How many symbols do we use in SignWriting? Introduction

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
August 18, 2009

> On Aug 17, 2009, at 1:06 PM, MARIA AZZOPARDI wrote:
>> In the IPA there are a total of 107 distinct letters (52  
>> diacritics, and
>> four prosody marks) - that's a great deal less - to write all the  
>> spoken
>> langauges in the world.


Hello Maria, Charles and Everyone!

Thank you Maria and Charles, for your messages...

As you already know...but for the sake of a summary...

The acronym IPA stands for the "International Phonetic Alphabet", used  
for spoken languages.

The acronym ISWA stands for the "International SignWriting Alphabet",  
used for signed languages.

Neither the IPA nor the ISWA are used in their entirety, when writing  
one spoken or one sign language.

English does not use all the symbols in the IPA. Actually, for daily  
use, English really uses a tiny section of the Roman Alphabet. English  
actually uses far more than 26 letters when writing for daily use. It  
also has punctuation symbols, but those punctuation symbols are not  
listed in the number "26" which everyone always mentions. So to say  
that English only uses 26 symbols to write a novel is not accurate  
either!

And in the same way, American Sign Language, or Maltese Sign Language,  
do not use all the symbols in the ISWA to write their languages. Each  
written sign language, picks and chooses symbols from the ISWA to  
write their language, so each sign language uses a much smaller  
symbolset. And if you take away all Punctuation Symbols from the  
number you are stating, like people do when they say that English has  
26 letters, then the number of symbols for writing sign languages  
becomes even smaller...so it is all the way you choose to count that  
matters...so that people do not become frightened that they have to  
memorize large numbers of symbols, which they do not...so I guess it  
is a matter of "fair counting" and what criteria one is looking for in  
the "list of symbols"...

Neither the number 35,000 nor 25,000 are accurate. Neither are true.

But I will show you how I explain this to people in two more messages...

First, in Part 1, I will discuss how I personally answer the question,  
when I am teaching people who are new to SignWriting and the ISWA...

Second, in Part 2, I will discuss how to search our software  
SignPuddle, the SignWriting Image Server, and the SymbolBank web site,  
to find how many symbols your specific Sign Language uses...yes...we  
have ways to pin this down in our software, so there is not as much  
guessing as before...(thank you, Steve!)...

Part 1 is coming next -

Val ;-)



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