In every spoken language I'm aware of, if you read a word you are unfamiliar with, you can generally work out how to pronounce the word from how it's written. You can sound it out.
Is this kind of thing possible with American Sign Language? If no, is it possible in any sign language? Is it possible to figure out how to sign a new word by "signing it out" analogous to how a speaker would "sound it out"?
Do you mean can you know how to sign a word in American Sign Language by reading it in English? Well no, because the two languages are not really that similar. Sign languages are not transformations of the local spoken language, they are independent fully formed languages with their own vocabularies and grammars. ASL is actually part of the French Sign Language family.
There is a thing called Manually Coded English which is a way of signing the English language. This can involve borrowing some signs from sign languages, making up new signs, and finger spelling. But even Signed English has different incompatible forms, based on the sign language of the area: ASL and BANZSL (the sign language of the UK/Australia/New Zealand) are not related, and only share about 40% of signs (and they only have that much in common because of borrowings, not because they descend from one language like English and French from Indo-European) and have different finger spelling systems. So not only could deaf people from the US and the UK not understand each without first learning the other's sign language, they also could not communicate through Signed English.
People who speak ASL as their first language often learn to read English as a second language, with all the difficulties faced by other second language learners.
It appears you are (implicitly) asking about Sutton Sign Writing. If you don't know the system, obviously you can't learn a new sign. It's not clear how many signers know the system, but it appears that, in principle, the system is capable of symbolising any sign in any manual language, so that a monolingual ASL dictionary could be possible.
I think part of the issue here is that you’re comparing ASL - which has several non-concatenative (I.e. simultaneous) elements - to spoken languages, which have more limitations as far as that’s concerned and are typically concatenative (I.e. linear). Phonologically, a sign has 4 elements: handshape (the configuration your fingers and hand make), movement, palm orientation, location (and in practice, non-manual markers, but that’s a whole conversation in its own right), and due to the physical nature of them, they all happen at the same time (save for dynamic signs, but for the sake of simplicity, we’ll ignore that here). That is to say, I couldn’t do a handshape, then the movement, then the location, then the palm orientation - that’s not how bodily mechanics work. Theoretically, someone learning a sign could go “okay, it has an A handshape, palm orientation is facing across the body, moving up and down, located in neutral space making contact with the other palm which is facing upwards with a B handshape.” In practice, doing that much examination is more complicated than seeing a sign and copying what they do, though some element of that could be included in making adjustments during learning.
As previous respondents mentioned, ASL and other sign languages don’t have a standard writing system - there have been a few systems created with that intent, but never really took off save for small groups of people here and there, and those are often teachers or linguists. The vast majority of signers don’t know those systems, and many have never even heard of them.
No.
Phonemes in English are distinct, unique sounds which sometimes-to-often correspond with letters or combinations of letters.
Instead, elements of signed language include: hand shape, location, movement, pauses, palm orientation, facial expression, and body movement.
You cannot determine how to produce a sign by reading an English word. You learn new signs by seeing someone sign them and copying the sign for yourself.
Sign language communicates concepts not sounds. Sounds do not have any meaning in language of Deaf.
However it is possible to communicate word equivalents through language components- for example stringing English alphabet letters together to literally Express an English word - this is called fingerspelling.
The OP seems to have the mistaken idea that sign language is an alternate system to Express and receive English...its not
Let's start from the top. Spoken languages are, by definition, phonetic. They work through sounds, so obviously they are sound-based.
But even tough that's the case, it took millenia to move from symbol-based writing to phonetic writing, and some languages retain ther symbol-based writing systems (like e.g. Chinese).
Phonetic writing systems have the big advantage, that you don't need to learn a separate written language, but only the transcription rules and some exceptions.
Sign languages are languages that developed seperately from spoken languages (they weren't designed, they "just happened", like spoken languages). The areas where they are spoken differ widely from the areas where spoken languages are spoken. For example, even though UK and USA both use English as their main language, ASL (American Sign Language) and BSL (British Sign Language) aren't even related.
On the other hand, ÖGS (signed in Austria) is close to LSF (signed in France) and rather dissimilar to DGS (signed in Germany), even though Austria and Germany both use German, which is not at all related to French.
Since there is no link between spoken and sign language, there is no concept of phonetics there. Instead, sign language uses the medium that it has to its fullest extent. Signers usually use both hands, their facial expression and their body language at the same time to convey multiple bits of information at the same time. It's often the case that a sentence in spoken language is equivalent to just 1-2 signs plus modifiers.
In that aspect, sign language is much closer to a symbol-based writing system than a phonetics based one.
Hence, there are some writing systems for sign languages that convey hand and face movements instead of phonetics.
That said, there is a single part of sign languages that actually is phonetic, and that's the finger alphabet, where one sign corresponds to a letter in the alphabet. This is mostly used for things that have no associated sign, e.g. names of companies, towns or train stations.
And since the finger alphabet's purpose is to literally convey spoken (or actually written) language in sign language, it is phonetic.
Well are y are you asking if you can guess a sign this meaning based on what it looks like, because there are certain things called classifiers, that can help you, as a beginner signer, understand the nature of what's being talked about. For example for water dripping, you would sign water first and then Shake Your Hand with the Palm inward(ring finger is the bottom finger) in a rotated w shape mimicking the dripping of a water faucet. You could not know that the second sign means dripping but you could figure it out based on the context, and the nature of the classifier (along with NMMs). But signs arent inherently "intuitive".
