[sw-l] BSL Fingerspelling (Part 1)

Mon Oct 4 14:19:27 UTC 2004

Howdy, Folks!  :)

I've been building up my handwriting skills and am trying to write more
continuous BSL now. What I've discoverd from this is that writing BSL
two-handed fingerspelling raises some serious but interesting problems!

I'm therefore submitting some gifs to show how I'm trying to solve some of
these problems. I'd be interested in hearing from people in the UK,
Australia and New Zealand about how they feel about these ideas, as well as
from any other SignWriters who feel I may be breaking some rules or who can
suggest improvements.

A couple of problems:

1. Even when you have developed some skill at SW, writing two-handed
fingrspelling takes a _lot_ of strokes! I find it completely breaks up my
train of thought when I'm writing.

2. BSL fingerspelling isn't just a matter of spelling one letter after the
other - some letters are blended, and sometimes a letter is signed
differently to blend better with adjacent letters.

In particular, double letters aren't really signed as one letter after the
other - rather they're like one letter with the contact made twice. But it's
immediately obvious that this solves part of problem 1, since it means that
double letters don't have to be written twice, only their contact symbol has
to be written twice. So written fingerspelling can be made more compact for
double letters. This raises some interesting (though not insoluble) problems
for programmers, but as someone who prefers to write by hand, it seems to me
a godsend!

I'm starting by attaching a sheet describing how to write just the vowels.
It also goes a little further by showing how sequences of different vowels
can be written with a single sign.