TAIWAN Sign Language Dictionary Online

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
August 3, 2005

Dear SW List, and Hope!
Hope Hurlbut, who has written signed languages in Malaysia, using  
SignWriting, years ago, working with SIL (I believe?) is that right,  
Hope? smile....Anyway...Hope is using SignWriting right now for  
Taiwan Sign Language .....Perhaps using SignWriter DOS? I am not  
sure.. Meanwhile, Hope does not have the time to read all the  
messages on the SW List so Hope is not on the List at the moment, but  
I have Hope's permission to post my answers to the List, so we all  
can share anyway!

So here is Hope's recent message to me...

--------------------

On Aug 3, 2005, at 2:15 PM, Hope Hurlbut wrote:

Dear VAlerie,
Thank you for all the sign language sites you have sent.
I hope I can plug-in to one of them soon.  Right now I am working on  
Taiwan Sign Language, and inputting the signs from the word lists I  
collected.  That is a very restricted set of data as you can  
imagine.  Some words have up to 10 different forms, others only have  
one or two.  Each list consists of 240 words, so potentially there  
could be 2400 signs, though in fact I am guessing that there are only  
about 1500 different forms.  When I worked on the statistics, and  
combined the lists for each city, the similarities were from 89-96%.   
If there were 2 different signs for the same meaning in a city, and  
one of those signs was similar to one in a different city then they  
were considered similar.  That assumes that within a city the signing  
was understandable between all Deaf signers.  One person might use  
one sign, and another uses another sign, but they both understand  
both signs, even though each prefers to use their own.
Sincerely, Hope

--------------------

Val answers...

Hi Hope!
You could use the Taiwan SignPuddle dictionary on the web to add your  
signs if you wish...

Go to:

Taiwan SignPuddle
http://www.SignBank.org/signpuddle/sgn-TW

There are exactly two signs in the Taiwan dictionary at the moment,  
so we could use your help! Attached is one of them...try to see  
yourself by going to the url above and then, click on Search  
Dictionary...smile...I can teach you how to add signs to the  
dictionary if you are interested...it is quite easy...and it might be  
helpful to your project because it has less problems than using the  
old MS-DOS on modern operating systems...

Val ;-)


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