use of sign language in Jordan

[Albert Bickford]

Technically, SignWriting would be classified as a featural writing system, 
like Korean Hangeul (sic?), not an alphabet.  The first clue is the fact 
that there are about 25,000 symbols in the system, which is a huge inventory 
for an alphabet, indeed, much larger than a syllabary and getting close to 
the size of inventory needed for a logographic system.  But actually, there 
are a lot of similarities between symbols, and in that way it is quite 
unlike a logographic system, because all of these symbols are highly 
analyzable.  For example, each handshape has 96 symbols, which represent 
various orientations of the same symbol (rotations, reflections, shadings). 
Basically the same conventions are used for representing these 96 different 
variants of every handshape.  (That's a bit oversimplified, I know, which 
people who know the system will recognize, but to a large extent it is 
true.)  Similarly, symbols for handshapes can be decomposed into finer 
sub-symbols that represent individual fingers and other parts of the hand. 
So, specific features of the phonology are represented by a specific aspect 
of each symbol, and there is a lot of consistency across the whole 
system--this is one of the things that makes SignWriting fairly easy to 
learn. To put it another way: each "symbol" in the SignWriting alphabet is 
analyzable into smaller parts that correspond to specific phonological 
features--hence it is clearly a "featural" system, not an alphabet.

Of course, when speaking to non-linguists (as people have to do in order to 
interest ordinary people in using SignWriting), the fine distinctions 
between syllabaries, abjads, abugidas, featural systems, etc. and alphabets 
are going to cause people's eyes to glaze over.  So, accepting the fact that 
the term 'alphabet' has a broader, looser sense among non-linguists, 
something akin to "an organized system for representing a language based 
primarily on how it is pronounced", I certainly have no objection when 
people talk about a SignWriting "alphabet".  But, within the context of a 
fine classification of different types of writing systems (the question 
Kathy originally asked), the term "alphabet" in its technical sense isn't 
appropriate--SignWriting is clearly a featural system.

Albert Bickford

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Valerie Sutton" <sutton at signwriting.org>
To: "A list for linguists interested in signed languages" 
<slling-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu>
Sent: September 26, 2007 8:10 PM
Subject: Re: [SLLING-L] use of sign language in Jordan


> On Sep 26, 2007, at 5:46 PM, Steve Slevinski wrote:
>> By alphabet I mean an ordered list of symbols. ...
> Kathy -
> To add to what Steve explained, SignWriting is considered to be an
> alphabet, because we write the way the body looks while we sign, so
> it can be either phonetic or phonemic, depending on how much detail
> the writer chooses to write...

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