Terminology

Fri Nov 30 18:14:10 UTC 2007

Thank you for this good point, Charles - Point well taken!

Val ;-)

--------

On Nov 30, 2007, at 10:12 AM, Charles Butler wrote:

> Val wrote: Just a thought...but it is not a big deal to me...just  
> as long as we
> are writing signed languages, the terminology in the hearing world is
> not very important.
>
> Hey Val, and others,
>
> Would that we could convince the hearing linguistic world that  
> "sign language literature" is not sign language vocabulary  
> clusters, such as "narratives", "medical descriptions", "legal  
> discourses", etc.  The use of "literature" to mean something that  
> is NOT"written down" really belies the term.
>
> The more we have REAL literature in Sign Languages, the less that  
> the Sign Language linguistics department can continue to misuse the  
> term.
>
> Charles Butler
>
>
> Valerie Sutton <signwriting at mac.com> wrote:
> SignWriting List
> November 30, 2007
>
> Wow...this is amazing, Steve. Thank you for your hard work, and for
> this message explaining it!
>
> 2008 will be an exciting year...
>
> I just have two Ethiopian handshapes to add, and then I will have the
> handshapes for the ISWA ready...then I need to work on the arrows and
> circles...people want choices of larger arrows and circles ;-)
>
> So the ISWA work is going well, so we can release it in 2008...
>
> Regarding terminology...I think we need to follow the Unicode
> terminology...as you can see on this web page, the term "character"
> is what Everson uses instead of the term "letter", and I am guessing,
> but I believe their term "symbol" stands for symbols for punctuation
> and other symbols needed to write with, but the symbols are not an
> alphabetic character....
>
> Universal Character Set (UCS)
> International Standard ISO/IEC 10646-1 and computer industry
> implementation Unicode
> http://www.signwriting.org/forums/software/unicode/unicod00.html
>
> And trying to follow that terminology will become complex for
> SignWriting, because in other writing systems a character does not
> flop and rotate...so I thought we could call our BaseSymbols (around
> 500 basic symbols) "characters" or "letters" and the flops and
> rotations could be called "symbols"....
>
> Just a thought...but it is not a big deal to me...just as long as we
> are writing signed languages, the terminology in the hearing world is
> not very important
>
> I am going back to working on the handshapes!
>
> Have a great day everyone -
>
> Val ;-)
>
> ----------
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Nov 30, 2007, at 9:00 AM, Steve Slevinski wrote:
>
> > Hi list,
> >
> > There's been renewed interest in Unicode lately. I think the main
> > reason to use Unicode is to reduce size.
> > I have a proposal for Binary SignWriting that will integrate with
> > Unicode. The specifics may change, but the basic idea offers a lot
> > of promise. http://signpuddle.net/index.php?id=Binary%20SignWriting
> > This will be an open standard that will work with SignText and
> > replace the other markups and formats.
> > As an example, consider the following section from "The Cat in the
> > Hat" by Cherie Wren.
> > http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/canvas.php?ui=1&sgn=5&sid=130
> > This has 164 letters (or symbols) from the SignWriting alphabet;
> > has 28 words (or signs) and is displayed using 7 image columns.
> > Here's the size breakdown:
> > Image Columns: 23 k
> > SWML: 10k
> > Binary SW: 0.64k
> > This is a tremendous saving. Binary SW has a nice hex
> > representation and it can be used in files, online, and databases.
> > Binary SW integrates well with either font files or the current
> > image files. It's compatible with Unicode and the current
> > SignText. It can use style sheets for presentation.
> > There will be several types of SignText plugins: client (FireFox
> > plugin), server (PHP and Ajax), and application (python, visual
> > basic, ...). All will use Binary SW with the new ISWA. I'll be
> > releasing the plugins as open source under the GPL on
> > SourceForge.net. If you want to participate in the coding, send me
> > an email discussing your interest. 2008 is going to be a fun year.
> > The specifications will be appearing on my site http://
> > www.signpuddle.net as open standards and proposals. I'd welcome
> > any comments, feedback or alternative ideas.
> > Regards,
> > -Steve
> >
> >
> >
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