[sw-l] Underlining proper names in vertical columns...

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 3, 2005

James Shepard-Kegl, Esq. wrote:
> They do if there is likely to be some confusion.   For example, in
> 1492
> Columbus sailed the ocean blue --- in the Santa Maria, the Nina and
> the
> Pinta.  Now, to an English speaker, there's no confusion.  To a
> Spaniard,
> "nina" means "girl" and "pinta" means "spot", so the words have to be
> capitalized to denote names of ships.  In Nicaraguan Sign, "Santa
> Maria"
> already is a specific sign ("for the Virgin Mary"), but "nina" gets
> signed
> as "girl" and "pinta" gets signed as "spot", so, indeed, there must
> be a way
> to signify proper nouns to avoid confusion.  Obviously, color-
> coding won't
> work on a whiteboard, either.

Hello James and Stefan -
Thank you for this excellent explanation.

You have both convinced me now, that we need a new punctuation symbol
that is equivalent to a "capital letter" in spoken languages...And
this new Punctuation Symbol will make it possible to mark proper
names or anything else you wish to capitalize...perhaps even the
beginning sign in a sentence?...

Color is out. You are right. A daily writing system cannot be
dependent on color pens....

And underlining for horizontal writing is working for you, and that
is great...Your students already know it, so no need to change
anything! I will try to document this in our Lessons in SignWriting
textbook in time...

When it comes to changing all of my vertical documents...that is a
huge job and the side-underline conflicts with another symbol so I am
not sure yet what to do with the vertical columns...

But in time we will find a solution!

Val ;-)