Phonemes (was RE: use of sign language in Jordan) - longish

[Valerie Sutton]

On Sep 28, 2007, at 7:23 AM, Carolyn Ostrander wrote:
> A second interesting thing about these pairings is that they were  
> very slippery historically until dictionaries came along.
> Signwriting begins with a dictionary, though.....

> Carolyn Ostrander
> PhD student, Composition and Cultural Rhetoric
> Syracuse University
> clostran at syr.edu
>

Hi Carolyn -

Actually, SignWriting did not begin with dictionaries, nor would I  
teach using dictionaries if we have a beginning class.

SignWriting started with transcribing signed languages from videotape.

The first use of SignWriting was at the University of Copenhagen in  
1974. I was asked to write (transcribe) a video of the movements of  
Deaf people having a conversation in Danish Sign Language, versus  
hearing people, and the hearing gestures they make while speaking  
spoken language.

As you know, SignWriting can record any movement of the body, so it  
is easy to write hearing person's gestures as well as signed  
languages. So this was at the request of a research project  
there...they needed to see the difference between hearing and Deaf- 
sign-language-related gestures....that was the beginning of  
SignWriting...

No dictionaries!

The second signed language written in SignWriting was a Sign Language  
from a South Pacific Island, and again it was taken from video  
footage and photos of positions made by the only Deaf signer on the  
whole island...a researcher asked me to do this project for his study  
on this unique signed language, that involved the entire  
body...including squatting and other features that were real signs to  
this one lone Deaf person on the island...

Then when we started writing ASL and Danish Sign Language in the  
early 1980s, we did not start with dictionaries either. The first ASL  
written were real articles written by native ASL signers for our  
SignWriter Newspaper from 1981-1984...they wrote stories from their  
own experience, directly in ASL the best they could...of course we  
learned a lot from that...it was not perfect ASL at all, but that was  
the beginning at least...

So dictionaries once again did not start the writing of ASL...

Online, in SignPuddle, it is true that people usually start with  
dictionaries for the newer signed languages being written...so that  
may be where you got that mis-impression...and it is true that a lot  
of people do start learning SignWriting through dictionaries....

But if I am teaching SignWriting to a new group, and they are here in  
my office, I do not start teaching with dictionaries, but instead  
hand them Goldilocks Level 2 in ASL and teach them to read real  
literature immediately...

Val ;-)

Valerie Sutton
Sutton at SignWriting.org
www.SignWriting.org

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