Minimalist

[Stuart Thiessen]

While that may work online, I am concerned that colored text would be 
too costly for printed materials. While many things move online, I 
don't think we will ever fully achieve the "printless" society that 
many envision for the future ... at least not anytime soon. I think we 
need to have a solution that is useful in black and white.  It may mean 
that the print form of sign languages may differ from the "spoken" form 
just like the print form of spoken languages often have some 
differences compared to the spoken form.

A perfect example of this might be a grandpa who tells stories to his 
grandkids and uses different voices to depict the characters in the 
story. That sort of thing is difficult to capture with a writing 
system. Sometimes it can be handled if there is a dialectical 
difference between the different voices or something. But if they are 
the same dialect, but a different kind of voice, then it is much harder 
to write. So that is why we have "And the wolf said, "...." in English 
and other European languages. I haven't had a chance to study how other 
languages handle it.

In our case, perhaps we might want to borrow something from glossing 
and use a subscripted number to indicate a specific space or something. 
Who knows?  We will have to play with this and see what the writers and 
the readers like.

Thanks,

Stuart

On Sep 6, 2005, at 19:59, Steve Slevinski wrote:

>  For conversations between multiple signers, I believe formatting and 
> color should suffice.  The colon has been used to identify who is 
> signing.  If you colorize the signers name sign, then the text becomes 
> even clearer.  Or if you don't like the color option, you could always 
> underline the name signs instead.
>
> <unknown.jpg>
>
>
>  To identify the common signing area, perhaps color could be used 
> again.  A short note in the beginning of the text would assign the 
> purpose to a color. 
>  Such as, the common area is written in blue.
> <unknown.jpg>
>
>  Just some thoughts,
>  -Steve
>
>
> rocha at ATLAS.UCPEL.TCHE.BR wrote:Valerie,
>>
>>
>>> Before you go, I want to ask you...How was the presentation in France
>>> in June? The one that presented transcribing video?
>>>
>>   Unfortunately, it happened that I was not able to attend the 
>> conference :-(
>>
>>   But later I talked to many french colleagues that participated in 
>> it.
>> And I came to realize an interesting point: the french are mostly
>> interested in the representation of dialogs, not of narratives.
>>
>>   That is, they are more interested in learning what are the features
>> needed for writing conversations between two or more people, than in
>> writing stories.
>>
>>   It seems that in sign languages, as in oral languages, the writing 
>> of
>> dialogs will require special symbols and text formatting not usually
>> present in the writing of narratives (for instance, indication of who
>> has taken the turn in the dialog).
>>
>>   But in sign languages, it seems that there is a special additional
>> requirement: since virtual objects are created in the shared signing
>> space, so people can refer to them during the dialogs, it seems that 
>> the
>> writing of dialogs require the explicit representation of such 
>> objects,
>> besides the representation of the two (or more) participants in the
>> dialog.
>>
>>   I briefly tried to get a solution for that in SignWriting. I came 
>> out
>> with the conclusion that it is not a problem that can be solved easily
>> (but I confess I didn't try really hard :-)
>>
>>   There was a paper by Patrice Dalle and Boris Lenseigne, presented 
>> at the
>> conference, that has pictures clearly illustrating the issue. It is at
>>
>>     http://tals.limsi.fr/actes/s7.pdf
>>
>> (the full proceedings is at http://tals.limsi.fr/actes ).
>>
>>   By just looking at the dialog pictures at that paper one can 
>> understand
>> the issue: How can a SignWriting dialog be structured so that those
>> small elements representing objects and relations between them be
>> represented in a clear way, showing that they are all accessible to 
>> both
>> participants in the dialog?
>>
>>   Anyway, just the point that french people are more interested in 
>> dialogs
>> than in story telling is an interesting point :-)
>>
>>   All the best,
>>
>>   Antônio Carlos
>>
>> -----------------------------
>> Antônio Carlos da Rocha Costa
>> Escola de Informática - UCPel
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
> <moz-screenshot-8.jpg><moz-screenshot-10.jpg>
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