Dan's SWML suggestion about pasting sign sentences from dictionaries

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
July 11, 2003

On Friday, July 11, 2003, at 04:13 AM, Angus B. Grieve-Smith wrote:
>  But SignWriter is not just about text processing.  Every text
> processing tool changes the language, just like every dictionary
> changes
> the language.  As you say, the whole point is to have a way to type
> without relying on spoken languages, which is why I was a little
> concerned
> from the beginning when Cecelia chose to copy and paste signs from the
> dictionary rather than learning to type.

Yes...This was precisely my point. It is not just Cecilia who does
pasting...Pasting signs into sentences is not a problem unique to
SignWriter...In fact, Antonio Carlos' program SW-Edit does that too -
that is all they do - there is no typing and everything is pasting -
whole signs and individual symbols - so pasting into sentences is
actually becoming the norm...and the typing system that Rich Gleaves
and I designed, which is highly intuitive, if you are fluent in
SignWriting, and is fast and efficient, if you have the right training,
may possibly go out of date, partly because of lack of training by the
users...

Imagine if we could paste whole English words into email, instead of
typing....And imagine you have never learned to type English in school.
Wouldn't you choose to paste? It would avoid having to learn to type -

So interestingly enough, Antonio Carlos' SW-Edit program has taken this
problem one step further...making pasting the norm...

Val ;-)