left, right and together arrows

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
March 10, 2006

On Mar 10, 2006, at 3:38 AM, Ingvild Roald wrote:

> For years we in Norway have been using the 'together' arrow when  
> the two hands are moving as a unit, even if they are not touching.  
> This will be when the hands are in certain classifier shapes, and  
> what is 'really' moving is the thing that the hand holds between  
> them. Just general 'paralell' is not enough for our use of the  
> 'both' arrow (sorry Stefan, I know I have written some signs  
> violating this rule, as you have pointed out).
>
> Personally, and with at least some deaf Norwegian signers behind  
> me, I feel that the 'togheter' arrow should be used (prioritized list)
> 1) when the two hands are painting the same route, contact or no  
> contact
> 2) when the two hands are moving in contact, even if the routes do  
> not overlap
> 3) when the two hands are moving as a unit, as in some classifier  
> signs, even if they are not touching
> 4) when the sign would otherwise be hard to read because of  
> crowding of symbols.


Hello Ingvild, Stefan, Charles, Philippe and Everyone!
Thank you for your ideas above. Perhaps for Norwegian Sign Language,  
where you do not have large dictionaries already created, this might  
work fine. This is similar to the way the Danes use the arrows...I  
think...I am not sure...so that Scandinavia would be similar...

For writing ASL, this would be an enormous change. Hundreds, perhaps  
thousands of signs would have to be changed in all our  
publications...so I am not going to force ourselves to re-write  
everything...if we get new rules, we need to make them a choice and  
not mandatory...We could simply relax the current rules to include  
certain exceptions...and I could teach the old and the new in our books.

Just your number 1 would change hundreds of signs in ASL...I would  
assume you would write the attached sign with general arrows? What is  
the difference between your number 1 and number 3 above?

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