The work of e-LIS@

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 4, 2004

Dear SW List Members, and Daniel!
Thank you for pointing this out to us. The Italian paper is in the
proceedings from the conference. It is the last paper, from pages
123-135, with lots of wonderful hand photographs, showing a
choreography of handshapes...one moving into the other...Very nice!

The fact that you like the way they ordered the handshapes, Daniel, and
that you are a signing Deaf person yourself, means a lot to me, and I
will look at their detailed descriptions later...

I can see that there is no way that I could ever pre-guess what will be
needed in different signed languages, so instead, I will go ahead with
catagorizing every symbol in the IMWA the best I can, and then if
programmers, for example in Italy, wanted to implement this other
sequence, they can, by finding the symbols they need in the IMWA, and
then putting them into their specific order for their language...I
suspect there is no other solution, if we are to move forward now...so
there may always be the need for writing conversion programs between
the symbolsets...but at least I am categorizing all the symbols...I saw
one handshape from Italy that I do not have in the IMWA at the moment,
so I will have to add that!

Thanks for your input, Daniel...

Val ;-)

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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
>