Role shifting

[Valerie Sutton]

Hello Stuart!
I figured you would say this, Stuart, so it is no surprise, and of  
course no offense...

The Unit Lines have been used since 1974, so obviously I liked them  
once...

In fact, they are used in the National Technical Institute for the  
Deaf's technical signs manuals still today for SignWriting, combined  
with a large Smooth Line, that came from DanceWriting...so they are  
definitely used today...

And I know you use them too...

I am just expressing a problem I have when reading them.... when I am  
reading large documents in SignWriting, they do not feel like  
Quotation Marks to me, because there are lines that then get broken  
up from column to column...Quotation Marks are tiny little symbols,  
and so are the question marks that go upside down in Spanish...so  
they are not lines extending over columns and columns...that get  
broken and one forgets what they related to...

I think the Unit Lines did better when we wrote horizontally, like  
the Parkhurst's novel. The Unit Lines in the vertical columns don't  
seem to work as well for me for some reason...

Val ;-)

------------------






On Jul 10, 2007, at 1:49 PM, Stuart Thiessen wrote:

> Personally, I like the unit lines and I would disagree (no offense,  
> Valerie :) ) that it creates a feel of a "linguistic notation  
> system". If a facial expression continues over a sequence of signs,  
> then we have two choices. We can either write each face or we can  
> write it as being "spread across" that sequence of signs. To me, it  
> is no different than quotation marks, parathenses, and other such  
> marks that spoken languages use everyday. In many cases, I would  
> predict it will be used for limited and specific situations like  
> yes-no questions, questions like who, what, where, when, why, or  
> other similar situations. Even Spanish has something like that when  
> they do questions like ¿Como esta usted?
>
> I personally find it a very simple way to reduce the number of  
> heads I have to use in a sequence of signs if it will be the same  
> across those signs. If it will vary, then I write them individually.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Stuart