TrueType Font for Mundbildschrift?

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
May 10, 2007

Stuart Thiessen wrote:
> I understand that many European sign languages do depend on  
> mouthings to distinguish different signs so I think Stefan's  
> development of the Mundbildschrift is great for that.

Maybe part of the reason for that, is that some signed languages do  
not use fingerspelling very much. At least when I lived in Denmark,  
my very brief encounters with Danish Sign Language...seemed to be  
that they did not use fingerspelling nearly as much as they do in  
United States, and so some foreign words for names, brought into the  
language from the surrounding spoken language, there seemed to be  
little other choice, if you could not fingerspell that foreign word,  
to mouth the word, while signing a sign......the mouthing seemed to  
differentiate between two different concepts, that were signed the  
same except for the mouthing...

My talk yesterday touched on a hundred subjects in 30 minutes...the  
five sections of Movement Writing, how I entered the professions,  
deafness, Deaf Education issues, languages, international issues,  
encoding by the ISO, ASL is not just fingerspelling (someone asked me  
if you spelled every word then why would you need to have a different  
grammar? smile) and yes...someone asked about lip reading ...so I  
answered for two minutes....so I mentioned Stefan's success with  
teaching his students in Germany..and yes...I am very proud to tell  
everyone about the European use of SignWriting...I also mentioned the  
Deaf Action Committee in the US (smile) and the issues of Deaf  
Culture, and preserving rich beautiful Deaf poetry and even a new  
PH.D dissertation that has just been completed in Jordan, studying  
SignWriting with Deaf children there....and I was just getting to  
teach them how to read vertical sentences, and darn it, my time was up!

I can't wait to tell you about Jordan...but I am waiting for the  
information myself ;-))

Val ;-)