words for abortion and birth

Yesterday I was surprised to see in my twitter timeline the video from the Handspeak site for the sign meaning "abortion." I'll look. Here in a bunch of the same thing, the one from Less Gov. More Fun that asks, "Have you seen the heartbreaking ASL sign for abortion?

Most unusual to have a sign pointed out from the hearing world like this. A bit startling, actually.

As it turns out I have seen the sign. I have seen the exact video. I studied her dictionary. The woman is committed to turning out a great website. Turns out we all recognize the interpreter from videos I've shown. That is a word that comes up in my reading and I need it in practice and I did look it up all over. It is not the only way to say it. On Spreadthesign the USA version is similar but no reference to stomach area, the abortion could be a discarded credit card transaction, all other countries indicate a dismissing, a dispensing, of something unwanted, not always around the stomach.

And yet "birthday" is not "birth" + "day" and I am glad it's not because it's a bit clumsy and extravagant and choppy. Too much jabbing, flippy-flopping around, two handed bulge then the arc of the sun, two arms fingertip to elbow, from straight up arced down to horizontal, all that for birthday. The real sign is the middle fingertip "touch" sign to chin then to sternum. I don't know why, but it's a heck of a lot better than "birth" + "day."  I've seen a thousand kids do this sign at least. It's a very good solid sign.

A similar thing with Egyptian hieroglyphics. I need the symbols for "birthday" for text on Egyptian pop-up cards but I do not see them, and I looked. Everywhere. Even Budge. But apparently celebrating birthdays is a rather modern conceit. I would have thought ancient parents would celebrate a child surviving their first year, and be very well please each year thereafter given their poor early chances. Combining birth + day in graphic glyphs turns out to be something I don't recall seeing. Eh, what the heck, make it up as we go.

R', referring to Re, sun, day. You can also have morning. (I had about 10 cards for various forms of day and they're disappeared from blogger.) Here's one, "good day to you." 

Looking at it now, it's more like: "Behold, to you one day good/beautiful/innocent. " That e-u feather-chick ligature is an odd antique sentence starter, a placeholder of a sort.

At any rate you do not say birth day. Instead, you say, "born of" and here is where the symbol becomes quite strange because it appears to rest upon an ancient custom lost to time and realized again anthropologically by noticing remote tribes unaffiliated in any way with Egyptian writing whose custom it is for women to place fox skins over the hut openings during birthing. Nobody knows why. Insects? Spooks? Spirits? Filter? Nobody could make sense of the symbol of three fox skins tied together but they know it is fox skins and they know it means "birth" and they know it sounds like "mes" but they do not know why three fox skins. Until just recently.

It is an important sign. You see it everywhere, in names such as Ramses. 

Another sign having to do with birth and with creation is the agricultural hoe. This sign arises naturally from agrarian society. 

 Picture it.  You're a farmer out there in the field. It's hot as the dickens and you're basically naked. You're hunched over scratching the dirt with a wooden tool that's a sharp poking digger with a handle and brace with twisted rope holding the two main pieces together. It looks like an "A." You're digging a long slit through the earth, poking and jabbing, and dropping your seeds into the fresh moist opening that you widen. As you go. All day long. Day after day.

And then later wheat pops up wherever you did that. Year after year. Reliably.  The sign means "bring forth" "brought forth by" "born by," this is a common and useful sign as well seen a lot in royal names. There is an incipient creator-cocreator-created somewhat religious aspect to the trinity of productive sticks. It means the sound "m-r" and there is another sign for "m-r" sound also seen a lot in names. This hoe and the canal m-r are often seen with one or two fronds, for "i" and for "y" thus Meri, Maria, Mary, Merrison, Merrywether. Kidding.

It is a reed leaf that looks like a feather. Gardiner's M-17, very common sign, that differs from the sign for feather, plumed as large ostrich feather and categorized under Gardiner's H, parts of birds, H6.