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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Thank you for posting these, Val - I've been
considering starting a Ph.D. project on SignWriting and these are exactly the
kind of thing I'm looking for!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>KJ</FONT></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; FONT: 10pt arial; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=sutton@SIGNWRITING.ORG href="mailto:sutton@SIGNWRITING.ORG">Valerie
Sutton</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A
title=SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
href="mailto:SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU">SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU</A>
</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, June 04, 2011 3:40
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> Re: Wikipedia article - Path to
Literacy</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>SignWriting List
<DIV>June 4, 2011</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Cherie -</DIV>
<DIV>Attached are two documents. I believe these are what you are looking for?
The Path to LIteracy is an excellent article... Great work... Val ;-)</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<P>
<HR>
<P></P>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV></DIV>
<P>
<HR>
<P></P>
<DIV></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>----------</DIV>
<DIV><BR>
<DIV>
<DIV>On Jun 4, 2011, at 2:07 PM, Cherie Wren wrote:</DIV><BR
class=Apple-interchange-newline>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<DIV>
<DIV
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: #000; FONT-FAMILY: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #fff">
<DIV><SPAN>Shoot, I cant find it now... I had written a proposal to my
administration to do some research using signwriting to teach Deaf
kids. It is based on research by J Cummins who did a lot of work with
bilingual education. His research posits that there are two ways to
reach literacy in a second language. One way is via the spoken
language. Spanish speaking kids in American schools learn to speak
English, then transfer that knowledge to learning to read and write
English. That doesn't work so well for Deaf kids, who have great
difficulties learning to speak a language they cant hear. The other
way that Cummins proposes is via the written form of the language.
Spanish speaking kids who are literate in Spanish can use written Spanish as
the bridge to learning written English. There is research out there
that states that Cummins research does not apply to Deaf kids--- because you
can't write ASL. But you CAN. I had hoped to do research showing
that SignWriting could be the bridge that helps Deaf kids improve literacy
in English, but that isn't going to happen now. </SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><BR><SPAN></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN>cherie<BR></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: rgb(16,16,255) 2px solid">
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
<DIV
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: times new roman, new york, times, serif"><FONT
face=Arial size=2>
<HR SIZE=1>
<B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">From:</SPAN></B> Charles Butler <<A
href="mailto:chazzer3332000@YAHOO.COM">chazzer3332000@YAHOO.COM</A>><BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> <A
href="mailto:SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU">SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU</A><BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Saturday, June 4, 2011 8:42
AM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Re: Wikipedia
article<BR></FONT><BR>
<DIV id=yiv599825412>
<DIV
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: #000; FONT-FAMILY: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; BACKGROUND-COLOR: #fff">
<DIV>My experience in teaching SignWriting to a group of Deaf and hearing
instructors in Ohio needs to be interjected here. The organizers of the
event for teachers of ASL seemed hopeful, but when the very first words
were "and how will this additional writing system help MY students to read
English" was the immediate barrier.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>I found myself tongue-tied and unable to pursue a useful conversation
because every response in the room was stacked against me. All of them
wanted the Deaf to read English in all circumstances, and honestly refused
to see SignWriting as a writing system for any signed language, a true
writing system to produce one's own language parallel to the larger
population's spoken language. For more than an hour, my lecture was
peppered with questions of "why should I ADD to the burden of the Deaf" as
if Deaf student were somehow the personal possession of the teachers, and
they MUST use English in the long run, so why teach them to write and read
their own language. </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>This is in a state where Oberlin Conservatory teaches Dance Writing,
recognizing that Dance itself is a language, and you cannot describe
choreography in English or any other language without a way to write in a
diagramatic written form. </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>When people have asked me over the years who invented SignWriting, a
Deaf or hearing person, I say neither, she is a Dancer, and Dance is a
language of movement, so that both the Deaf and the Hearing can be fully
enfranchised in using gesture based languages on an equal footing.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Although one can write Russian using the Roman alphabet, the Cyrillic
alphabet is the writing system of choice because of history and
education. </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>One can write the many mutually unintelligible languages of China
using a written language of pictographs which are pronounced any number of
ways whether one is speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, Sechuan, or Mongolian
dialects, it remains itself a pictographic system not really dependent on
any one of them. </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>One can write Hindustani using the Roman alphabet, but the alphabet
of choice is Sanskrit, used for more than 3000 years. </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>So now we have SignWriting, able to be used for all movement based
languages, I believe, in a way that is much better than any other as it is
iconographic so that it is not dependent on spoken language to be
read. </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: arial, helvetica, sans-serif">
<DIV style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt; FONT-FAMILY: times, serif"><FONT face=Arial
size=2>
<HR SIZE=1>
<B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">From:</SPAN></B> Trevor Jenkins <<A
href="mailto:bslwannabe@GMAIL.COM">bslwannabe@GMAIL.COM</A>><BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">To:</SPAN></B> <A
href="mailto:SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU">SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU</A><BR><B><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Sent:</SPAN></B> Saturday, June 4, 2011 7:11
AM<BR><B><SPAN style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Subject:</SPAN></B> Re: Wikipedia
article<BR></FONT><BR>
<DIV id=yiv599825412>A better comparison for the content of the
SignWriting page on the English language WikiPedia page would be the pages
for Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Linear B, Klingon, Na'vi and other
<B>orthographic systems</B>. We need to be clear that SignWriting is
nothing more than a writing scheme for signed languages. In the same way
that Chinese calligraphy is a writing scheme for spoken Chinese and
similar for other spoken languages with non-Latinate
orthographies.<BR><BR>Personally I consider SignWriting to be closer in
purpose to IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) than to written English.
Lexicographers might disagree with me and suggest that Stokoe notation is
the obvious parallel to IPA. Though here as a native English speaker and
second language British Sign Language speaker I would contend that the
reliance on ASL fingerspelling shapes names in Stokoe, and the use of
Latinate symbols in IPA for that matter, are a hinderance to learning the
notation. There is, of course, a similar problem with SignWriting as many
of the training materials are written using ASL as an exemplar. The iconic
nature of SignWriting allows one to get around the problem, which a
non-Latinate reader would not be able to do with IPA. I could just as
easily say that HamNoSys is the IPA of signed languages but the point is
that the written critical form of spoken languages often bears no relation
to the way strings are actually pronounced. (One only has to consider the
lyrics of the Gershwins' song "Let's call the whole thing off" to see what
a mess standard English orthography makes of
pronounciation.)<BR><BR>However, in one sense I agree with you; the use of
an ASL story gives the wrong impression of SignWriting ... that it is
solely for ASL. As Val has pointed out (thanks Val for correcting my poor
history of the genesis of SignWriting) this orthography is applicable to
all signed languages and manual communication systems.<BR><BR>
<DIV class=yiv599825412gmail_quote>On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 11:21 PM, George
Veronis <SPAN dir=ltr><<A href="mailto:george.veronis@yale.edu"
target=_blank rel=nofollow
ymailto="mailto:george.veronis@yale.edu">george.veronis@yale.edu</A>></SPAN>
wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE class=yiv599825412gmail_quote
style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">
<DIV style="WORD-WRAP: break-word">A number of people responded to my
suggestion about signwriting (SW). Only two of them understood
where I was coming from and why I made the suggestion that a simpler,
more straightforward piece is called for in the Wikipedia article.
Valerie Sutton mentioned the origins of SW and how it arose from
someone without a background in sign language. I think that all of
the respondents should read and think about what she wrote because at
the time she was also not involved in SW as it has developed. The
other person who made very pertinent remarks is Stuart Thiessen, who
went through the same experience that I have, viz., very little
knowledge at a very early stage of learning ASL. He, too, needed
responses to questions that arose from very little experience with ASL
<DIV>
<DIV><SPAN
style="WORD-SPACING: 0px; FONT: medium Geneva; TEXT-TRANSFORM: none; COLOR: rgb(0,0,0); TEXT-INDENT: 0px; WHITE-SPACE: normal; LETTER-SPACING: normal; BORDER-COLLAPSE: separate">
<DIV><BR>I think that communication itself must be handled with care.
One has to take the time and trouble to understand the basis and
the reason for remarks made and questions asked. The article in
Wikipedia is in the English language and the topics contained therein
are intended for English speaking people. I wrote as an English
speaker and relatively ignorant ASL user who was trying to understand an
esoteric </DIV>
<DIV>topic. All of you must have been confronted with "Why
signwriting - why don't they just use the text?". That's a very
understandable question for someone with little or no training in sign
language and with no experience with deaf people. I have attended a
total of 12 classes in ASL; for my final exam I decided to try to convey
to the class that something called signwriting exists. No one in a
class of fifteen, not even the teacher, had ever heard of signwriting.
So those of you who have been involved with SW for a long time
should keep in mind that there is a world of people who might want to
know about SW and who will probably ask very simple and elementary
questions, as I did. </DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Given what I just wrote, I would like to suggest that a statement
like the one that Adam Frost made:</DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#1b00ff>Having a literal translation will actually be
seen as an insult, especially to native users, and will make SignWriting
seem to be an oppressors tool to limit how Sign Language is
used </FONT>must be directed to an audience very different
from the vast majority of users of Wikipedia. I was completely
perplexed by it</DIV>
<DIV>and it was only after thinking hard about how in world anyone could
misconstrue my simple suggestion that I realized how delicate the issue
of communication is and how hard we have to think about the source of
the question. Without giving the issue serious consideration, the
two sides, experienced SW users and those seeking to understand what SW
is all about, will never make contact and that would be a pity.
But as long as people like Thiessen and Sutton are involved, there
is hope that the issue will not get too far out of control.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>With serious good intentions,</DIV>
<DIV>George Veronis </DIV><FONT color=#888888>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV></FONT></SPAN></DIV></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR><BR
clear=all><BR>-- <BR>Regards, Trevor.<BR><BR><>< Re:
deemed!<BR></DIV><BR><BR></DIV></DIV></DIV></DIV><BR><BR></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR></DIV>
<P>
<HR>
<P></P>SignWriting List<BR>June 4, 2011<BR><BR>Cherie -<BR>Attached are two
documents. I believe these are what you are looking for? The Path to LIteracy
is an excellent article... Great work... Val
;-)<BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>----------<BR><BR>On Jun 4, 2011, at 2:07 PM,
Cherie Wren wrote:<BR><BR>> Shoot, I cant find it now... I had
written a proposal to my administration to do some research using signwriting
to teach Deaf kids. It is based on research by J Cummins who did a lot
of work with bilingual education. His research posits that there are two
ways to reach literacy in a second language. One way is via the spoken
language. Spanish speaking kids in American schools learn to speak
English, then transfer that knowledge to learning to read and write
English. That doesn't work so well for Deaf kids, who have great
difficulties learning to speak a language they cant hear. The other way
that Cummins proposes is via the written form of the language. Spanish
speaking kids who are literate in Spanish can use written Spanish as the
bridge to learning written English. There is research out there that
states that Cummins research does not apply to Deaf kids--- because you can't
write ASL. But you CAN. I had hoped to do research showing that
SignWriting could be the bridge that helps Deaf kids improve literacy in
English, but that isn't going to happen now. <BR>> <BR>>
cherie<BR>> <BR>> From: Charles Butler
<chazzer3332000@YAHOO.COM><BR>> To:
SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU<BR>> Sent: Saturday, June 4, 2011 8:42
AM<BR>> Subject: Re: Wikipedia article<BR>> <BR>> My experience in
teaching SignWriting to a group of Deaf and hearing instructors in Ohio needs
to be interjected here. The organizers of the event for teachers of ASL seemed
hopeful, but when the very first words were "and how will this additional
writing system help MY students to read English" was the immediate
barrier.<BR>> <BR>> I found myself tongue-tied and unable to pursue a
useful conversation because every response in the room was stacked against me.
All of them wanted the Deaf to read English in all circumstances, and honestly
refused to see SignWriting as a writing system for any signed language, a true
writing system to produce one's own language parallel to the larger
population's spoken language. For more than an hour, my lecture was
peppered with questions of "why should I ADD to the burden of the Deaf" as if
Deaf student were somehow the personal possession of the teachers, and they
MUST use English in the long run, so why teach them to write and read their
own language. <BR>> <BR>> This is in a state where Oberlin Conservatory
teaches Dance Writing, recognizing that Dance itself is a language, and you
cannot describe choreography in English or any other language without a way to
write in a diagramatic written form. <BR>> <BR>> When people have asked
me over the years who invented SignWriting, a Deaf or hearing person, I say
neither, she is a Dancer, and Dance is a language of movement, so that both
the Deaf and the Hearing can be fully enfranchised in using gesture based
languages on an equal footing.<BR>> <BR>> Although one can write Russian
using the Roman alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet is the writing system of
choice because of history and education. <BR>> <BR>> One can write the
many mutually unintelligible languages of China using a written language of
pictographs which are pronounced any number of ways whether one is speaking
Mandarin, Cantonese, Sechuan, or Mongolian dialects, it remains itself a
pictographic system not really dependent on any one of them. <BR>> <BR>>
One can write Hindustani using the Roman alphabet, but the alphabet of choice
is Sanskrit, used for more than 3000 years. <BR>> <BR>> So now we have
SignWriting, able to be used for all movement based languages, I believe, in a
way that is much better than any other as it is iconographic so that it is not
dependent on spoken language to be read. <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> From:
Trevor Jenkins <bslwannabe@GMAIL.COM><BR>> To:
SW-L@LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU<BR>> Sent: Saturday, June 4, 2011 7:11
AM<BR>> Subject: Re: Wikipedia article<BR>> <BR>> A better comparison
for the content of the SignWriting page on the English language WikiPedia page
would be the pages for Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Linear B, Klingon,
Na'vi and other orthographic systems. We need to be clear that SignWriting is
nothing more than a writing scheme for signed languages. In the same way that
Chinese calligraphy is a writing scheme for spoken Chinese and similar for
other spoken languages with non-Latinate orthographies.<BR>> <BR>>
Personally I consider SignWriting to be closer in purpose to IPA
(International Phonetic Alphabet) than to written English. Lexicographers
might disagree with me and suggest that Stokoe notation is the obvious
parallel to IPA. Though here as a native English speaker and second language
British Sign Language speaker I would contend that the reliance on ASL
fingerspelling shapes names in Stokoe, and the use of Latinate symbols in IPA
for that matter, are a hinderance to learning the notation. There is, of
course, a similar problem with SignWriting as many of the training materials
are written using ASL as an exemplar. The iconic nature of SignWriting allows
one to get around the problem, which a non-Latinate reader would not be able
to do with IPA. I could just as easily say that HamNoSys is the IPA of signed
languages but the point is that the written critical form of spoken languages
often bears no relation to the way strings are actually pronounced. (One only
has to consider the lyrics of the Gershwins' song "Let's call the whole thing
off" to see what a mess standard English orthography makes of
pronounciation.)<BR>> <BR>> However, in one sense I agree with you; the
use of an ASL story gives the wrong impression of SignWriting ... that it is
solely for ASL. As Val has pointed out (thanks Val for correcting my poor
history of the genesis of SignWriting) this orthography is applicable to all
signed languages and manual communication systems.<BR>> <BR>> On Fri,
Jun 3, 2011 at 11:21 PM, George Veronis <george.veronis@yale.edu>
wrote:<BR>> A number of people responded to my suggestion about signwriting
(SW). Only two of them understood where I was coming from and why I made
the suggestion that a simpler, more straightforward piece is called for in the
Wikipedia article. Valerie Sutton mentioned the origins of SW and how it
arose from someone without a background in sign language. I think that
all of the respondents should read and think about what she wrote because at
the time she was also not involved in SW as it has developed. The other
person who made very pertinent remarks is Stuart Thiessen, who went through
the same experience that I have, viz., very little knowledge at a very early
stage of learning ASL. He, too, needed responses to questions that arose
from very little experience with ASL<BR>> <BR>> I think that
communication itself must be handled with care. One has to take the time
and trouble to understand the basis and the reason for remarks made and
questions asked. The article in Wikipedia is in the English language and
the topics contained therein are intended for English speaking people. I
wrote as an English speaker and relatively ignorant ASL user who was trying to
understand an esoteric <BR>> topic. All of you must have been
confronted with "Why signwriting - why don't they just use the text?".
That's a very understandable question for someone with little or no training
in sign language and with no experience with deaf people. I have attended a
total of 12 classes in ASL; for my final exam I decided to try to convey to
the class that something called signwriting exists. No one in a class of
fifteen, not even the teacher, had ever heard of signwriting. So those
of you who have been involved with SW for a long time should keep in mind that
there is a world of people who might want to know about SW and who will
probably ask very simple and elementary questions, as I did. <BR>>
<BR>> Given what I just wrote, I would like to suggest that a statement
like the one that Adam Frost made:<BR>> Having a literal translation will
actually be seen as an insult, especially to native users, and will make
SignWriting seem to be an oppressors tool to limit how Sign Language is
used must be directed to an audience very different from the vast
majority of users of Wikipedia. I was completely perplexed by it<BR>>
and it was only after thinking hard about how in world anyone could
misconstrue my simple suggestion that I realized how delicate the issue of
communication is and how hard we have to think about the source of the
question. Without giving the issue serious consideration, the two sides,
experienced SW users and those seeking to understand what SW is all about,
will never make contact and that would be a pity. But as long as people
like Thiessen and Sutton are involved, there is hope that the issue will not
get too far out of control.<BR>> <BR>> With serious good
intentions,<BR>> George Veronis <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>>
<BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>> -- <BR>> Regards, Trevor.<BR>>
<BR>> <>< Re: deemed!<BR>> <BR>> <BR>> <BR>>
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