[sw-l] im a very poor salesman of the SW!

[Charles Butler]

Hi Sandy,

You definitely need a primer, with examples from BSL.  As far as "just the handshapes from ASL" - handshapes in ASL are about 54, for Libras around 58 (this is off the top of my head) so a simple listing is not easy.  However, if one were to take a book on BSL and then go through it and take examples from BSL literature and list those handshapes and combinations (such as both the manual alphabet and commonly used handshapes) in kind of a playful dictionary format (use words like ball, balloon, kite, fish, policeman, Queen) you'd likely get a book that's both exciting and short but gets the point across.  Even taking a sentence from Gilbert and Sullivan might be fun.

"Then one of us will be a queen and sit on a golden throne,
With a crown instead of a hat on her head and diamonds all her own,
With a beautiful gown of gold and green, I've often understood.
I wonder whether she's wear a feather, I rather think she should."

In that one paragraph you have active and passive voice, fun signs, colors, objects, people, places, dresses, and motion.  If you were signing that sentence in ISL, NISL, BSL, how would you do it?  The verbal structure would not be English, but BSL, many of the words are iconographic (a crown on the head, diamond necklaces, gold, green).  It actually could be quite fun, and revealing, and put a smirk on the smile of the researchers.

Charles Butler


Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org> wrote:
Hi List!

As far as being a SW salesman goes, I can get people interested but I can't
get them to actually get round to looking at the SW pages on the Web.

So I tried printing off a copy of the SW manual so I could give it to anyone
who was interested, since people often like to read paper books that they
wouldn't want to read them on the Web.

The problem is that it's two inches thick and they always hand it back
because they reckon they don't need to look inside it to know that it's far
too complicated!

What I really need is a manual that gives a good introduction to SW in say,
20 or 40 pages.

One problem with the manual as it stands is that there a lot of introductory
pages with photos of people, and then there are pages with huge pictures of
handshapes, and most pages have a lot of white space or list all possible
orientations of every handshape - and not just the ones needed to write,
say, ASL.

Isn't there a slimmer version of the manual in PDF that I could hand to
someone without it getting rejected as an impossibly fat book?

Sandy


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