common criticisms of signwriting?

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
November 15, 2009

There will be Unicode for SignWriting someday...mark my words...just  
as there will be a SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin too! smile...

Val ;-)

----------------


On Nov 15, 2009, at 12:57 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> Hoi,
> I am confused.. ASCII is a subset of the Latin script. Cyrillic and  
> Arabic are also not fonts but scripts. I fail to understand how you  
> can use sound based characters for signs. Then again, I am not doing  
> any modern research .... The only advantage I see is indeed that  
> current hardware supports these scripts. If you want to make use of  
> modern hardware, an alternate approach would be to get SignWriting  
> graohemes included in the Unicode system.
> Thanks,
>       GerardM
>
> 2009/11/15 Sandy Fleming <sandy at fleimin.demon.co.uk>
> On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 11:55 +0000, Trevor Jenkins wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Of course, if you showed some written English to a hearing person who
> had never seen written language before, the reaction would also be
> confusion, so that's not necessary an argument against less schematic
> writing systems.
>
> I feel that Stokoe, HamNoSys and SignWriting all run into the same
> problem: they're all falling behind with respect to the advances that
> have been made in sign language linguistics since they were invented.
>
> I think that any current sign language writing system will need to be
> revamped in the light of these findings.
>
> In linguistics, for example, signs tend to be described in terms of a
> few bases (head, trunk, opposite hand and suchlike), and it's
> acknowledged that non-compound signs are signed on only one of these.
> Moreover, the "settings" or positions at which a sign is made on a  
> base
> is simply high, low, left, right, far and near, so positioning could
> easily be incorporated into a simple linear writing system.
>
> Similarly, orientation is more simply described in modern linguistics
> than it generally is in available writing systems, and handshapes  
> can be
> described in terms of a few components so that a huge character set  
> for
> describing all the handshapes isn't really required.
>
> I think that a relatively simple, linear system that could be written
> with a fairly small alphabet of ASCII characters (or any preferred  
> font:
> say, Arabic, Cyrillic or a specially designed one) without  
> diacritics is
> well within our grasp in the light of modern research.
>
> Although this would look like a normal alphabet-based writing system  
> on
> the page and would have to be learned properly, the characters chosen
> could nevertheless be graphically motivated to aid the learning  
> process.
>
> And of course the advantage of not needing to write special software  
> for
> anything would be immense. If two people learned it they could
> immediately start communicating in sign language by SMS, email or
> anything else without having to set any software up.
>
> Classifier constructions in sign languages would be the real test of
> such a writing system, but my feeling is that if someone could write
> plain signs well in such a system, they'd be able to write classifier
> constructions with the same sort of creative thinking that goes into
> executing such constructions in the living language.
>
> Sandy Fleming
> http://bsltext.org/
>
>
>
>
>
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