What's the deal with SignWriting?

[Andrew Pidkameny]

Hi everyone,

This is a question for any linguists out there who have direct
personal experience with Sutton SignWriting.

I've noticed that about half of the posts I've seen since subscribing
to this list have made some mention of SignWriting. I've seen some
information about it on the Internet (including a host of fascinating
transcriptions on signwriting.org) and I thought it looked pretty cool
and pretty useful as a way to record and transmit utterances in signed
languages without the use of video.

However, when I asked around about it in the ASL department at
Northeastern University (where I am a student) I mostly got a lot of
frowning and scoffing. The general opinion around here seems to be
that SignWriting is not a useful tool for research because it is not
precise enough in its descriptive powers. And as far as it is
sufficiently descriptive, it is too rich to be useful, or too easy to
misinterpret.

It seems true to me that a SignWriting transcription of an ASL
utterance will certainly lack some linguistic and paralinguistic
information, but probably no more so than a phonemic (NOT phonetic)
transcription of a spoken English utterance will probably lack certain
information about phonetic production and prosody.

With that in mind, PHONEMIC transcription can still convey a lot of
information about English which is useful to linguists, and there are
even situations in which written English is sufficient as a medium for
recording linguistic data about spoken English.

So my question (for experienced SignWriters) is, how good or bad is
SignWriting as a tool for linguistic study? Where does it excel? Where
does it fall short? Can people who use it interpret it accurately in a
reliable way?

Forgive me if this is not the appropriate forum in which to open such
a discussion, or if my questions seem ill-informed. Any input
(off-list or on-list) from people who use SignWriting on a regular
basis would be enlightening and greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Drew Pidkameny
Northeastern University
pidkameny at gmail.com

P.S. - Incidentally, I found that it was not too difficult for me to
learn to read SignWriting representations of ASL using only my
knowledge of signed ASL as a guide (and Goldilocks and the Three Bears
as a Rosetta Stone). I'm sure learning to properly write ASL using
SignWriting would be considerably more difficult, but probably not
that much more so than learning to write in English when you already
know how to speak it. I was also impressed by the fact that
SignWriting seemed about as good at representing classifiers as it was
at representing signs. I am worried, however, about jumping to
conclusions regarding SignWriting's utility based on my own very
limited experience with the system.
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