SignWriting Standard Colours

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
July 6, 2008

On Jul 6, 2008, at 4:20 AM, Sandy Fleming wrote:
> Sorry to disturb the list for such a simple request, but I need to  
> know
> the values of the standard colours for SignWriting symbols (where the
> colour of the heads is different from the colour of the hands and so
> on), but I can't seem to find the information on the website. Can  
> anyone enlighten me? Thanks!! Sandy



Hello Sandy and Everyone!

Thank you for your question ;-)

Back in the late 1990's, Darline Clark Gunsauls and I worked together  
on books for the SignWriting Literacy Project. We wanted to create  
good storybooks and workbooks for teaching Deaf children SignWriting.

So Darline wrote children's stories in ASL, and also signed four  
stories on videotape. I put the books together. It was a lot of fun  
and the books have been used ever since.

One of the decisions was to try teaching the symbols with a color  
coding system, in one book, that compared the SignWriting with still  
photos taken from the videos. You can see the beginning of this book  
as web pages, starting here:

Learn to Read ASL in SignWriting
http://www.signwriting.org/lessons/readasl/

The color coding system is described here:
http://www.signwriting.org/lessons/readasl/learn002.html

The complete manual can be downloaded here:
http://www.SignWriting.org/archive/docs3/sw0238-US-LearnReadASL-Goldilocks.pdf

The reason for the color coding?

It specifies categories and types of symbols, for teaching purposes.  
It is useful in the classroom to clarify that this symbol is a  
punctuation symbol, and this symbol is a Contact Symbol, and so forth...

It is also very beautiful, and we all enjoy it because of the colorful  
optimistic feeling it gives. So we started calling it "Standard  
Colors" in SignPuddle, and I am happy to see people using it.

But you can also make an entire document ONE color too, and that is  
fine too...

So the Standard Colors are a teaching tool for teaching the different  
symbols, and the colors seem to help people learn to read SignWriting,  
although we do not have any data to prove that, it seems to be true.

By the way, for the new ISWA that will be released in the upcoming  
SignPuddle 2.0, the Standard Colors are the same, but we have added  
one new color...Brown...for a new category of symbols called "Advanced  
Sorting"...They are "Location Symbols for Sorting" that are used for  
some sophisticated SignSpellings for sorting dictionaries, but the  
symbols themselves are not actually written with in the actual  
signs...they are only for computer-sorting to give more details to the  
software as to how to sort a series of signs that have close  
SignSpellings, but the only difference is a different location  
place...so that is one new color added to the Standard Colors...Brown.

Here are the ISWA colors. As you can see, there are 7 Symbol  
Categories in the ISWA, and the Standard Colors generally identify a  
Symbol Category, with one exception...the Contact Symbols.




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