SW-HamNoSys

[Albert Bickford]

I've just been discussing similar issues with Keren Rice with regard to 
North Slavey (Dene), a spoken language in Canada.  There is a lot of 
variation from one speaker to the next, and the community has to a large 
extent chosen to reflect those variations in how words are spelled.  
Further, they don't want to privilege one spelling as the "right" or 
"standard" spelling with the others being variants, but they want to 
treat all variants on an equal basis with equal status.

It strikes me that the amount of variation we see in the ASL community 
(and probably other sign languages) is comparable to what exists in Dene 
and many other spoken language communities I've heard about.  From a 
linguistic point of view, it would be important to retain variant 
spellings, although it would be better if we know where each spelling 
came from (whose signing it represented).

There is another type of normalization, however, in which two spellings 
are given that represent the pronunciation, since there are often 
alternate ways of writing a given sign. This type of variation is only 
variation in the writing/spelling process, not in the pronunciation of 
the sign.  So, I'd personally be more in favor of normalizing that type 
of variation than variation that represents actual differences in how 
the sign is made.

Ultimately, of course, this is an editorial decision to be made by those 
responsible for a corpus, so I don't want to seem to be dictating what 
should be done.

Albert Bickford
SIL-Mexico, Linguistic Publications
SIL International, Sign Language Global Team
albert_bickford at sil.org

late May through early August: 2901 University Ave Stop 8217, Grand Forks ND 58202; 701-777-0575
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On 2012/07/03 8:57 AM, Steve Slevinski wrote:
> On 7/3/12 8:30 AM, Dan Parvaz wrote:
>> It sounds like the user-contributed corpora could use a little
>> "smoothing" in the form of a normalization step (manual, automated, 
>> or a bit of
>> each) that standardizes the orthography a bit for purposes of 
>> concordance-
>> building, search, etc.
>
> Hi Dan,
>
> Very true.  I am almost ready to add normalization functions to 
> SignPuddle.  They will be a combination of manual and automated.
>
> Last year I had a breakthrough with approximate searching for 
> SignWriting.  Given any sign, the search routines can find all other 
> signs that are variant spellings based on position and order.  The 
> searching uses regular expressions and is very fast.
>
> It will be up to the end user to decide if the signs returned from the 
> search routines are meaningful variant that should be left alone or if 
> the signs returned are meaningless variants that should be normalized 
> to a common spelling.
>
> Regards,
> -Steve
>
>
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