Res: [SLLING-L] use of sign language in Jordan

[mariangela estelita]

Hi,
I've
been following the discussion about what type of writing SW is. I agree
with some of you that SW is a featural system. I'm writing to tell you
about my experimental writing system in Brazil, called ELiS (which
stands for Sign Language Writing, in Portuguese, Escrita das Línguas de Sinais).
I've recently started this work and the results of the experiment is
the subject of my doctoral thesis. I suspect ELiS is not typically a
featural system and not typically an alphabet, it is in between. The
symbols represent "phonemes", or "cheremes", or "visemas" (allusion to
'visual'). Most symbols (not all of them) resemble very abstractly what
they represent. The alphabet is a set of 98 symbols, which I call
letters. The system, has also a set of diacritics and a set of rules
which organize all of it. It is a linear writing, horizontal, from left
to right. ELiS has already an "alphabetical" order to enable the
creation of "alphabetical" dictionaries in SL using ELiS. Everything is
very new and deaf people have received it enthusiastically.
In
my experiment, 22 deaf adult students learned ELiS in a 30 h course,
and could write short narrations and spontaneous letters by the end of
it.
Unfortunately, my material is still not available in
English, just in Portuguese. Our site is also still amateur, but if you
can read any Portuguese, please visit www.escritadesinais.org. 

Mariângela Estelita


----- Mensagem original ----
De: Albert Bickford <albert_bickford at sil.org>
Para: A list for linguists interested in signed languages <slling-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu>
Enviadas: Quinta-feira, 27 de Setembro de 2007 2:53:40
Assunto: Re: [SLLING-L] use of sign language in Jordan

Technically, SignWriting would be classified as a featural writing system, 
like Korean Hangeul (sic?), not an alphabet.  The first clue is the fact 
that there are about 25,000 symbols in the system, which is a huge inventory 
for an alphabet, indeed, much larger than a syllabary and getting close to 
the size of inventory needed for a logographic system.  But actually, there 
are a lot of similarities between symbols, and in that way it is quite 
unlike a logographic system, because all of these symbols are highly 
analyzable.  For example, each handshape
 has 96 symbols, which represent 
various orientations of the same symbol (rotations, reflections, shadings). 
Basically the same conventions are used for representing these 96 different 
variants of every handshape.  (That's a bit oversimplified, I know, which 
people who know the system will recognize, but to a large extent it is 
true.)  Similarly, symbols for handshapes can be decomposed into finer 
sub-symbols that represent individual fingers and other parts of the hand. 
So, specific features of the phonology are represented by a specific aspect 
of each symbol, and there is a lot of consistency across the whole 
system--this is one of the things that makes SignWriting fairly easy to 
learn. To put it another way: each "symbol" in the SignWriting alphabet is 
analyzable into smaller parts that correspond to specific phonological 
features--hence it is clearly a "featural" system, not an
 alphabet.












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