common criticisms of signwriting?

[KJ]

I've run into most of the criticisms mentioned; one other that I've heard (and I realize it's completely wrong, but it is the opinion of one of the top people in Deaf education in Alberta) is that trying to learn SignWriting as well as the majority spoken language is "cognitive overload".

Another "issue" brought up by a teacher I spoke to is that a lot of the hearing-impaired kids she teaches have no language when they start school; their hearing parents don't (and often won't) sign.  Since they're not starting with a signed language knowledge base, and because the hearing parents generally don't want their kids involved with the Deaf community and have no desire to sign with them, this teacher really doesn't see any point in using SSW in her classroom.

KJ
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Erika Hoffmann 
  To: sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu 
  Sent: Thursday, November 05, 2009 1:40 PM
  Subject: [sw-l] common criticisms of signwriting?


  Hi! I mentioned the last time I posted that I'm working on a paper
  about SignWriting for presentation at the American Anthropological
  Association meeting in December.
  One of the things I'm thinking about is the ways in which Signwriting
  and Signwriten documents can be used to critique dominant ideologies
  about language and writing that are common in Linguistics and related
  disciplines. At the same time, I want to note that the radical nature
  of the script can sometimes be a social barrier to its adoption by
  signers (particularly because of the historical relationship between
  the Linguistic validation of sign languages with the social validation
  of Deaf signers).
  I'm wondering if any of you would be willing to share some of the ways
  you've heard people criticize or dismiss SSW (or point me to places
  where these opinions are aired). I'm looking for people's concerns
  about the script itself (i.e., "it looks like hieroglyphics") rather
  than the other common arguments about the need for a script at all
  (i.e., "Deaf people can just write in English").
  Thanks!
  Best,
  Erika



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