SignWriting dictionaries

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
January 28, 2003

On Tuesday, January 21, 2003, Steven Lytle wrote:
> i am thoroughly impressed by the dictionary.  how many entries does it 
> have?  it seems to be only one way, viz. asl to english.  is this > true?

Hello Steve and Everyone!
The SignWriter DOS computer program includes different country files. 
The English-ASL dictionary that comes with the USA version has 3,110 
signs I believe. You can check this by exiting the program to DOS, and 
then type

dict

Then press Return or Enter.

This will start the Dictionary Manager program in DOS. In the 
Dictionary Manager, you can check to see how many signs are in the 
dictionary. SignWriter DOS is used in 27 countries now, and there are 
17 signed languages supported and 10 spoken languages. Each country 
develops their own dictionary files, and I know that in Spain there is 
a dictionary with 5,000 entries, and in Germany they have a very large 
dictionary file...so the number of signs varies from country to country.

These dictionary files, in SignWriter DOS, can be printed with the 
Dictionary Manager program. They are only Word-to-Sign....English to 
ASL or German to German Sign Language....etc.

To print dictionaries sorted by the visual symbols of SignWriting, 
called the Sign-Symbol-Sequence, you will need to use SignBank 2002. 
SignBank doesn't have very many signs right now - so our job this year 
is to start to add a lot of data - in time it will become a very useful 
dictionary database -

Glad to know you are enjoying using SignWriting software, Steve -

Val ;-)


----------------------------------------

Valerie Sutton
Sutton at SignWriting.org

Sign Languages
are written languages!

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

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

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

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