AW: [sw-l] Some more questions...

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
April 28, 2005

Stuart Thiessen wrote:
> Mea culpa!  I had been under the impression that Don Newkirk was deaf.
>  That was why I said that.  Sorry for the error on my part. I
> understand that it was a rough time for you.

You are such a good friend, Stuart...Your work with SignWriting all
these years is very important...thanks for hanging in there with me!

No, unfortunately Don Newkirk is very much a hearing person! I first
met Don Newkirk in 1975 at Salk Institute, when I came directly from
Denmark into San Diego, to show Dr. Ursula Bellugi the SignWriting
system...and Don met me there and showed me HIS writing system, that
used nothing but the English alphabetic characters to represent
handshapes etc..So Don had actually invented his own system that had
nothing to do with SignFont, and then later, he was brought in to run
the SignFont system...and he had a web site for awhile, but on that web
site he showed both HIS system, and the SignFont system and it was hard
to see which one was which!

Then Don took the site down when he had little interest...

> I have not seen any deaf who have seriously advocated it.  I have only
> seen hearing people mention it to me.  I know of one deaf person who
> apparently learned about it from Sam.

Right. I am sure someone had to learn it from Sam to run their school...

>
> Yes, I was mentioning Sam Supalla's school, but I haven't heard more
> about it.  I only heard about it from the hearing person who tried to
> convince me that SignFont was a better system to use. :)

Smile. Well...Last I heard Sam's school closed in the Spring of
2003...He had a hard job convincing the parents of Deaf children etc...


>
> Sorry for dredging up the bad memories.  Now we return you to your
> regularly scheduled SignWriting instructional program.  ;)

Not your fault at all! It is understandable that Stefan asked that
question, since Stefan has some TrueType fonts that are really
beautiful and the name SignFont sounds like TrueType fonts, doesn't it?
smile...

So Stuart, do you have any questions on how to write SignWriting?
grin...

Val ;-)