What's the deal with SignWriting?

Tue Jan 13 11:43:19 UTC 2009

I use Sign Writing (SW) everyday for my PhD studies and so do all my colleagues (deaf and hearing, students and researchers) at the “SignLab” of ISTC-CNR in Rome (Italy). I know many people who dislike SW, but usually it’s because they never tried to really learn it, so they know the theory about SW but have never practiced it.

At ISTC-CNR we use SW to write (real writing! = put on paper thoughts in SL without passing through factual execution of signs) and transcribe SL (usually Italian Sign Language, but personally I also transcribe French Sign Language and French “hearing’s” gestures) and we find no difficulties in writing, transcribing and reading sentences written or transcribed by others.

The mayor problem with SW is that you must learn it well (and this seems easier for deaf than for hearing people). One year ago I started learning with Sutton’s “lessons in SW” but I was “too afraid” to try to write in SW (I have to tell you that I’m a hearing person and a "mean" signer). I started transcribing my corpus with SW 6 month ago and now I’m pretty good (but a deaf colleague, with great experience in SW, helped me as teachers do with children starting to write in Italian or English…). Incidentally, my deaf colleagues started writing (not transcribing) with SW just 3 days after starting to learn it.

If you are interested in researches done with (and on) SW, read the papers of Elena Pizzuto (A.K.A. Elena Antinoro Pizzuto) and/or Paolo Rossini, Alessio Di Renzo, Barbara Pennacchi…, some of which are written in English.

Claudia Savina Bianchini
chiadu14 at tiscali.it
PhD student
ISTC-CNR Roma (Italy) + Univ. Paris8 (France) + Univ. Studi Perugia (Italy)

Ps: Sorry for my “macaroni” English  :-[ 

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Message: 1
Date: Mon, 12 Jan 2009 21:51:12 -0500
From: "Andrew Pidkameny" <pidkameny at gmail.com>
Subject: [SLLING-L] What's the deal with SignWriting?
To: slling-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
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	<1d9addf50901121851v5b996191k4a904e3db7442cbd at mail.gmail.com>
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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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