The work of e-LIS@

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 3, 2004

Dear SW List, and Daniel!
I am very interested in the conference itself, and what you all learned
there...not just the pictures, which were wonderful too! So I hope that
all of you will share your experiences at the conference related to
signed languages...maybe give us a technical report as to what you
thought of the conference content? I hope several of you will do
that.... ;-)

And I know there are different ways to sort handshapes. If you feel
their work is valuable, of course, share it with me...maybe you can
send it to me privately?...Just realize though, that I have no choice
right now, to try to get a version 1.0 working for the IMWA. The
numbering system we have been working with for years will be a part of
that, and any new ordering system can be looked at and considered in
the future...

No matter what the new numbering system people propose, anything new
gives us the old problem of having to write conversion programs between
the symbolsets, so I really need to keep this in mind, and not make too
many changes...it is really a problem and I am praying we can solve it,
since we are working with 27 countries...smile...You can tell, I am
starting to feel a little tortured myself - ha!

Val ;-)

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


On Jun 3, 2004, at 11:27 AM, Daniel Noelpp wrote:

> Dear SW List
>
> Paola Latorza and Claudio Baj (a hearing psychologist and a Deaf
> Italian Sign Language teacher) submitted their work e-LIS@ to the
> workshop. They tried to find the "most natural" ordering of handshapes
> occurring in Italian Sign Language: "This research represent a new way
> of ordering signs, different from the usual alphabetical one, and is
> more congenial to the signing community's linguistic needs, which are
> more clearly oriented to the visual-corporeal channel rather than to
> the written-oral one." (cit. from their paper for the LREC workshop
> 2004).
>
> While they limited themselves to the handshapes occurring in LIS they
> did find an ordering of 58 handshape very plausible, natural and
> pleasing to me. I was impressed how much care they put to the asthetic
> feelings of the Deaf people.
>
> Perhaps it is a good idea to try to let e-LIS@ orderings influence the
> Sign-Symbol-Sequence?
>
> Daniel
>