What? No BSL?

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
September 5, 2003

Sandy Fleming wrote:
> One of the problems I'm having with SW is the lack of materials in
> BSL. Some
> stories, articles or letters in continuous BSL would be nice, so that I
> could verify the sort of stuff I'm writing. I wrote to Professor Woll
> as
> suggested on the site but he says he doesn't have any BSL materials
> online,
> nor much offline.


Dear SW List and Sandy!
Actually Bencie is a member of this List, although silent most of the
time! Bencie is now at the University of London, I believe, but used
SignWriting while she was at the University of Bristol, on a totally
different project related to international signing....

Bencie asked a Deaf man from Norway, Jon Martin Brauti, to write
volumes of International signing in SignWriting...Jon typed it with the
SignWriter DOS computer program...So they did not record BSL much at
that time. I have those documents, but I am not sure what the
International signing is based on...I think they wrote an interperter's
signing at one of these international Deaf conferences?

Jon did an excellent job and the documents are beautiful, but it does
not help with the BSL issue...

All new countries have no choice but to start their own SignWriting
dictionaries, since obviously I do not know BSL personally and I cannot
do your work for you! So in each country, it takes a special person who
is diligent and wants to create a SignWriting dictionary so badly, that
they continue to work on preparing one for years...and then future
generations are spoiled and can start using SignWriting immediately
because of the dictionary created years ago...that is the way it is!
smile...

By the way, SignWriter DOS works on Windows 95, 98 and ME....but with
VirtualPC, you can run Windows 98 inside Windows XP, which would then
make it possible for you to use SignWriter DOS on XP...

They have a 45 free days to use VirtualPC on the web, if you download...

VirtualPC
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/virtualpc/downloads/trial.asp