What's the deal with SignWriting?

[Shane Gilchrist]

Drew,

hey there.

its all about personal choice among sign linguists.

And a stupid fact that its because the inventor is a hearie!

It baffles me when many sign linguists tells me that they think SW is great
and that it should be encouraged yet some other sign linguists insists that
the HamNoSys is better - and we have some more who are loyal to the Stokoe
system. Unfortunately a lot of work that is published on sign linguistics
tend to use HamNoSys/Stokoe. Even my friend who is at Hamburg is encouraged
to use HamNoSys instead of SW (he was showing some interest in SW) - despite
what the academics says, there is very little interest for them to learn SW.

I feel that the SW is more developed than HamNoSys or Stokoe - the latter
two havent changed much over the past 20 years (and it wasn't even planned
with deaf people involved whereas SW is a true teamwork.

I guess SW is more suitable for people who uses sign language every day -
i.e. the people who knows how the language actually work - just like English
speakers write as how they speak, the SW users would write as how they sign
- that is the closest to the true representation. You can't really get that
in HamNoSys or Stokoe.

Another problem is that we have people coming up with their own notation
systems, trying to "sell" the idea to people - I get bullied by some people
saying that their system is much more better than Valerie's system (despite
the fact that it took her and her deaf team over 20 years to develop the
system!) and then ALWAYS add "oh its a hearing system!"

Shane

p.s. u speak of Rosetta Stone...lets say if the human civilisation is wiped
out and a new race comes to Earth to find books left behind by sign
linguists - SW will be the only notation system they will get our signed
languages right...prolly with Stefan's mouth system, they ll even get the
mouthed German right!!!!!!!

2009/1/13 Andrew Pidkameny <pidkameny at gmail.com>

> Hi everyone,
>
> This is a question for any linguists out there who have direct
> personal experience with Sutton SignWriting.
>
> I've noticed that about half of the posts I've seen since subscribing
> to this list have made some mention of SignWriting. I've seen some
> information about it on the Internet (including a host of fascinating
> transcriptions on signwriting.org) and I thought it looked pretty cool
> and pretty useful as a way to record and transmit utterances in signed
> languages without the use of video.
>
> However, when I asked around about it in the ASL department at
> Northeastern University (where I am a student) I mostly got a lot of
> frowning and scoffing. The general opinion around here seems to be
> that SignWriting is not a useful tool for research because it is not
> precise enough in its descriptive powers. And as far as it is
> sufficiently descriptive, it is too rich to be useful, or too easy to
> misinterpret.
>
> It seems true to me that a SignWriting transcription of an ASL
> utterance will certainly lack some linguistic and paralinguistic
> information, but probably no more so than a phonemic (NOT phonetic)
> transcription of a spoken English utterance will probably lack certain
> information about phonetic production and prosody.
>
> With that in mind, PHONEMIC transcription can still convey a lot of
> information about English which is useful to linguists, and there are
> even situations in which written English is sufficient as a medium for
> recording linguistic data about spoken English.
>
> So my question (for experienced SignWriters) is, how good or bad is
> SignWriting as a tool for linguistic study? Where does it excel? Where
> does it fall short? Can people who use it interpret it accurately in a
> reliable way?
>
> Forgive me if this is not the appropriate forum in which to open such
> a discussion, or if my questions seem ill-informed. Any input
> (off-list or on-list) from people who use SignWriting on a regular
> basis would be enlightening and greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Drew Pidkameny
> Northeastern University
> pidkameny at gmail.com
>
> P.S. - Incidentally, I found that it was not too difficult for me to
> learn to read SignWriting representations of ASL using only my
> knowledge of signed ASL as a guide (and Goldilocks and the Three Bears
> as a Rosetta Stone). I'm sure learning to properly write ASL using
> SignWriting would be considerably more difficult, but probably not
> that much more so than learning to write in English when you already
> know how to speak it. I was also impressed by the fact that
> SignWriting seemed about as good at representing classifiers as it was
> at representing signs. I am worried, however, about jumping to
> conclusions regarding SignWriting's utility based on my own very
> limited experience with the system.
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