11. 147 Glosses in ASL. The written-language transcription of a sign is called a
gloss. Glosses are words from the spoken language written in small capital
letters : WOMAN, SCHOOL, CAT. {Alternatively, regular capital letters
may be used . ) When two or more written words are used to gloss a single
sign, the glosses are separated by hyphens . The translation is enclosed
in double quotation marks.
The sign for "a car drove by" is written as V E H I C L E - DRIVE -BY.
One obvious limitation of the use of glosses from the spoken/written language
to represent signs is that there is no one-to-one correspondence
between the words or signs in any two languages.