Wikipedia article

[Trevor Jenkins]

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 12:49 PM, Charles Butler <chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com>wrote:

> This multi-faceted approach was the very one given by a British researcher
> who was touring Brazil when I was there in 2000. He went on and on about the
> Deaf not being able to write their own language and so having a barrier to
> becoming truly bilingual, and this was with more than 100 out of the 500
> people in the lecture hall fluent in SignWriting. Everyone, as is the
> Brazilian custom, were excruciatingly polite in not contradicting a
> professor in a lecture, but people were clearly annoyed.
>

Fascinating anecdote. Of the 100 SignWriting users how many were Deaf? Or
were they all hearing signers? I suspect that the reaction here in Britain
would be similar; let him have his say and then ignore everything. It's here
that Stefan's experience is so useful. If the educators are focused so
intently upon the enclosing spoken language then sell them SignWriting (with
Mundblischift) as a way to improving the Deaf childrens' command of the
enclosing language.

Personally I'm not interested in uni-linguialism. I am passionate about true
bi-lingualism though; I want the hearies to be able to communicate with the
Deaf as opposed to the Deaf being forced to communiate at the hearing. Bell
still has a lot to answer for.


> SignWriting is finally hitting the national stage in Brazil, so I think we
> are going to be seeing a lot of changes over the years.
>

I love the LSB dictionary. (And especially that it doesn't use Stokoe
notation.) The use of cartoon and more formal pictures with  SignWriting is
fantastic. It might be more appropriate to use something similar on the
(English language) WIkipedia page for SignWriting; the formal drawing of the
signed component with the corresponding SignWriting form would get around
the problem that the original poster here was raising.

Regards, Trevor.

<>< Re: deemed!
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