Ordering Signs

Thu Nov 26 17:10:00 UTC 2009

I understand your concern that SW is too young to mandate an order as it may grow linguistically for some situations.  However, the groups of handshapes are by fingers used, so though they are also ASL numbers, they are based on which fingers are being used in a sign, which makes them very useful in clustering signs together that all use the "index finger", the "index and middle finger", the "index finger, middle, and thumb", the "four fingers", "the four fingers and thumb", "the thumb and small finger", the "thumb and ring finger", the "thumb and index finger" and the "thumb/fist".  

One can cluster in any number of ways.  Just as aside, the Roman Alphabet is thought to have been based on a primer

A B C D 
E F G     H
I          J
       K     L
   M     N
O P Q     R
            S
            T
U V W X Y
            Z

There are missing sounds, but a grid in order of vowels, bilabials, gutterals, dentals, and liquids seems to work for me.

Charles

________________________________
From: Trevor Jenkins <bslwannabe at gmail.com>
To: SignWriting List <sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu>
Sent: Thu, November 26, 2009 10:52:39 AM
Subject: Re: [sw-l] Ordering Signs

I understand your viewpoint but don't agree with it. In English we order our dictionaries arbitrarily; over the years we have put the letters A, Z, Q, R U, etc into a conventional sequence of commencing A, B, C, D, E. Prior to 1755 the listing was not used for (English language) dictionaries. But the list itself tells us nothing--- other than that when we consult a dictionary all the words starting with A will appear before Z, and Y will be after M. It could have happened in any order. No significance is attached to that odering other than that we follow it. Mathematically A > B > C > D > ... > X > Y > Z does not hold. Acually there might be some sense in an order that commences with E, T, A, O, N, R, ... based as it is on the frequency of occurreences of the letters in English words. That A preceeds B preceeds C preceeds D ... is merely ossified custom and convention. It gives no assistance to those seeking a headword based solely upon phonetics.

Inclusion of national characters, the Spanish ch, the Welsh ll and dd, the Swedish national characters of å, ä, and ö is just as arbitrary regarding to their location in the sequence. The Swedish nationals appear at the end of the sequence after z but then v and w are intermingled in dictionaries despite being distinquished character glyphs.

The Stokoe ordering by tab, dez, sig, ori, loc are equallly arbitrary.That's the way he and his team arranged them in the ASL/English dictionary. It mimics the English alphabet. And, confuses the hell out of BSL users consulting the BSL/English dictionary because the names of the handshapes are drawn from the one-handed ASL fingerspell alphabet not the two-handed BSL alphabet.

Imposing an arbitrary order now on SignWriting may stifle future development. It's premate optimisation. We cannot know in these early days what is the best arrangment of lexemes within signs in which to organise dictionary --- indeed it might be completely different for those with an ASL one-handed fingerspelling alphabet from those with BSL two-handed fingerspelling alphabets.

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 6:52 AM, Charles Butler <chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

I would agree that they don't HAVE to be, particularly with signed languages that don't have the same character set, but I feel that there ought to be a universal ordering system that has some logic to it (straight, curved, bent, crossed) that would be a natural progression through the handshapes, ditto with lines and curves, facial expressions, etc.  It's the whole corpus that would be in order, so that if a handshape is used, one knows where it is, if it is not, it is skipped.  English and Spanish both use the Roman alphabet, and though English does not have a ch, an ll, there is an order that can be compared sound for sound.  
>
>Charles
>
>
>
>
________________________________
 From: Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>
>To: SignWriting List <sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu>
>Sent: Thu, November 26, 2009 12:19:14 AM
>Subject: Re: [sw-l] SignWriting on Bing - Improvements to Ordering Signs
>
>>
>Hoi,
>Sorry, but you are wrong. SignWriting is currently not part of Unicode and, it would be in an associated standard, the CLDR where you would find the information about the collation or sorting order of languages using in SignWriting. As it is, the collation of languages using the Latin script each have their own collation because they are not the same. The Dutch collation has a character that is nowadays written with two characters, "ij" tha has its place after the "w" for instance. Consequently the collation or sorting order CAN be the same for every sign language written in SignWriting, it however does not need to be that way.
>>
>Thanks,
>     Gerard
>
>
>2009/11/25 Trevor Jenkins <bslwannabe at gmail.com>
>
>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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>>>
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>>
>>
>>-- 
>>Regards, Trevor.
>>
>><>< Re: deemed!
>> 
>>
>>
>>
>>
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-- 
Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!
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