dictionaries are vitally important

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
July 16, 2003

Fernando Capovilla wrote:
> I deal directly with a population of 2,000 deaf students in Sao Paulo
> main schools. (My students and I have assessed their cognitive and
> language skills over the last three years). And I am glad to say that
> they seem, indeed, quite keen to using the Libras trilingual
> dictionary (which is also a SignWriting dictionary, since it does
> include signwriting of each documented sign). It is reassuring to
> learn that the SW dictionary has been increasingly used for the
> purpose of reading and writing signs. Our deaf kids use the dictionary
> as a guide to write signs by hand (they do not type, specially because
> computers are, unfortunately, still quite rare).


That is wonderful news, Fernando! So you are receiving positive results
from Deaf students, who use your Encyclopedic Dictionary? Wonderful!
You have really helped the world...Thank you for believing in
SignWriting enough to place it in your Encyclopedia!...and your
students are writing SignWriting by hand? Great news...

I understand the issues of not having computers...There are plenty of
people who do not use computers, so we have people here in the USA,
too, who also write SignWriting by hand and I am glad they do...that
was the way I started too...

Interestingly enough, Antonio Carlos came to visit me because he has
developed a way to create SignWriting dictionaries inside computers
with his new SWML format...so we were actually talking about
dictionaries in SignWriting the whole time he was here! His new
computer program called SW-Edit, creates SignWriting dictionaries in
SWML, which can then bring SignWriting symbols into other computer
programs quickly, with less hassle than we have with our old DOS
program...So I am not surprised that he and his team does not use our
old DOS format for dictionaries...They are developing their own
computer programs for that...

Val ;-)