[sw-l] Suggested Future Feature for Puddle

[Sandy Fleming]

Thanks, Charles - I thought that was the group I clicked on, but anyway,
I've now corrected it to .

I've also added the sign for "if it rains" to the dictionary as , just to
illustrate how the conditional tense is done in BSL (ie what in English is
done with "if").

The reason is that I've been trying out SignMail and Translate, and I run
into the immediate problem of how to vary the head to get different
inflections of the same sign.

I suppose one way of dealing with this would be to put "inflections" into
the dictionary as signs with just the head and shoulders, then as long as we
type in columns the inflection will more or less look like part of the sign?
For example we could type "if rain" and get what looks like the above sign
although it's really head/shoulder part plus hands from the dictionary. This
could be used for all sorts of things such as adding a smiling or unhappy
face to the same sign, and nodding and shaking the head - it's all very
important.

The only problem is that the signs could get split at the bottom of a
column. Would it be possible to be able to compose complete signs from
glosses which are in the form "head/shoulder hands"? Then for example a
gloss like "if rain nod car" could be used to make the BSL "If it rains I'll
take the car". Perhaps the head qualifiers could be distinguished in some
way in the dictionary such as being in brackets or having a plus sign after
it to show that it's not a complete sign. So it would be glossed "(if) rain
(nod) car" or "if+rain nod+car".

I know it's a bit of work (and I don't know whether that's an understatement
or not!) but it would much improve the quality of the language in sign mails
and translations.

What do you think, Stephen, Val?

Sandy

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