How many symbols do we use in SignWriting? Part 2b

[MARIA AZZOPARDI]

Dear Valerie, Charles, Stefan, Steve and all friends.

Wow. I feel like I've eaten a book - there was SO much important
information going round all those emails - thank you ever so much!!

A few points I took note of:

1. I totally agree that for specific languages the number of symbols you
count depends on HOW you count. I love the example of the symbols in
English - I never actually thought of it that way, true - adding
punctuation symbols, capital letters and numbers - the symbol set for
English is much higher than 24.

2. I am so glad there is the Symbol Frequency - this is invaluable! (thank
you steve!) Over the past few weeks I've been teaching SignWriting to a
few interpreters. This was the first time ever that I exposed students
SPECIFICALLY to the symbols we use in Maltese Sign Language. For instance
in our language we don't even have one instance from the handgroup 7, so I
told them they don't need this group. From the manual I manually marked
all the symbols we use in LSM (based on my intuition from years of
SignWriting and more recently from long documents we have written) - but
to have the Symbol Frequency just makes it incredible easy to do!

3. Stefan, although it's true that the Iswa2008 has enough symbols to
write DGS and yet more than you will ever need - still I strongly believe
that it would be good to extract from the Iswa2008 a symbolset for DGS -
why you may ask? to make the signwriting of DGS more standard. If you
expose your students to a symbolset, when they write, even though they may
produce handshapes which are NOT in the symbolset for DGS -I am SURE that
they will FIT the handshape they produce into a close-enough symbol. To
give an example from speech - if we did not have conventions for spelling
English, then people with all different dialects would choose different
spellings for the way they pronounce the words - and having so many
differnet ways of spelling the same word - well imagine that! How would we
understand each other in writing?

This links directly to what Valerie commented about the past 80 handshapes
that were enough to write ASL before, but now, since there are more
available, then users of ASL are simply using more than 80 handshapes!
Why? Because there are sO MANY individual differences (idiosyncracries),
so many slightly different ways of configuring your hands etc etc.. yet
many of these slight differences DO NOT need to come out in the spellings.

That is what my dissertation is about - what is the MINIMUM required in
spelling signs - enough for a signer of Maltese Sign Language (or any
other language for that matter) to READ! not to make the sign exactly as
it is produced (phonetically) in real life but to READ.

So, I'm not only after HOW MANY SYMBOLS are needed to write Maltese Sign
Language. But also how to write the langauge at word-level using as few
symbols as possible - just enough to read and understand the signs. ALSO I
will be looking at sentence level - how to pattern all verbal inflection
etc using signwriting - and I mean PATTERN - just like in spoken languages
where past tense in English is always -ed. Or in Italian where you know
who the person is because of the verbal inflection  -parl-o parl-i,
parl-ano etc etc. Although patterns often occur in spatial movements which
may vary depending on the position of two signers - STILL a pattern needs
to be established, irrelevant to individual differences of how people are
standing in relation to one another

Have I lost you? Hope not. Let me know where I wasn't clear enough.

Thanks again everyone for your invaluable input, and thanks Valerie for so
much of your time - I got tired reading the emails - let alone you writing
so many.

Maria






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