LearnSigns 28: Superlatives

After I did the whole video calling these superlatives, I did my homework and found out they are called degrees of comparison. Superlatives and comparatives are the two degrees.

The comparative compares one item to another, or a group of items. It tells you which one has more of a quality or property in the comparison. An example is, “my brother is older than I.” You can think of this as “more than.”

The superlative compares one item against a group and tells you which one has the greatest property or quality of all the items. An example is, “my brother is the oldest.” You can think of this one as “the most.”

Comparatives and superlatives are applied to adverbs and adjectives. We often do this with the words more and most, or with the suffixes -er and -est.

View the episode transcript.

Hello Welcome to LearnSigns lesson 28.

In this lesson we are going to talk about superlatives. Superlatives are those words like BETTER, BEST. You’ve got your degrees. You have GOOD. And then the next degree up is BETTER. And then BEST. Now, in English sometimes these would be MORE GOOD. I know that we don’t say that. Or, MOST GOOD. We have GOOD, BETTER, BEST. But then some words do use the MORE and MOST. And then some will just use the -ER at the end of the word, or -EST. And so those are the types of words I am talking about here. Superlatives.

Now, let’s talk about MORE and MOST first and then we will talk about how to apply this. I am not going to go through all the possible superlatives, because you can use the principles here to build the superlatives that you need.

MORE and MOST are the two signs that you would use to get your -ER (your middle one). I forget what that is called. Some grammar person can let me know. And then your -EST. That is your MOST. Your superlative, the BEST one.

So, MORE, you already know that one. MORE. You take both of your hands, your kissy fingers and you put them together. MORE

MOST – There are a couple of different ways to do this. And it depends on how you are using this sign, or what the sign is that you are saying as to which one you use. But most of the time you will use this one. You will have your non-dominant hand, your subordinate hand, is going to stay stationary. And you are going to rub your dominant hand up the knuckles. So your knuckles are going to touch the knuckles.

MOST

MORE and MOST

Now, in GOOD, BETTER and BEST, there are … it has it’s own way of doing it. We know that GOOD is like this. And then BETTER is just straight across. BETTER. BEST – And this is, BETTER-EST. BETTER-MOST. Or you could say the MOST BETTER. Of course we would not say that in ENGLISH. You could say that in sign language. But it does have its own sign and that is BEST. So, GOOD, BETTER, and then BEST.

Now, BAD, WORSE and WORST are good examples of how you would do this the sign language way, the ASL way. And that would be BAD. You know that one. BAD. Now there is a sign for…you could say, MORE BAD. That would be WORSE. And then MOST BAD, you could do that. This is the sign for WORSE or WORST, both of them. WORSE is getting WORSE. Something was BAD before but now is getting WORSE. You could do that a couple of times to show that. And then WORST would be the WORST is just one time. It is the WORST it could be. WORST

Now you can use this MORE and MOST with other signs as well.

Let’s look at PRETTY or BEAUTIFUL. We could say BEAUTIFUL. BEAUTIFUL. And then MORE BEAUTIFUL. BEAUTIFUL-ER. MORE BEAUTIFUL is the way you would say it. And then MOST BEAUTIFUL. You do MOST BEAUTIFUL.

Now we don’t do that with PRETTY. We do PRETTY, PRETTIER and PRETTIEST. So you could do that as well. PRETTY. PRETTIER – You could do MORE PRETTY or PRETTY MORE. Most of the time you would do MORE PRETTY, PRETTIER. And the MOST PRETTY. PRETTIEST. PRETTIEST.