Solasign

Solasign is a gestural language created by members of the Sorority of Solace to facilitate communications with deaf or hearing-impaired patients while also allowing for silent communications between Sorority personnel. Intended as in international auxiliary language, Solasign is among the most common conlangs under the Manifold Sky next to Guild Pidgin.

Writing System

Solasign does not yet so much have a written form as a corpus of simple figural images used to indicate how the various words are formed with one's hands and arms. Solasign 'speakers' will most often communicate in writing in the native scripts of their homelands,

Phonology

As a gestural language, Solasign has no spoken form. Individual finger placements can be conceptualized as phonemes for the purpose of expressing words in the language. Because of the possibility that a 'speaker' of the language is an Ovinex - and, thus, has only four fingers - the ring and pinky fingers of each hand may be used as 'allophones.' It should be noted that no information in Solasign requries contact with one's own face or torso. This lack of contact stems from the fact that it was originally engineered for use in a medical setting, where the use of obscuring personal protective equipment and the risk of contaigon remain important factors.
Because the Sorority of Solace arises from the Manifold Conservation Society - and thus, by heritage, the Voxelia Academy of Sciences - the 'spelling signs' of Solasign correspond to the letters of the Vozendi alphabet.

Morphology

Solasign features a loose Subject-Verb-Object word order, but structural markers can be used to indicate objects and subjects to allow for a degree of freedom in this regard. Using these markers to rearrange the sentence can sometimes be used to convey additiona information about the case of a term. For example, moving the verb to the beginning of a sentence puts it in the imperative case because it gains extra immediacy in the linguistic space - a similar rationale to that used to justify Burnheart Cant's natural word order.

Vocabulary

Solasign may be considered agglutinative, with adjectives, adverbs, and modifiers appended directly to roots. Concepts in Solasign are conveyed through individual or paired hand gestures used to form gestural 'syllables.' Root words requiring only the hands from the wrists onward and modifiers including arm movements; the more specific one gets, the higher up the arm the joints involved with the gesture go.

Structural Markers

Solasign features optional declension gestures for sex, relative age, and relative health state of living beings. These are useful in the original medical context of the language because they allow speakers to quickly convey information like triage decisions without being overheard by the public. In this sense, Solasign has the added benefit as a language of providing an additional layer of privacy in these matters; between two fluent speakers, behind closed windows and doors, all conversations are essentially impossible to overhear.