<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><DIV>July 21, 2005</DIV><DIV>To Participants of the</DIV><DIV>First European SignWriting Symposium</DIV><DIV>Brussels, Belgium, July 21-22, 2005</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>From the desk of</DIV><DIV>Valerie Sutton</DIV><DIV>La Jolla (San Diego), California</DIV><DIV>In the south-west corner of the US, near the border with Mexico ;-)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>We will see each other by videophone at 1:00 in the morning California time, which is 10:00 in the morning Brussels time, today! That is just a few hours from now ;-))</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">HELLO EVERYONE, from the other side of the globe!</FONT></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>How truly amazing that we can communicate together, through email messages, the web, and videophone conversations...Airplanes may go out of business, if we can all fly by videophone!</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This year, communication by videophone is NEW, so without the help of Daniel Noelpp, who recently started to work with videophones in Switzerland, the videophone conversation with the Symposium could not happen...Daniel gave me special attention through email for several hours, two days before the Symposium, helping me step by step, to configure my videophone to work properly. THANK YOU, Daniel!</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>ALSO, a big THANK YOU to our hosts in Belgium....Kathleen Heylen, Sara Geudens, and the Kasterlinden School for the Deaf in Brussels, and to the other members of the Organizing Committee: Shane Gilchrist from Northern Ireland, Trevor Jenkins from England, Ingvild Roald from Norway, and Stefan Woehrmann from Germany. This was a big job to organize the First European Symposium - Congratulations!</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>The First European SignWriting Symposium</DIV><DIV><A href="http://www.SignWriting.org/symposium/2005">http://www.SignWriting.org/symposium/2005</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>And thank you to our international interpreters, Gerdinand Wagenaar and Mindy Brown.....We certainly could not hold such an international event without you!</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I understand that Symposium participants may possibly be discussing a constitution for a new European SignWriting Organization? SignWriting began in Europe, so it is only fitting to have a European organization...Thank you to Ingvild and Shane and others who are working on this. This is YOUR organization, and that feels really good to know that SignWriting is spreading in Europe...</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Since our videophone time will be short, I would like to share news with you from my desk....</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>VAL's NEWS...</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">1. New SignWriting Technical Support Options</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">Free Technical Support on the SignWriting List as always...</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">or...</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">Pay a Fee to Receive Immediate and Private Attention to your Questions</FONT></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>If someone has a project that is using SignWriting, and they need specific answers quickly to their technical questions, and they cannot wait online for me to answer them on the free SignWriting List, (which seems to have more and more people waiting these days) then there is a new solution. Become a SignWriting Member for $25.00 a year, and I will answer you privately. I will give paying members priority. In time, I hope to be able to pay other co-workers to do tech support for us too, and we may have to develop different levels of technical support for different fees, depending on the project. As SignWriting grows, support needs to grow with it ;-)</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>SignWriting Membership Gives Tech Support</DIV><DIV><A href="http://www.SignWriting.org/catalog/member">http://www.SignWriting.org/catalog/member</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>-----------------------</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">2. Videos are now on DVD!</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV>Our three SignWriting video products are now available on DVD:</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>SignWriting Catalog</DIV><DIV><A href="http://www.SignWriting.org/catalog">http://www.SignWriting.org/catalog</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Lessons in SignWriting Video Series on DVD</DIV><DIV><A href="http://66.27.57.178/ecommerce/pages/products_sw_detail.jsp?id=2.0">http://66.27.57.178/ecommerce/pages/products_sw_detail.jsp?id=2.0</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Deaf Perspectives on SignWriting Video Series on DVD</DIV><DIV><A href="http://66.27.57.178/ecommerce/pages/products_sw_detail.jsp?id=6.0">http://66.27.57.178/ecommerce/pages/products_sw_detail.jsp?id=6.0</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Learn To Read American Sign Language Video on DVD</DIV><DIV><A href="http://66.27.57.178/ecommerce/pages/products_sw_detail.jsp?id=5.0">http://66.27.57.178/ecommerce/pages/products_sw_detail.jsp?id=5.0</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>-----------------------</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">3. Private SignPuddles for Your Projects</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV>Steve Slevinski, SignPuddle developer, and our non-profit organization, the Center for Sutton Movement Writing, are working together to create a way for groups to hire their own private SignPuddle dictionary on the web. Right now we only have Community SignPuddles, which are open to anyone to add signs. They are not private or restricted. But some groups are now requesting a way to create their own private web dictionaries, that no one else could add to, or change.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>If you or your group would like to have your own private video-SignPuddle, with added linguistic features and private group access, then write to me and we can talk about costs. We hope that the first private SignPuddles will be available in September-October, 2005. We will provide technical support for the private groups, and new features, such as Unicode support for spoken languages, multiple fields for keywords, variants, dialects, multiple definitions, and cross referencing between signs. There will be a place to upload video for each sign, and a way to establish the order of the symbols in the Sign-Spelling for lookup purposes. This means that your private dictionary will be able to sort by Sign-Symbol-Sequence. Large video dictionaries take memory on the web, which costs money for us to pay DeafVision (our web server) for the space, so we will provide you with an explanation of the costs, as to how much different features will cost, and your group can decide what you can afford. Even if you choose a small dictionary in the beginning, you can always add more features later, as you get funding.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>These private SignPuddles will also help us continue to be able to offer the free Community SignPuddles for the general public, which are great teaching tools. I love the open nature of the Community dictionaries...smile...</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>SignPuddle</DIV><DIV><A href="http://www.SignBank.org/signpuddle">http://www.SignBank.org/signpuddle</A></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>-----------------------</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">4</FONT><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF">. Simplified SignSpellings are the goal...</FONT></DIV><DIV><FONT class="Apple-style-span" color="#0000FF"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV>Recently I became aware that the IMWA...the International Movement Writing Alphabet...was giving people a mis-impression. Because there are so many symbols in the IMWA, it can give the mis-impression that we are supposed to write with ALL those symbols! But that was never my intention...Most signed languages only need a small percentage of the symbols in the IMWA.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>So to clarify, the IMWA is not a writing system in its own right. It is an archive, holding symbols that can be used in SignWriting, DanceWriting, SportsWriting, MimeWriting and GestureWriting.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>German Sign Language probably does not need the same handshapes that are used in Ethiopian Sign Language. So the German SignWriting symbolset and the Ethiopian SignWriting symbolset will choose different symbols from the IMWA. These smaller symbolsets specific to one signed language become true writing systems, as the symbols are applied to SignSpellings. That is SignWriting.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Although it is easy to compare the IMWA with the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), the truth is that the comparison is not an exact one at all. Sutton Movement Writing is unique in history and has no comparison...</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>So I am writing to ask all of you to try to write signs with SIMPLE SignSpellings. Do not put in too much detail, unless you are doing a research project that requires it. When we write in English, we are not writing with the IPA. We are writing simplified English spellings...not detailed ones. Simplified SignWriting spellings are the ones that will be used most when writing a letter to a friend, or writing a novel in Sign Language. And Deaf children deserve to have a simple SignWriting system that is easy to read and write by hand...</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>Once you have your SignPuddles filled with your country's signs, Steve and I will be able to do a symbol-frequency check to see which symbols you have used most when writing your signs. That will pin-down the simplified smaller symbolset just for your one sign language. So the IMWA will become the reference tool it is supposed to be, for researchers and new signed languages that are just starting to be written...</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>This message is becoming way too long! I really enjoyed sharing with you, and I wish you all a wonderful time in Brussels!! And enjoy the celebration of Belgium's Independence Day!</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>I hope to hear from you when you get home...smile...have a safe trip home...</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Val ;-)</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><A href="mailto:Sutton@SignWriting.org">Sutton@SignWriting.org</A></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Geneva; min-height: 19px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">D-Link Videophone:</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">192.168.1.77</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">or</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial">val.go-vp.net</FONT></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><FONT class="Apple-style-span" face="Arial"><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></FONT></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1. SignWritingSite</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><A href="http://www.SignWriting.org">http://www.SignWriting.org</A></SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Read & Write Sign Languages</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Geneva; min-height: 19px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">2. SignBankSite</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><A href="http://www.SignBank.org">http://www.SignBank.org</A></SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Sign Language Dictionaries</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Geneva; min-height: 19px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">3. DanceWritingSite</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><A href="http://www.DanceWriting.org">http://www.DanceWriting.org</A></SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Read & Write Dance</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Geneva; min-height: 19px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">4. MovementWritingSite</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;"><A href="http://www.MovementWriting.org">http://www.MovementWriting.org</A></SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Read & Write Movement & Gesture</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Geneva; min-height: 19px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">5. SymbolBank On The Web</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><SPAN class="Apple-style-span" style="text-decoration: underline;">www.MovementWriting.org/symbolbank</SPAN></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Archive For All Symbols</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Geneva; min-height: 19px; "><BR></DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Deaf Action Committee for SignWriting</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Center For Sutton Movement Writing</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">an educational nonprofit organization</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Box 517, La Jolla, CA, 92038-0517, USA</DIV><DIV style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">tel: 858-456-0098....fax: 858-456-0020</DIV></BODY></HTML>