POLAND Report on the presentation on Brussels symposium

[Lucyna Dlugolecka]

Hello List,
Thanks to the materials I received from Valerie and found on the web I 
could do an interesting presentation to report what we did at the First 
European SignWriters Organization Symposium that was held in Brussels 
last summer. Kathleen's presentation and Alessio's report were 
especially helpful. We discussed some of the related issues. For example 
we agreed that face symbols are not needed to differentiate homonyms. 
There are many homonyms in spoken languages and there is no problem with 
understanding them in the context. Of course, there may be phonetic or 
graphic homonyms. In Polish we may have some problems with writing 
phonetic homonyms but nothing is so simple in the world and we have just 
to learn writing rules. For example, words masaż (massage) and masarz 
(butcher) are spelt the same way. But there are some rules that help us 
remember that masaż is to be written with "ż" at the end, not "rz".
In case of graphic homonyms, like "rola" that can mean "a role", "soil" 
or "a roll" there isn't any problem with understanding, either... 
Likewise we don't need additional symbols to differentiate sign that 
have several meanings.
My article on the symposium, written for the Swiat Ciszy magazine for 
the Deaf have been also published, but it's just narrative, while my 
presentation brought up more in-depth theoretical problems.As soon as I 
have scanned the article, I'll post it to the List.

Lucy