Catty, I was talking about this with my roomie from college - the one I learned finger-spelling to help - and she made a point I hadn't thought of. people like me who don't regularly interact with someone who has a hearing impairment and uses ASL, don't think of it as being a language different from English. We assume it's syntactically the same as spoken English, but it's really not. (Off topic: Can I use syntactically in a sentence? Is it even a word?)