What's the deal with SignWriting?

Tue Jan 13 12:25:54 UTC 2009

I have used Signwriting within a project looking at International Sign. It
was extremely useful for this purpose since most notation systems (and
Signwriting is a writing system - not a notation system) assume some
phonological status for elements, and this assumption cannot be made a
priori for International Sign. Additionally, Signwriting is  - as others
have said - very easy to learn to use (especially for handwritten notes). 

Bencie Woll, BA, MA, PhD
Chair of Sign Language and Deaf Studies
Director, UCL DCAL Research Centre
49 Gordon Square
London WC1H 0PD
+44 20 7679 8670 (voice)
+44 20 7679 8691 (fax)
+44 20 7679 8693 (textphone/minicom) www.dcal.ucl.ac.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
[mailto:slling-l-bounces at majordomo.valenciacc.edu] On Behalf Of Adam Frost
Sent: 13 January 2009 03:19
To: A list for linguists interested in signed languages
Subject: Re: [SLLING-L] What's the deal with SignWriting?

As a native ASL user who is very skilled in SignWriting, I can say  
that many people "frown" on SignWriting because it is different and  
people are afraid of what is different. As far as the pros and cons,  
you pretty much stated it but I will restate it so it is clear.  
SignWriting is very clear and precise in writing what you "see", so it  
is great for classifiers. As far as it being "too rich" or "easy to  
misinterpret", I don't see how that can happen because it has yet to  
happen to me. I think it is more a matter of learning it well enough  
and most people don't want to have to learn something "different". It  
really isn't that difficult to learn. I was writing well written  
documents within months, but that is also because I focused on  
learning it well.

I know that at one time, if not still, people at the Emmory Lab in San  
Deigo used it in research. Hopefully someone there or elsewhere can  
help you more. If you have more questions about SignWriting, I can  
help as I teach it quite often.

Adam

On Jan 12, 2009, at 6:51 PM, "Andrew Pidkameny" <pidkameny at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> 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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