| Summary: | In French Sign Language (LSF), the sign effort is produced with the thumb affixed to the cheek while the index finger wiggles. The sign’s etymology is mysterious, an enigma that this article sets out to resolve. Our introduction emphasizes the importance of regional variations, those forms that are rarely studied if not totally ignored. Half of the signs that are used in our demonstration are regional signs that were discovered largely through field work conducted with the ethnographic methodology of participant observation in Nogent-le-Rotrou, Clermont-Ferrand, Bordeaux, Pont-de-Beauvoisin as well as among the pieds-noirs who frequented the school for the deaf in Alger before independence. It is not surprising to see dispersed communities connected through this type of analysis: largely issued from the institute in Paris, dialects in these areas are all part of the same system. American Sign Language (ASL), whose base was imported to the U.S. by Laurent Clerc – a deaf teacher in Paris and co-founder of the first American school for deaf children – also belongs to this same system.In the first part of the article, we analyze signs that present the same characteristics as effort and from which we can reconstruct its evolution. These sources of comparison include both ancient and contemporary signs from Paris and other regions in France : potato, steal, restaurant, sausage, lady, black person, august, police, republic, as well as who in ASL.We deduce the existence of an evolutionary tendency that can be summarized thusly: « When the hand effectuates a circular or semi-circular movement, the thumb tends to affix to the closest location on the body, the movement of the other fingers reduces to a bending or oscillating movement » (theorem 1). Applied to the sign effort, this tendency suggests that the etymon consisted of the hand turning in front of the face. In the second half of the article, which deals with the relationship between form and meaning, we introduce evidence of the fact that « all round or spherical objects are susceptible to being represented by the head of the speaker » (theorem 2). The legitimacy of this form-meaning relationship is shown in the Parisian or regional signs moon, sun, lamp as well as the signs for different fruits and vegetables including onions, orange, strawberry, and pear. The use of the head metaphorically constitutes a morphosemantic field according to Pierre Guiraud, etymologist of the French language. The intersection of theorems 1 and 2 leads us to examine those signs that represent a round object, produced by a circular movement in front of the face. This category consists of signs in which the head of the speaker represents the face of a clock ; the hand that turns around the head stands for the needle that indicates a number of hours. These signs were discovered outside Paris (Clermont-Ferrand and Nogent-le-Rotrou). In the third part of the article, we examine the relationship between the passage of time represented by the face of the speaker and the first meaning of the sign effort. Three observations show that the passage of time includes speed as a semantic feature. First, an observation in Paris of a humorous rendition of the sign shows that, even in the absence of lexicalization, the metaphorical meaning of the head as the face of a clock is still present in a latent state. Second, the sign kilometers per hour seen in Bordeaux is produced the same as effort and represents the speedometer of an automobile. Third, the sign name for Le Mans, the location made famous for its automobile race track, les Vingt-Quatre Heures du Mans, is identical to effort. This sign represents a track used for speed and endurance. We conclude that the original sign for effort consisted of pointing to the face with the index finger, which was animated by a circular movement to indicate the speed of an automobile, a cyclist’s track or a racetrack. Over time, the sign’s evolution, generated in the first part of this work, led to the contemporary form effort. The identical sign effort, in Chambéry, is used when asking a speaker to moderate his aggressiveness or to calm down. This instance carries the proof that in effort’s etymon, the intensity of the movement of the needle – as represented by the index finger – can be modulated to express slowness equally as well as speed.
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