Just saw this comment — and the cues themselves dont’ interfere with intonation — in fact, they can add to it. Lengthening cues (like to say “oooooooooh!” as opposed to “ooh!”), adding facial expression is a must-have (too many transliterators and parents aren’t trained to do that), and the use of “double cues” (both hands cueing the same thing) to provide emphasis.

I learned my first signs there when I was in elementary school. I remember seeing a table or two of the deaf kids in the lunchroom and wishing I could understand the flutter of hands. I’ll bet you a nickel they didn’t use strict MSS among themselves socially, especially as they got older (as others have said in comments on this page about their school signing systems). I was only bussed to that school one day a week to attend a separate program, so I didn’t have the oportunity to get to know anyone in the deaf program. But that general exposure 20 years ago sparked a lifetime of learning ASL and Deaf culture. :)

Back to MSS: I think the signs I was taught were based on SEE signs… Initialized C in CAT, K in KITTEN, W in WE, etc. But I know I got a handout that talked about MSS - breaking up English words into morphemes (or what that string of letters *can* mean as a prefix, root, or suffix in English) and signing each morpheme individually.

For example, bringing a left-hand C and right-hand M together to touch at the thumbs meant “com-” as in the Anglicized Latin
root for “with” (signed with a similar movement as WITH in ASL). If I remember correctly, it was the fist part of the sign for “computer.”
When you think “computer” do you think of the concept of “with” as being part of its meaning? Probably not.

The woman who taught us was a hearing parent of a deaf child. She used a typewritten dictionary of signs. I guess it was in some kind of Stokoe notation adapted for typewriter. I think I saw a book like that for SEE 1 in the deaf stacks at the Gally library.

SEE 1 is where butter + fly comes from, I think. But in MSS would be but + er + fly
(BUT as in the conjunction, ER as version of the superlative suffix -er signed with an R handshape, and FLY as in what an airplane does - signed with the ILY handshape.)

That’s how it’s signed, even tho those so-called morphemes have nothing to do with butterfly. Butterfly is one morpheme and means that floaty pretty flying bug with colorful wings. So MSS may have been an attempt at conveying English meaning, but it actually conveyed a horribly low level of conceptual accuracy.

I think this kind of situation sparked the movement toward more conceptually accurate English-like signing. However, using one language to convey another will never approach 100% conceptual accuracy, no matter what the two langauges are. This is one reason that some people support cueing instead of sign-based MCE systems for conveying English - there’s no conceptual mimatch when you don’t have to cobble together ASL signs in a non-ASL way. Instead, you can let ASL be ASL and English be English, and have 100% visual access to both languages.