- “rolling”: French(/Turkish?) vs English
- descending vs. tumbling expressed grammatically
- gestures focus on downward motion vs. circular motion
So in English, if you ask English speakers to gesture “The ball is rolling down the hill.”, you’ll often get something like
[Lauren gestures a linear path going from her upper left to lower right while indicating a rolling motion with one finger]. So in English, the verb-part is “roll”.In French, the verb part is “to descend” from “descendre” – “to go down.” (NOTE: or “dévaler“ “to go down, descend“) and then you have to add on, separately, the “rolling” bit.
So the
[gestures the linear path]directional gesture doesn’t necessarily have[gestures the linear, rolling path]“rolling down” at the same time.
(but it also seems like gestures aren’t just cultural because blind-people-gesture?)