Writing Dialogues in Signed Languages

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
September 16, 2005

On Sep 15, 2005, at 6:02 PM, Steve Slevinski wrote:
> That being said, I think the best editor available for SignWriting  
> is pencil and paper. Nothing stands between the writer and the  
> writing.  The writer either knows the symbols and the conventions  
> or the writer isn't ready to write.  If the writer doesn't know how  
> to write something, they can try their best or make a note and then  
> move on.  I don't think a dictionary should be consulted for the  
> first draft, that would only interference with the writer's ideas.   
> Write quickly, then edit.

This is such an excellent description of how SignWriting began. In  
1981, our non-profit organization in California got a grant. We hired  
around 10 Deaf adults who were either born into Deaf families, or  
were born profoundly Deaf and grew up in Deaf residential schools  
where they used Sign Language as their first mode of communication.

There were no computers for everyday people back in 1981. Sure they  
existed at universities, but the Apple 2 e and c were not on the  
market yet, and MS-DOS wasn't either. The PC and Apple computers came  
out around 1983-1985, so this was before the personal computer.

Deaf adults had never written their language before and there were no  
computers to type with. No typewriters either. We used pens and  
pencils and paper. And some of the Deaf staff members did not know  
spoken languages well, and so we chose not to use spoken languages  
when writing.

We had no SignWriting dictionary to refer to, since none existed.  
These were the first 10 Deaf adult scribes in history. In 1982, I  
went to Denmark to teach and 30 teachers took a seminar to learn  
SignWriting, and so it started in the first schools in 1982-1983 in  
Denmark.

But the 10 Deaf adults in California were the first to write directly  
in the movements of their natural language, with no book as their  
guide. We all sat in the same room together and I taught them to  
write the movements. They would show me the sign and we would write  
it together. At that time we used full stick figures, and we wrote  
receptive from left to right.

BUT one thing is for sure. We were NOT dependent on any dictionary,  
no book and no spoken language. No glosses were ever used. That is  
how we wrote the articles written in the SignWriter Newspaper by  
hand. Then after the full article was written, then a hearing  
interpreter did the English translation.

The advent of computers brought on the problem of being dependent on  
diictionaries...but at least we did not have to write by hand!

Val ;-)