Antw: SignWriting to HamNoSys?

Thu Aug 23 07:56:08 UTC 2012

Dear Maria,

We should very good keep in mind what you say about SignWriting becoming "living": Like languages themselves, writing systems undergo changes which can be described by several principles, one of the most important being economy. But "economy" is not simple: Is it more economic to keep an old writing despite the fact that it is no more "near phonetics" or is it better to reform writing everytime according to a changed phonetics (I am referring here to the alphabetically oriented writing systems)? A real phonetic description (and no writing system is really "phonetic" in this sense) has to use generally accepted notations for every parameter value analysed as "somehow" important at least in one of all languages of the same modality. A writing system is oriented towards quickly and "adequately" saving an otherwise fugatious utterance. "Adequately" means that - by convention - it has to offer a quick recovering/reproduction of any concept realised by every person who has learned it. If there are too complex writing rules or there is too much material used for writing down utterances, users will inevitably cut down the writing system to a more "phonemic" one (i.e. one which only represents the functionally important features relevant for the respective languages), letting all other features to the interpretation/understanding of the competent language users. Because sign writing is rather "phonetic", I suppose that it may be incorrectly interpreted as a pure phonetic notation (but that was not its intention and I think that the users "understand" that.
What you tell now about adaptation, would be a proof that SignWriting is used like a real writing system. I wanted to point out this very interesting phenomenon.

Concerning your central question, how a conversion of SignWriting to HamNoSys could work, you give the answer yourself by quoting the English example: As soon as there is a generally accepted SignWriting system for a single sign language, researchers have to try to find out the language specific conversion rules. in other words: If there is one and the same SignWriting item or combination of items used for different phenomena over different sign languages, the conversion cannot work universally but becomes language specific to some extent. As writing systems have their own "rules"/system, we can be optimistic that a conversion programme can be found for every language, however.

By the way, my opinion is that HamNoSys could be enormously improved in terms of representing the serial vs. simultaneous aspects of feature combinations.

Best Regards

Franz 

>>> "MARIA GALEA" <maria.azzopardi at UM.EDU.MT> 8/23/2012 9:07 >>>
Hi everyone - first a v brief introduction - I have been using SignWriting
for data transcriptions for several years and have also used it as a
writing system to write long texts in Maltese Sign Language (for sign
language literature - not for research).

I'm working on my dissertation 'SignWriting: Towards an orthography for
LSM (Maltese Sign language)' with the Univ of Malta. I can't believe this
email list (SSLING) never came to attention before. Better (extremely)
late than never I guess.

Can I ask a few questions about the work on the SignWriting to HamNoSys
converter: what will be the use of this tool? I.e. WHY are you carrying
out this study? Why do you need an SW converter to HamNoSys? Are you
focussing on one sign language or several?

Gerard's argument is valid - but besides this, there are different rules
applied to SignWriting for different sign languages - although this is
still not researched (I hope to be filling this gap a little), with time
users of the SW writing system naturally adapt SignWriting.(In the same
way that the latin script "x" symbol nowadays represents a wide varied
list of sounds that is language dependant - and has moved away from the
original Latin sound). There is evidence that with the use of long-text
writing of SignWriting for a specific sign language, the system naturally
evolves beyond a simple phonetic transciption (i.e. a representation of
exact articulation) to a more abstract representation of language.  How do
you hope to deal with this reality, when this reality has not yet been
fully understood and researched?

Taking the analogy of say written English to I.P.A (International Phonetic
Alphabet)- I could imagine an IPA converter dealing with the English word
'although', because I imagine you could 'teach' your machine the pattern
of written English '-ough' : that represents the sound "ow". Most written
English patterns are known so you could teach them to your machine I
guess. But what about the SignWriting to HamNosys converter? How can you
include such patterns, if they haven't yet been investigated? And
furthermore how are you going to include all different patterns for all
different sign languages that are using SignWriting?

Look forward to your reply - and wish you all a lovely day.
Maria
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