What's the deal with SignWriting?

Tue Jan 13 19:07:43 UTC 2009

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#Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:01:04 -0800
#From: Valerie Sutton <sutton at signwriting.org>
#Subject: Re: [SLLING-L] What's the deal with SignWriting?
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After a couple of stages of decipherment, this is what it says:

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Hello Andrew and everyone!
I think you make good points. The linguists at Northeastern University, back in 
the late 1970's had some influence on SignWriting's early development, through 
meetings that I had with several linguists there. SignWriting was first 
developed in Denmark, for a research project at the University of Copenhagen in 
1974. So SignWriting is now 35 years old, if you count those early years...

As Bencie mentioned, we can differentiate between a "notation" system and a 
"writing" system. Although there are other "notation" systems used for sign 
language research, which Shane mentioned, SignWriting is different because it is 
used to write sign language on a daily basis...and it has been our goal to work 
towards a "writing" system, rather than a "notation" system...It has naturally 
evolved over the 35 years, through usage...Signers started writing, and as time 
went on, they suggested improvements and changes and as a group, we decided to 
improve the writing system so more and more people could use it on a daily 
basis...

Maybe it is only natural that a daily writing system for sign languages would 
have more research done in Deaf Education, than as a tool for sign language 
linguistics...There are two dissertations specifically on "writing sign language 
in the classroom"...one from Albuquerque, New Mexico and the other from Jordan 
and Saudi Arabia. And another research study in French-Canada, in Quebec Sign 
Language, has resulted in a classroom of Deaf students using SignWriting in 
Canada. New research is being discussed in Saudi Arabia now about using 
SignWriting in the classroom someday...there was just a meeting about it in the 
last week of December 2008 in Saudi Arabia...I will be posting information about 
the results of that meeting shortly on signwriting.org...but all of that 
research is focused on reading and writing sign languages in education.

So why not more "linguistic research" using SignWriting? First, we do have some 
papers written by linguists, who have used SignWriting as the written examples 
or diagrams in their papers. And some of those papers are online. I will find 
the lists of those links for you, Andrew, and send them to you privately.

Second, there is one area that might be of interest to linguistic research...We 
are starting a new database online called the SignWriting Literature 
Project...It is an online archive of SignWriting Literature that is not ready 
yet...I am working on it now and I hope to have the beginnings of the archive 
ready in February. We are collecting both old and new literature written in the 
past 35 years and creating a "home page" for each document. On each document's 
home page will be links to several versions of the document, both old and new, 
and also the credits and history behind each document.

Years ago, an ASL linguist once told me that until there was a novel written in 
SignWriting, they would not consider it a writing system! Well...we have had a 
novel written in SignWriting for years, just not in ASL...it is a mystery novel 
in Madrid Sign Language written in SignWriting by Steve and Dianne Parkhurst. 
The mystery novel has no spoken language in the entire book of 140 pages, with 
illustrations by Steve Parkhurst. We are now working on placing the complete 
novel online, in the SignWriting Literature Archive...

So we need more SignWriting Literature to study, and for this reason we are 
creating a library of written works in SignWriting, in many sign languages. This 
may also provide researchers with documents to refer to ...possibly for 
linguistic research as well...imagine if you had more than Goldilocks to read? 
(big grin)...it could provide a wealth of information for different research 
subjects...

So let me finish by pointing you to three pieces of SignWriting Literature in 
ASL that are online right now...written by Adam Frost and Cherie Wren... These 
are written transcriptions from video of ASL...so when you go to these web 
pages, you will see the video, and then scroll down to read the SignWriting 
transcription of the videos...

Why SignWriting?signed and written in ASL by Adam Frost
http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/canvas.php?ui=1&sgn=5&sid=352

Poem One Harbor, signed in ASL by Kevin Clark, written by Adam Frost
http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/canvas.php?ui=1&sgn=5&sid=668

Cat in the Hat, signed and written in ASL by Cherie Wren
http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/canvas.php?ui=1&sgn=5&sid=357

Follow the red arrows to turn the pages...there are 32 pages in the Cat in the 
Hat document, for example...

Val ;-)

Valerie Sutton
Sutton at SignWriting.org

1. SignWriting
Read & Write Sign Languages
http://www.SignWriting.org

2. SignPuddle
Create SignWriting Documents Online
http://www.SignBank.org/signpuddle

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On Jan 12, 2009, at 6:51 PM, Andrew Pidkameny wrote
> 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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