SignWriting in Denmark

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
July 11, 2005

Dear SW List, Katrien, Tomas and Ingvild -
Wonderful to hear about Wendy Lewis, who was very kind to me years  
ago in Denmark. And I see they changed the name of their  
organization...KC used to stand for Kommunikations Center, which had  
a full name of Doeves Center for Total Kommunikation (The Deaf's  
Center For Total Communication) so thanks for informing me of the new  
name!

 From 1982-1988, SignWriting was used extensively in Denmark, and  
they were using it to write real Danish Sign Language and in a few  
classrooms the idea was to make written DSL equal to written  
Danish...and their publications at that time were quite amazing and I  
cherish them as historic publications. But times have changed. They  
still use SignWriting, but not as officially as before...it varies  
from teacher to teacher.

Tomas, if you can, I would suggest meeting Bente Sparrevohn, a  
teacher of Deaf children who, in the early 1980's, was the most  
skilled at writing DSL storytelling in SignWriting from video...Her  
transcription work was outstanding and I am hoping to post her  
documents on our web sites someday, but I have to write to her and  
others for permissions etc and have not gotten to it...Bente and her  
colleagues also wrote a wonderful report on their work in the 1980s  
about how that used SignWriting extensively...

http://www.signwriting.org/forums/research/rese002.html

In Denmark they write differently than we do today. They chose to  
stay with using the full stick figure...Here is information about the  
Danish style of SignWriting...

http://www.signwriting.org/library/history/hist008.html


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