Improvements in Sign Writing dictionaries.

Wed Nov 25 14:49:35 UTC 2009

Then I'm in complete agreement with you. But for dyslexics, such as
myself, the mention of Bing at the start constitutes a topic-comment
constraint making all your comments about ordering specific to search
engines rather than consistency of SignWriting writing.

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 2:37 PM, Charles Butler <chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com>wrote:

>  Stop, you are misconstruing my point, I'm not saying anything about Bing
> or anything other search engine, but SW in its own right.  Signed languages
> need dictionaries, just like any other language, and the ordering system
> needs to be consistent across the board so that two signed languages can be
> compared in print and one knows where in the corpus to find a particular
> sign.  When I started a 4-language dictionary in Brazil, comparing ASL and
> LIBRAS in print makes no sense if one is relying on English or Portuguese as
> the primary language.
>
> Stokoe has its ordering system, SW has had an ordering system since its
> creation, the Sign-Symbol-Sequence which does go handshape, orientation,
> location, movement, facial expression, it is within the 10 larger groups
> that I am looking to impose order so that I know, for example that:
>
>      *100*
> one hundred
>
> Used for people, places, things, not money
>
> comes before:
>
>     *for*
>
> Sign: Reader<http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/spreader.html?bsw=0080b980f8c0f8b30111f8e5f8ba8d48f8e5f89e>
> Modified: November 14, 2009 11:38
> Puddle page 10501
>
>
> Comes before:
>
>
>      *100*
> one hundred
>
> page number
>
> Searching purely for the dominant hand, orientation, and rotation.
>
> If I am going to print a dictionary, it has to have some order to it, not
> everything is in a database searchable by everything when one is printing.
>  That's my point.  If it is to be entirely in Sign Language first and then
> spoken language second, following the alphabetic rendering of the Roman
> Alphabet does not lend itself to this kind of search and comparison.
>
> Charles
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* Trevor Jenkins <bslwannabe at gmail.com>
> *To:* SignWriting List <sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu>
> *Sent:* Wed, November 25, 2009 9:00:52 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [sw-l] SignWriting on Bing - Improvements to Ordering Signs
>
> Hi Charles,
>
> I think the exact opposite! It is not that SignWriting (or HamNoSys or
> Stokoe) needs to accommodate Bing, Google, Wolfram Alpha or so later search
> engine. Instead the search engines need to change to accommodate SignWriting
> (and everyother non-Latinate script). We should not change the order in
> which signs are transcribed -- we do not alter the order of written lexemes
> so that search engines can retrieve web pages or emails. What we do need is
> for the present and all future search engines to be capable of searching on
> inflected sign forms (for example using the Stokoe classification of
> handshape, orientation, location, movement, repetition). It is us as users
> who impose order on lexems whether signs or words.
>
> We could be consistent in the way that we write each SignWriting symbol in
> the same way that there is a convention for how Stokoe is written generally
> following.*location, handshape, movement, orientation, repetition *and *
> alterations* as we describe the full sign.
>
> The ISWA will prove sufficent for Bing, Google, Alpha, Yahoo!, etc to
> retrieve on because it is part of Unicode. But let's not make their lives
> easier at the expense of making our own more difficult. We have better
> things to do than help Microsoft, Google, Wolfram or Yahoo! fleece us.
>
> On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Charles Butler <chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com
> > wrote:
>
>>  Hello Folks,
>>
>> Although I don't know how to change Bing, I'm glad that the system
>> footnotes my article, written back in 2001, on an ordering system for Sign
>> Writing.
>>
>> http://www.signwriting.org/archive/docs1/sw0066-SW-Journal-Butler.pdf
>>
>> I believe that we need to fine-tune the system so that the order of
>> handshapes follows logically, not simply as they are put into the system, as
>> having the articulated fingers starting straight, then together, then
>> curved, then bent, then crossed, seems logical but because of the order of
>> creation of a given handshape in the historical progression of the ISWAthat
>> sometimes does not follow.
>>
>> Ordering of the system now simply follows the order of the coding, so that
>> signs using the same articulators can be put into a system.  The
>> sign-shape-sequence which I have been trying to include or edit all the
>> signs I find to include, follows the glyphs in sequence order internal to a
>> sign.
>>
>> 1) Right hand (by hand group, sub-hand group, orientation, rotation)
>> 2) Left hand (by hand group, sub-hand group, orientation, rotation)
>> 3) Right hand contact (touch, grasp, brush, rub, in-between)
>> 4) Left hand contact (touch, grasp, brush, rub, in-between)
>> 5) Right hand location (include face or body) (location on the face,
>> location on the body)
>> 6) Left hand location (include face or body) (location on the face,
>> location on the body)
>> 7) Right hand movement (straight, curved, compound)
>> 8) Left hand movement (straight, curved, compound)
>> 9) Right hand speed (prosody) (slow, fast, smooth) There are signs in
>> LIBRAS where the only difference is the speed of the sign)
>> 10) Left hand speed (prosody) (slow, fast, smooth)
>> 11) Facial expression (I have no idea how to order facial expressions)
>> 12) Body posture (there are signs in LIBRAS where the only difference is a
>> posture)
>>
>> Now that we have a sufficiently large corpus, I would propose we use this
>> system for some experiments to see how clearly it actually works.  The only
>> change I would put in might be in defining 1) as "Dominant Hand" and 2) as
>> "non-Dominant Hand" but there are many signs such as "WITH" in ASL that have
>> no clearly dominant hand, so that it might be simpler to continue with
>> "right-hand dominant".
>>
>>
>>
>> Charles Butler
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Regards, Trevor.
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!
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