common criticisms of signwriting?

[Trevor Jenkins]

Interesting topic. One criticism that I've heard about SignWriting
(from sign language interpreters) is that it is too ideograhic! They
prefer either Stokoe or HamNoSys notations! Yet if you show a Deaf
people something transcribed in Stokoe or HamNoSys and the reaction is
utter confusion. This is exacerbated beacuse the BSL fingerspelling
alphabet (I'm in the UK) is two-handed and completely different from
the one-handed ASL alphabet that is used to label handshapes in
Stokoe.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 8:40 PM, Erika Hoffmann <erhoffma at oberlin.edu> wrote:
> Hi! I mentioned the last time I posted that I'm working on a paper
> about SignWriting for presentation at the American Anthropological
> Association meeting in December.
> One of the things I'm thinking about is the ways in which Signwriting
> and Signwriten documents can be used to critique dominant ideologies
> about language and writing that are common in Linguistics and related
> disciplines. At the same time, I want to note that the radical nature
> of the script can sometimes be a social barrier to its adoption by
> signers (particularly because of the historical relationship between
> the Linguistic validation of sign languages with the social validation
> of Deaf signers).
> I'm wondering if any of you would be willing to share some of the ways
> you've heard people criticize or dismiss SSW (or point me to places
> where these opinions are aired). I'm looking for people's concerns
> about the script itself (i.e., "it looks like hieroglyphics") rather
> than the other common arguments about the need for a script at all
> (i.e., "Deaf people can just write in English").
> Thanks!
> Best,
> Erika
>
>
>
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-- 
Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!



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