LL-L "Writing systems" 2003.09.02 (04) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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From: Sandy Fleming [sandy at scotstext.org]
Subject: "Writing Systems"

Although systems for writing sign languages have been in use by academics
for a few decades, these have never been suitable for teaching to children
or for writing large amounts of text.

Over the past few years, however, the "SignWriting" system invented by
Valerie Sutton has been gaining wide acceptance and looks set to become the
standard for writing sign languages worldwide.

The symbols used take time to draw, but nevertheless deaf people have been
using it for writing and the fact that pen-pal clubs have sprung up using
SignWriting shows that it is a practical system. I imagine the slight
clumsiness of the system is part of a natural development as with the Greek
and Roman alphabets that were originally written all in capitals and then
became more cursive. In fact, a shorthand system based on SignWriting has
already been developed for transcribing sign languages, and from this a more
cursive form of longhand SignWriting has been developed, although with
computer programs being written to enable people to type in SignWriting, it
may be some time before many people bother to become fluent in handwritten
forms.

It also looks like Signwriting characters will soon be adopted into unicode,
so we probably are talking about an international standard for writing sign
languages.

The main SignWriting site is at http://www.signwriting.org/

A complete course in SignWriting is online at
http://www.signwriting.org/lessons/lessonsw2002/

There are various documents and downloads on the site. A cursory glance at
the PDF document "Writing by Hand" will show a range of writing styles by
children, pen-pals, shorthand writers, and writers using the cursive version
developed from the shorthand.

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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