Sign Proccessing Software

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 18, 2004

Louis-Félix Bergeron wrote:
> If the fonctions are the same, no matter if what is
> written comes from sign language or spoken language, then why have
> different names?

Thanks to all of our List members, for your thoughtful discussion on 
terminology....SignWriting has its own terminology partly because the 
English words used to describe it, have been based on how Deaf people 
in my world, signed it in their dialect of American Sign Language! 
Complex, isn't it?

I remember back in the 1980's,  Dr. Karen van Hoek and I talked about 
the fact that signs shift to the right or left of center......I 
remember asking Karen ....what should we call that? I had called it 
Spatial Comparisons, when I signed about it with everyone...and I 
wanted to be sure that terminology was OK, and I remember that Karen, 
at that time, told me that was fine because there wasn't an established 
term yet, for that particular grammar in signed languages. I bet things 
have changed since then and our terminology is now out of date...the 
point I am trying to make is that we went ahead with our terminology 
because we were writing 20 years ago. There is nothing new about our 
terminology...we have been using it since the mid-1980's, fully aware 
that such terminology may not be the norm...Just as long as we define 
it properly, so we all are talking about the same thing....that is all 
that matters. I am not asking anyone to change the way you see these 
terms. And I will not ask Deaf people to start signing them differently 
either...Let's move on to writing the beautiful signed languages of the 
world...and slowly new terms will develop, because that is life!

While we are talking about Spatial Comparisons (grin), here is Karen 
van Hoek's article on that topic! These beautiful grammar lessons were 
originally written in English by Karen, but then signed in ASL by Deaf 
native signer Butch Zein, and then Karen transcribed them into 
SignWriting from videotape. ...There are a series of 12 grammar lessons 
written this way...I love the fact that ASL describes ASL in these 
articles...The English translation is below...


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