asger Bergmann who was THAT deaf consultant who visited Bellugi all those years ago, and he explained he showed her an older sign from Danish Sign Language.
In the intervening five decades, the older sign has fallen out of a use, and a new sign has replaced it. It's the newer sign that is recorded in the current Danish Sign Language dictionary, and not the older one.
So it turns out Klima and Bellugi's example was right, and that language change is the actual star of this show! And we all need to pay much more attention to deaf elders in our signing communities because they have lived this language change: they KNOW.
I blogged about this back in 2012: turns out I was wrong! The mythbuster has been mythbusted. 
https://adamschembri.tumblr.com/post/125057504041/myth-busting
https://adamschembri.tumblr.com/post/125057504041/myth-busting
