spelling order

[Charles Butler]

Hello Ingrid and the list,
Charles Butler here.
Oddly enough, I could agree with you that "right hand's first handshape" is a good way to start as the system, at the moment, is set up with that as "default."
With Valerie's recent postings on positionings from the center of the body in terms of locations in space, I guess I'm of split mind on this, only for the sake of "completeness" in a dictionary, and the fact that two of my sisters are left-handed.
What I would propose is that right hand comes first, but then left hand position also be included as a separate entry, so for example, the sign for "help" which has a 10 hand (primary) and a flat-5 hand on the secondary hand, could, in fact have four entries, depending on which hand is primary (left or right) and whether one also indexes by the secondary hand. Because of the multiple parameters involved, this would cause a dictionary to be large, but no one could say it wasn't complete enough for linguistic discussion.
2) After hands, I would put positions on the body (head to two, center right, left) as Valerie has proposed, else all the left-handed signs would have to go to the end, and for the left-handed signers, that would put all the signs at the end of the list.
That's as far as my thought processes can go today, but I figured I should reply.

 Ingvild Roald <ingvild.roald at STATPED.NO> wrote:Hi,

First: Thank you Valerie for the nice dictionary files. Where thay made by
the SignBAnk program??

Second: I've be working on this spelling-order problem.
Stokoe, and several researchers after him, have been writing linearlily,
and have been starting with location. I do not see that as an option.
But some agreement should be made, if not rigorous, and it should be an
agreement that would lend SW and SB credibility in the academic world as
well as among ordinary users of SW.

Recenly I've seen two different ways of writng the sign for 'coffe', see
the two attached GIFs.
The difference is arbitrary, and should not show up when the sign is
looked up in the dictionary.

So in my oponion, it is obvious that the right hand's first handshape
(supposing we decide that the ordinary dway to write a dictionary is
righthanded) should go into the first box when we put down the spelling.

Let's take it from there.

Ingvild

> ATTACHMENT part 2 image/gif name=coffe l.gif > ATTACHMENT part 3 image/gif name=coffe r.gif


---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20021101/1c27cfd3/attachment.htm>