“…Considering the crosslinguistic similarities and the prevalence of iconicity, it is not surprising that signers from distinct countries, e.g. the US and France (Clerc, 1852), South Korea, the Netherlands, Uzbekistan, and Hong Kong (Byun et al, 2018), and France, Germany, the US, the UK, Indonesia, Australia, and India (Moriarty, 2020), communicate with each other with relative ease. Before the influential proposition by Saussure (1916Saussure ( /1986 early in the 20th century that arbitrariness is a defining feature of languages, signing intellectuals frequently described all sign languages as parts of the same universal and natural [iconic] language (e.g.…”