LL-L "Orthography" 2003.09.25 (04) [E]

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Fri Sep 26 15:14:59 UTC 2003 

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

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Orthography
>
> this sort as a universal "scriptura franca."  If we based it on existing
> sign languages (this requiring prior universalization) and a written (thus
> ideographic) form of these (be it the currently proposed one or an
> esthetically more pleasing one ;) ), we would kill three birds with one

What would you consider to be aesthetically more pleasing?

There are a couple of documents that might be of interesting this respect.
This chapter of a history of SignWriting gives examples of how the system
has evolved over the past 30 years:

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

Note that although it's now considered best to write vertically, this hasn't
been adopted by some of the "old hands" yet, so a lot of the stuff you see
on the Web is rather clumsy compared to the current system. The idea of
writing vertically was adopted after the insistence of certain deaf
SignWriters. Luckily, the inventor of the system now fully supports the idea
so it hasn't been the old story of the deafness-impaired trying to reduce
sign languages to linear monotony to suit themselves.

This document compares SignWriting with the Stokoe notation, the other big
contender:

http://www.signwriting.org/library/pdf/pdf/sw0032%20Comp%20Stokoe%20Sutton.pdf

You also need to realise that the Stokoe notation fails to represent many
important features of sign languages. Stokoe was aware of the need for
those, but said that there were "many difficulties" in representing them.
Looking at the SignWriting notation and the ease with which it expresses
these features, it's hard to know what these difficulties might have been. I
think the answer is that Stokoe notation is awkward to start with and adding
even more features would make it very unwieldy indeed.

In countries where SignWriting has been widely adopted, the books have been
rewritten so that the SignWriting is written vertically. As far as I know,
no one has written a book in Stokoe notation.

As for aesthetics, although there are a huge number of typographical symbols
in SignWriting, they don't have to be memorised individually. After a few of
the salient features of each block have been learned, producing or
recognising the rest is fairly intuitive.

When you read SignWriting, you can feel the sign language being produced,
very much like subvocalising in written oral languages. When SignWriting's
written vertically, it's possible to subvocalise smoothly, because the
centreline of the body doesn't have to be re-established with each sign.

SignWriting also represents all the channels of communication, often in an
intuitively recognisable way. This enables it to express the international
capabilities of sign languages in a way no other notation comes close to
doing.

It also represents the non-linear aspects of signing, such as the way parts
of one sign can be held with one hand while the other makes several other
signs with respect to it, as well as non-manual features such as comparator
intensity, question tone, simultaneous negation/affirmation, and so on.

In summary, you've got a writing system that has all the multilinear
expressive power of all sign languages, written in a way that's intuitively
easy to grasp and enables fluent subvocalisation with high precision.
Although experienced users might drop things that seem intuitively obvious
in the context of a particular language, it's also quite a lean system in
the sense that there's nothing in it that's not really necessary to the
expression of some sign, and yet when an unusual construction is represented
its execution is still immediately clear.

Truth is beauty, right?  :)

Sandy
http://scotstext.org/

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Orthography

Sandy,

Thanks for all the thought-provoking information.

You asked:

> What would you consider to be aesthetically more pleasing?

:)  Hmm ...  This is very subjective, of course.  I guess my mind is
strongly influenced by the looks of existing systems with long histories,
namely those that evolved from "clumsy"-looking pictographic scribbles into
scripts that allow room for stylistic variation, including what is known as
"calligraphy," and are at the same time relatively easily written and
remembered.

I can tell you what some of my favorite existing scripts are with regard to
looks and stylistic flexibility (not necessarily with regard to
"efficiency"):

   * Chinese
     e.g., http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm
     e.g., http://www.chinavoc.com/arts/calligraphy/origin.asp
     e.g., http://www.chinavoc.com/arts/calligraphy/analysis.asp
     e.g., http://www.chinapage.com/calligraphy.html
     e.g., http://www.asiawind.com/art/callig/calligal.htm
   * Arabic
     e.g., http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm
     e.g., http://www.sakkal.com/ArtArabicCalligraphy.html
     e.g.,
http://www.sakkal.com/articles/art_arabic_calligraphy/square_kufic_examples.html
   * Javanese
     e.g., http://www.joglosemar.co.id/hanacaraka/hanacaraka.html
     e.g., http://www.omniglot.com/writing/javanese.htm
   * Balinese
     e.g., http://www.babadbali.com/aksarabali/art2-c.htm
     e.g., http://www.omniglot.com/writing/balinese.htm
   * Tibetan
     e.g., http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tibetan.htm
   * Old Uyghur/Manchu/Mongolian
     e.g., http://www.omniglot.com/writing/manchu.htm
     e.g., http://www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm

(Of these, Javanese, Balinese and Tibetan are derived from Indic scripts.)

I find the looks of Roman, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and most Indic scripts
very pleasing too, besides being stylistically very versatile.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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