Recently approved MA Thesis on SignWriting

[Bill Reese]

Great!  I'm glad they're working together on it.  I hope great things 
come out of the collaboration.

I know I brought this up before but I'm wondering, Stuart, if a concept 
of relative coordinate systems was discussed in your thesis?   I did a 
quick scan so I'm not sure if it was.  What I mean by "relative" is a 
coordinate system that's related to a previous symbol in a sign 
according to that sign's signspelling sequence.

The coordinate for the first symbol would be in absolute coordinates 
according to the signbox, then the second symbol would relate to the 
first symbol according to a coordinate system using a point of the first 
symbol as the origin.

Doing it that way may allow establishing matrices of symbol pairing in a 
sign.   I would imagine this to be similar to "kerning" and possibly 
define distances according to the pairs rotation of not only themselves 
but to each other.  Similar to what you were saying about establishing 
minimum distances.

About the overlap of symbols that you mention.  I was wondering if it 
couldn't also be solved by a matrix of symbol pairing so that a 
particular matrix value would indicate overlap - say, a value of -1.   
On the other hand, do you think it would be possible to create totally 
different symbols that are overlaps of two symbols?  I ask this as 
that's what's done in other languages when there's an overlap.  For 
instance, "æ" which looks like "a" and "e" overlapped but is it's own 
symbol.  I would hazard a guess that separate symbols are only possible 
when there's only a few.

Bill


On 5/9/2011 1:06 PM, Valerie Sutton wrote:
> SignWriting List
> May 9, 2011
>
> Hello Bill -
> Just want you to know that we have a group of Unicode-knowledgeable 
> people working together on our SignWriting proposals that will be 
> presented to the Unicode-related meetings over a period of years, and 
> Steve and Stuart are both in the group, along with others as well - so 
> we are all working together...The proposals have been separated into 
> proposing the encoding of the symbols, or characters, first, (of the 
> International SignWriting Alphabet 2010) and then once the symbols 
> have been encoded, we will present a second proposal related to layout 
> and symbol placement issues - so that second area is where different 
> theories will be discussed until we can come up with a final decision 
> for a second proposal - so we are taking this one step at at a time...
>
> An exciting time for all of us - smile -
>
> Val ;-)
>
> ----------
>
> On May 9, 2011, at 8:56 AM, Bill Reese wrote:
>
>> Stuart,
>>
>> Wow, that was a lot of work!  I do have one question.  How would the 
>> most recent work in Unicode and, more particularly, what Steve 
>> Slevinski has written to the list affect the portion where you talk 
>> about what may be needed for successful Unicode acceptance?   From 
>> what it appears, it's well on it's way to acceptance with what Steve 
>> and Michael Everson have done.
>>
>> Bill
>>
>>
>> On 5/8/2011 1:02 AM, Stuart Thiessen wrote:
>>> Hello, all! I know it's been a long time, no see. I wanted to let 
>>> you know that I have completed my MA thesis on SignWriting. For 
>>> those of you interested in reading it, you can download a PDF from 
>>> the University website. Just so you know, the PDF itself is about 22MB.
>>>
>>> _http://www.und.edu/dept/linguistics/theses/2011Thiessen.htm_
>>>
>>> If you have any questions about it, just let me know.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Stuart
>>
>

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