Ordering Signs

Thu Nov 26 19:03:51 UTC 2009

Hoi,
I find it quite interesting to learn that there is an evolution to sorting..
However, we have evolved and consequently things may have been "ossified¨.
However, the sorting order is learnt in school. the "ij" is after the x I
have been taught and I really do not care at all that another order is
possible. Effectively the sorting order is essential to being able to find
things in a telephone book, a dictionary ...a list of words  ....

I completely agree that there is no inherent meaning to the sorting order.
The point however is, that it is a standard and because of that people
typically expect the order to be what is considered standard for a language.

When people in the Netherlands say that a given issue is "academic" it means
that only academics find it of interest and that the general public has no
application for an issue. I agree that there are multiple ways to sort data.
In my opinion it is essentia; that there are shared expectations.. they are
the standards and for the oral languages they are different from language to
language and typically standardised for a language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2009/11/26 Trevor Jenkins <bslwannabe at gmail.com>

> 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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>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Regards, Trevor.
>
> <>< Re: deemed!
>
>
>
>
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>
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