SignWriting Report July 23, 2002

[Valerie Sutton]

July 23, 2002

Dear SignWriting List Members!

I have been reading your messages with great interest. My Irish
guests will be here with me until Saturday. Then they fly back to
Dublin. Patrick Matthews is one of Ireland's Deaf leaders. I feel
very honored that he is using SignWriting in a series of books
teaching Irish Sign Language (ISL). He will be using the books at The
Centre for Deaf Studies at Trinity College in Dublin.

Last week, as you know, I also had two very special Deaf guests from
Switzerland and Norway. Siv and Michele were married on June 22! They
both work for GS-Media, with Penny Boyes Braem, in Zurich. I know Siv
wrote a message recently to the SignWriting List, so you all have
met! We had intense discussions about facial expressions and other
writing details. It was wonderful. All of our Deaf guests visited
Salk Institute. They were invited to visit by a Deaf researcher at
Salk Institute. Plus our board member, James Short, took them to the
beach, and Michele learned to surf in the California waves!! ;-)

I understand from James that Michele is a natural-born surfer! Too
bad there is no surfing in Zurich, Switzerland - ha!

Anyway, I just want to tell you that I have missed you. I have had
some health problems in June and early July, but I am fully recovered
now. My family and friends took care of me, and I am grateful.

And I am working on SignBank 2002, which now includes a "SignWriting
Instruction Database" too. I am almost done adding my entire Lessons
In SignWriting Textbook into the Instruction Database, so that people
can search for topics, and find the pages they need. Siv and Patrick
have been using the Lessons database already, and it seems to be a
great help.

Regarding seminars, of course a SignWriting Symposium, or a
SignWriting Seminar is always possible. For specific workshops, we
could setup an arrangement with a hotel here in La Jolla, California,
where I live. There are some lovely little hotels right near the
beach and people could enjoy the beach as well as structured
SignWriting course with me and other teachers.

Regarding a true convention on all writing systems, that is a little
more complicated. I will leave that to all of you. Since SignWriting
does not have the same purpose as the other research notation
systems, it is like putting both trains and airplanes in the same
"transportation convention"... a convention on systems with different
purposes can be hard to setup...so just realize that SignWriting is
made for writing stories and newspapers in Sign Languages - true
written literature...the other systems are not designed as a daily
writing system.

And last, regarding the mouthing and mouth gestures needed in writing
the northern European signed languages, such as German Sign Language,
Swiss-German Sign Language, and possibly Norwegian Sign Language...I
would like to suggest that Ingvild, Siv and Stefan communicate with
each other on possible solutions. Stefan has already developed a lot
of mouth movements written in SignWriting, based on the German spoken
language. And I know Siv wants to add more....so I hope you will
write to each other and try to work out some of the
questions....Meanwhile, I am writing a report on writing detailed
facial expressions. I hope to have that ready in the next couple of
weeks. It will be included in the SignWriting Instruction Database in
SignBank in September.

I hope to return to the List officially in September - Have a wonderful summer!
--


Val ;-)

Valerie Sutton
Sutton at SignWriting.org

SignWritingSite
http://www.SignWriting.org
Read & Write Sign Languages

SignBankSite
http://www.SignBank.org
Sign Language Dictionaries

DanceWritingSite
http://www.DanceWriting.org
Read & Write Dance

MovementWritingSite
http://www.MovementWriting.org
Read & Write Movement & Gesture

Deaf Action Committee for SignWriting
Center For Sutton Movement Writing
an educational nonprofit organization
Box 517, La Jolla, CA, 92038-0517, USA
tel: 858-456-0098....fax: 858-456-0020