Sign Writing Order

[Charles Butler]

Bill,

I would agree that sorting PLAYING into its constituent letters would make
no sense, and your development of PLAY + ING is at least linguistically an
interesting development.

What I am doing is looking at how movement language is constructed.  All
things happen at once.  Unlike the English word "playing" which is a
graphical representation of a spoken word with a specific order to the
sounds, sign writing in capturing a "word" captures handshape, movemenet,
positioning, tension, and so forth.  Each of those "happen at once" like if
PLAYING somehow was all the letters on top of each other in a spoken word,
which they are not.  There is a natural order in English writing of speech.
Sign Writing is a capture of a whole word, which can be broken down in
component pieces, but they aren't sequential, they are simultaneous.

Your proposed person with the sign "playing" is going to look exactly as you
said, either at the "Y" listing or the "hand at side" listing or the
"wobbles" listing, each of which happens all at once in the whole sign
"playing".  A complete dictionary would list all of the signs with "Y"s in
the "handshape section" in the SSS order (as a systematized listing).  All
the signs (the same one's in the handshape listing reiterated) listed in
"location" order + handshape, etc.; and then the third section of "movement"
would have "movement, then handshape, then location".

For me, we should have a "default" ordering, which at the moment is the SSS,
which goes "handshape" + location + movement + facial expression, etc.

Charles