glossing/ SW, self-intro

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
March 30, 2004

Hello Everyone and Nancy!
I agree with everything you said in this message, and welcome to the
SignWriting List, Nancy! We have done some work with writing
classifiers, so perhaps later we can discuss this? For now, here is a
web page to visit:

Writing Classifiers in SignWriting
http://www.SignWriting.org/lessons/lessonsw

and click on the chapter on Dynamics...read that whole chapter...there
are several pages on classifiers...Enjoy!

Val ;-)

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On Mar 29, 2004, at 7:53 PM, Nancy Emery wrote:

> hi everyone,
>
> I had a couple thoughts about the use of gloss and of writing in
> SignWriting.
>
> The translation feature of the PUDL program could be useful as an
> introduction to reading SignWriting - when people who are used to
> glossing
> (from TTY etc) put in glosses and see the SignWriting that comes out,
> since
> they already know what the signing itself looks like, they can
> associate
> that with the pictures and probably pretty quickly figure out how to
> read a
> lot of the elements in the SignWriting.  (I think that trying to come
> up
> with something that would mechanically translate from written standard
> English sentences into SignWriting would be really hard.)
>
> But, a lot of ASL or any other natural signed language isn't very
> glossable
> - like classifier use or role shift.   Those are the parts of ASL that
> interest me the most, and I'm trying to learn SignWriting so that I can
> transcribe, in a way that makes visual sense, narratives that include
> classifiers and role shift.  That means including head turns and eye
> gaze
> and other things.  So I don't think that glossing - or dictionary
> cut-and-pasting - can substitute for learning to write.  I admit I
> started
> with handwriting SW and haven't tried typing yet.
>
> As for myself, I'm hearing, started learning to sign in my 30's, partly
> because of a short course offered at my workplace but mostly because I
> met a
> Deaf woman I wanted to be able to talk with.  Then, being someone who
> loves
> languages anyway, I was hooked.  I actually went through a 2 year
> interpreting program but realized that the high speed transliteration
> that
> was mostly called for in my early (academic interpreting) jobs wasn't
> something I liked or was much good at, and I soon left the field.
> What I
> really enjoy is ASL narrative, storytelling, poetry, language games,
> etc.  I
> also used to be somewhat involved in Seattle's large Deaf-Blind
> community,
> have done some tactile signing.  I'm pretty rusty now.  Have returned
> to
> grad school in linguistics.  Interested, among other things, in
> classifiers,
> in signed and spoken languages.
>
> Nancy Emery
> Seattle (University of Washington)
>