[sw-l] PHILIPPINES SignWriting Report

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
January 28, 2005

PHILIPPINES SignWriting Report
From: nana.dumitra at schlossklaus.at
Date: 	January 23, 2005

Greetings from the Philippines! You have not heard from me in a long 
time, but we are still here and still busy. Our dictionary of FSL 
(Filipino SL) in SW is slowly growing, we have started to teach more 
deaf how to use it etc. but our main focus is on teaching deaf leaders 
of 4 churches and working on translation (parts of the Bibel into FSL 
using SW). This we do in cooperation with SIL/Wycliff Bible 
translators. Just this past week my husband was able to attend a 
seminar on FSL taught by the PFD (Philippine Federation for the Deaf). 
They did a lot of research on FSL and have now presented their paper, 
which is very impressive – proves FSL as being a true language and 
gives a lot of good information about deaf culture etc. The only draw 
back is that they don’t want to consider SW (we found out that they 
have strong connections to Gallaudet and so they are more into Stokoe 
J). Still, it is a good contact and we pray that the future will show 
that more and more deaf will be interested in SW – probably more in the 
provinces, where many deaf don’t know English at all or just very 
little, PFD is mostly in Manila and there many deaf have a better 
command of English. One thing that was very interesting from their 
research: Bicol, the area we are living and working in is the one 
region of the Philippines that has hardly been influenced by ASL and so 
“our” signs here are the most “traditional” FSL.

In March or April our organisation will buy a new laptop for our work. 
Can you give us some suggestions as to what would be good to look at in 
order to be able to use it well for SW? I recall some mails that Mac 
would be better, but is more expensive (which is definitly an issue for 
our organisation). What kind or operating system, programs, memory, 
speed etc. should we look at to make it as “good” as possible for SW? I 
don’t understand all the computer issues, but if you give me some ideas 
then our computer guys in Austria will have a better idea what to look 
for.

Thank you so much,
Nana in the Philippines
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 2610 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20050128/93c77395/attachment.bin>