AW: AW: Mundbilder in der GebaerdenSchrift

Mon Oct 17 18:18:10 UTC 2011

Hi Charles and friends

Wow - I loved to read this message! 

.... your system is used for Deaf chlidren to learn to read and interpret
and write spoken German and translate from German sign language into proper
spoken or written German.

Well  - it is not "my" system. It is my method. And it is only a part of the
whole thing!  

".... However, most educators in the US are looking at teaching English to
the Deaf and though communicating with the Deaf in ASL they are looking at
getting the Deaf to understand and read and write spoken English. The
purpose of the classroom is to teach English, not to examine and honor ASL
in its own right as its own language." 

I would love to meet people who understand that in order to become smart it
is important to communicate in a strong communication - system which turns
out to be Sign Language for deaf students. At least in Germany that would
not be enough to get along pretty good in the hearing society. All the
written materials and all the situations when you have to communicate with a
hearing person without any interpreter at hand - you are much better off if
you improve your spoken language skills! 

Their ONLY argument was "why should I teach SW to ANY Deaf children when
what I want to do is teach them ENGLISH"

They should invite me! - smile I would be able to give an inspiring lecture
and demonstration and workshop! hahaha 

.... German to Deaf kids, not be used as an everyday common writing system
for Deaf Germans whose only language is German Sign Language. 

Well we use GebaerdenSchrift exactly for that purpose as well - to document
and preserve and learn German Sign Language as it is... 

Greetings 

Stefan 

  _____  

Von: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages
[mailto:SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU] Im Auftrag von Charles Butler
Gesendet: Montag, 17. Oktober 2011 15:53
An: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Betreff: Re: AW: Mundbilder in der GebaerdenSchrift

>From this message, I see we are understanding each other, your system is
used for Deaf chlidren to learn to read and interpret and write spoken
German and translate from German sign language into proper spoken or written
German. 

As a bridge system, it is doing its job. 

I am now looking at ASL written in SW without and independent of an English
translation, written to be ASL as ASL not as a pidgin English on the hands
to be translated into English for the hearing and speaking English
population. The purposes are different.

However, most educators in the US are looking at teaching English to the
Deaf and though communicating with the Deaf in ASL they are looking at
getting the Deaf to understand and read and write spoken English. The
purpose of the classroom is to teach English, not to examine and honor ASL
in its own right as its own language.

So, ASL is still not an independent language, but a colonized language, one
which is not a language "of the marketplace" with its own history, but one
essentially secondary. We once had a newspaper in that language, assuming
ASL as the first and only language of a Deaf population. 

I tried to teach SW to a class of Deaf educators in Ohio. Their ONLY
argument was "why should I teach SW to ANY Deaf children when what I want to
do is teach them ENGLISH", not some other writing system. "They", the Deaf
children", don't have time to learn another writing system on top of
English. 

They'd undersstand your GebaerdenSchrift because its only purpose is to
teach German to Deaf kids, not be used as an everyday common writing system
for Deaf Germans whose only language is German Sign Language. 

Charles Butler
chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com
240-764-5748
Clear writing moves business forward.

--- On Mon, 10/17/11, Stefan Wöhrmann <stefanwoehrmann at GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
wrote:

From: Stefan Wöhrmann <stefanwoehrmann at GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
Subject: AW: Mundbilder in der GebaerdenSchrift
To: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Date: Monday, October 17, 2011, 9:35 AM

Hello Bill, 

thank you very much for your comment. Well I have to explain that your
assumptions to not go along with my practical experience of teaching deaf
students for more than 10 years now using this concept. 

It is not only for the purpose of articulation but very much to identify a
given sign in its meaning – if you are asked to write a German translation.
I had been so amazed to learn how difficult it is for a deaf student to
write down what you explain – even if you use signed German. They are no
fools so they catch the idea between the lines – but they have to be trained
to focus on themselves: Would I be able to write it down. And lots and lots
of mistakes related to vocabulary and grammar will be the result if you
really get to the point to run this test. 

My students do exactly what you cannot imagine. With so much competence they
write any Mundbild-Sequence by hand – no problem at all whatsoever!  And of
course we tried many different things to reduce the amount of the
Mundbilder. For example if you count from one to hundred – it is self
understood that you do not need  a l l the Mundbilder. Same is true if you
know that you are talking about colors. If it comes down to sign names
(Stefan, Valerie, Bill... ) that are known to the students we follow the
method from Nicaragua and add this tiny line underneath – so no extra
Mundbild is necessary. 

On the other hand – believe me – You would not believe how much advantage
can be taken out of every single Mundbild if the words are difficult to
differentiate or if they are new terms ...

Attached you find a document – it is not finished. The whole document will
be far more than 100 pages. And we feel blessed and honoured that the
software Team at Hamburg are so sensitive and competent to create exact that
kind of software that really fits to our needs. My students look at this
document and are asked to write or read out loud the German translation.
Although it is written in signed German it is a very difficult task. We
understand that we have to edit this document in order to be able to write
the translation without too much guessing!  It is not the final stage so
far.  So we will add more Mundbilder in the future and I can imagine the big
smile in their faces because then they will be able to improve their Spoken
German skills dramatically! 

We also tried a string of Mundbilder without the face circles as you
suggest. – big smile  - 

We do not do that – guess why! 

Right now it seems to be a wonderful way to support deaf children to develop
higher skills in Spoken Language if we write GebaredenSchrift as we do. 

All the best

Stefan 

  _____  

Von: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages
[mailto:SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU] Im Auftrag von Bill Reese
Gesendet: Montag, 17. Oktober 2011 14:56
An: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Betreff: Re: Mundbilder in der GebaerdenSchrift

Charles,
I have to agree with you on this.  It seems to be a lot of extra writing.
But, as Stephen pointed out, it could be used for articulation training but
not necessarily the sign itself.  As a research or training tool, you
wouldn't have a child in school going to the blackboard to write it.   

I would imagine that, for Ingvild and other's who's sign language
differentiates signs by mouth movements that the different signs could,
conceivably, be written with just the first mouth movement (if they're
dissimilar) or the mouth movement that is more dominant or is different
between signs.   

On the other hand, I would also presume it's possible to write a string of
mouth movements without the face, similar to the concept of writing Latin
letters next to the mouth.

Bill

On 10/17/2011 7:36 AM, Charles Butler wrote: 

I guess people are misunderstanding what I'm saying, DELEGS is the closest
that I have seen to a DOS program that allowed people to show grammatical
differences and word/concept order on the same line or within visual
distance to help Deaf people read in their own language and compare it to a
spoken language rendering of the same concepts.  

I would not want to show a Roman letter within a sign, I'd be showing a
facial expression probably quite similar to the Gebarendenschrift, but I
don't even know understand why so MANY faces compressed. One may as well be
using Cued Speech as one's augmentation, which at least reduces the number
of faces to a handful not a line of up to 10 faces.

I'm sorry, when I see a row of faces it confuses me, I think signs, not
whole clusters of faces. It may show every nuance of the articulation of a
face and for showing that to help with lipreading, it may be perfect, but I
look at it and think -- how can a child possibly write that on a board with
a piece of chalk and say "o this is simple". I guess I'm looking for minimal
pairs, what is the absolute minimum necessary to show an articulation, which
for the Deaf in the US was to strip the body away and show much fewer facial
markers than hearing users expected. The Gebaredenschrift is created to be
articulated by computer, as all these programs are, but what of someone
somewhere with only paper and pencil, not a computer. If an EMP pulse comes
along, all the programming in the world will not survive but a pencil and
paper will still function.

Charles

Charles Butler
chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com
240-764-5748
Clear writing moves business forward.

--- On Mon, 10/17/11, Stefan Wöhrmann <stefanwoehrmann at GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
wrote:

From: Stefan Wöhrmann <stefanwoehrmann at GOOGLEMAIL.COM>
Subject: Mundbilder in der GebaerdenSchrift
To: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Date: Monday, October 17, 2011, 6:49 AM

Hi Ingvild, 

in order to understand the difference between Mundbildschrift – a tool to
support articulation and listening-training -  and Mundbilder in der
GebaerdenSchrift  (what you might write in Signwriting in order to present
information coming from the lips and tongue) you may download this file. 

http://www.gebaerden.de/files/3187/upload/pdf_new/Mundbilder%20in%20der%20Ge
baerdenSchrift.pdf

Stefan ;-) 

  _____  

Von: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages
[mailto:SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU] Im Auftrag von Ingvild Roald
Gesendet: Montag, 17. Oktober 2011 11:58
An: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Betreff: Re: AW: Please help us test SignWriter Studio Beta 5!!

I agree, the Mundbildschrift and the Mundbilder the Gebäredenschrift are not
the same - but very useful.

The writing of 'words' beside the mouth was / is just a lazy (and formerly
only) way of writing the different mouthing of signs that are otherwise
similar. With Mundbildschrift this can be done directly - so I do not really
miss this oprtunity to write the latin letters near the mouth. Whith the
latin letters the connection to the Norwegian word is stressed, but letters
are not really part of SignWriting

I have looked at DELEGS - and I am refering to it in my lecture later this
week in the Netherlands - as I am to your Mundbildschrift - I am recomending
the use of SignWriting as part of making deaf children literate

Ingvild 

  _____  

Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:46:32 +0200
From: stefanwoehrmann at GOOGLEMAIL.COM
Subject: AW: Please help us test SignWriter Studio Beta 5!!
To: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU

Hi Ingvild and friends, 

it is interesting to understand that you agree with my concept that it is
necessary to add information coming from the lips- and tongue movements in
order to “understand” the exact meaning of a given sign. 

“....Signs that are the same in the hands and other movements, differ in the
mouthing and make distinctive signs that way. NSL claims to have no homonyms
(two or more signs that look exatly the same but have different meaning)
because of this....” 

Well my invention of Mundbildschrift is not the same as my set of
“Mundbilder in der GebaerdenSchrift” 

Nevertheless – thanks to the studies of Erica Hoffmann with my students we
found out that it is not correct simply to add the letters of a word (spoken
language) next to the sign in order to avoid “Mundbilder”

To my very surprise I had to understand – and this has been such an amazing
experience – that even little deaf children having no idea of how to write
the spoken word – show almost mouth – and tongue movement patterns that
almost look like the same – as a “informed” signer would perform. 

Mouth movements are part of the usual guessing game trying to understand
from lip-reading.  From my actual point of view these Mundbilder which I
defined to stand for special patterns of movements that might result in
specific sounds of a given spoken language come pretty close to the best
representation of what can be seen (!!!) looking at a signing person. 

And you are right – SignPuddle – so far does not allow to type latin letters
– as you could do with the DOS Program. Did you get the chance to look at
the German new softare Delegs? 

Now you get the chance to look for your signs almost loke in the good old
SWDOS –program. 

In addition to that you are able to change the preferred sign alternative in
every document without any problem. You can copy this specific sign and
paste it with this same variation. You can write the best translation of the
signwriting  sentence beneath this line and hide or show one or both lines!
This is the perfect tool to support deaf students to improve their spoken
language skills. Just look at the attached gif.

Our team is still busy, busy, busy to complete our vision of an almost
perfect SignWriting – software program to support this idea which is the
motto of our Editor: “Delegs” = Deutsch lernen mit GebaerdenSchrift"  =
learn German assisted by SignWriting".

All you need is a well fed dictionary and this wonderful program. 

All the best 

Stefan 

  _____  

Von: SignWriting List: Read and Write Sign Languages
[mailto:SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU] Im Auftrag von Ingvild Roald
Gesendet: Montag, 17. Oktober 2011 11:15
An: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Betreff: Re: Please help us test SignWriter Studio Beta 5!!

?

I don't think I can write a 'word' in latin letters beside a mouth in
SignPuddle, can I?

On the other hand, I DO love the newer software,

Ingvild 

  _____  

Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:11:06 -0700
From: sutton at SIGNWRITING.ORG
Subject: Re: Please help us test SignWriter Studio Beta 5!!
To: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU

SignWriting List

October 16, 2011

Hi Ingvild and Charles!

Two thoughts...

First, SignWriter DOS is not past tense - it is not in the past. I am using
it right now, and so can anyone. Just download DOSBOX and install it:

DOSBOX

http://www.dosbox.com/

Second, software like SignWriter DOS and SignPuddle 1.6, actually has little
to do with how you write. You can write the Norwegian mouth movements in any
style you choose in SignPuddle 1.6 too - software is not a theory of writing
- so there are no limits to your writing styles when it comes to Mouth
Movements in either software program...

The only limits to SignWriter DOS usage is that it uses a smaller symbolset
(sss1995) and it cannot write down in vertical columns - but other than that
there are no limitations on your writing styles no matter which software
program you choose -

I think what you really are saying is that you enjoyed writing the old way -
and that is fine because you can continue to write the old way!

smile -

We are adding a lot of Norwegian signs and documents - have you notice?I am
so happy about it!

SignPuddle for Norway

http://www.signbank.org/signpuddle/index.html#sgn-NO

There are close to 3000 signs now in the dictionary and the literature
puddle is growing too - we may need to move some of the individual signs
from the literature puddle to the dictionary puddle, but we will do that
work later - Thank you for all your old SignWriter DOS files, Ingvild! I am
happy to build a sign language corpus in SignPuddle Online for all countries
-

Val ;-)

---------

On Oct 16, 2011, at 5:36 AM, Ingvild Roald wrote:

Another good thing about the DOS-program was the possibility to write the
mouthed 'words' near the mouth, rather than using the later invention of
Mundbildschrift', for those signed languages that use a lot of mouthing in
the signs. Norwegian SL uses mouthing a lot, especially for nouns. Signs
that are the same in the hands and other movements, differ in the mouthing
and make distinctive signs that way. NSL claims to have no homonyms (two or
more signs that look exatly the same but have different meaning) because of
this.

Ingvild 

  _____  

Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 19:03:24 -0700
From: chazzer3332000 at YAHOO.COM
Subject: Re: Please help us test SignWriter Studio Beta 5!!
To: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU

Part of it is to understand that many educational systems use Sign Writing
to show the grammar comparing a local sign language to the local spoken
language. 

The useful thing about SW Dos is that one can use the spoken language, the
signed language, and fingerspelling so that one can compare gramatically,
very similar to the current German system. 

Thank you for your attention. Charles

Charles Butler
chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com
240-764-5748
Clear writing moves business forward.

--- On Thu, 10/13/11, Jonathan <duncanjonathan at YAHOO.CA> wrote:

From: Jonathan <duncanjonathan at YAHOO.CA>
Subject: Re: Please help us test SignWriter Studio Beta 5!!
To: SW-L at LISTSERV.VALENCIACOLLEGE.EDU
Date: Thursday, October 13, 2011, 11:09 AM

Hi Charles,
    I just tried out SignWriter DOS to see exactly what you are talking
about.   I see you can type right over a sign if you want to, below, above
and if you type a long sentence the other signs move over.  Is it important
for you that the be place on top of the signs too?  Or is it more important
for you to be able to write some text, then some signs, then some text, etc?
    Had I realized that so many just LOVE the old SignWriter Dos I may have
gotten permission to duplicate it very faithfully.  With SignWriter Studio
some things may be similar but none are identical.  Right now I am trying to
get the three main parts of the program working, the dictionary ( I will
soon have a preview version available), the signlist (for printing lists of
signs from the dictionary) and the document.   Once I get everything working
again after changing to ISWA 2010 and a new database, I am interested in
implement a keyboard like SignWriter DOS.  But first things first.
    The document isn't functional right now.  Also it only deals with
vertical columns of writing for the time being.  It can have text above the
sign up to the width of the sign, then it wraps onto more lines.  At present
there isn't any way of writing just text without a sign but it shouldn't be
too hard to implement.   The editing of the signs is done in a popup box
instead of directly in the document like SignWriter DOS.  A lot of thought
has been put into it to use the keyboard but it may need a few more
adjustments yet.

Thank you for sharing this important feature with me and list.

Jonathan

On 10/10/2011 9:48 AM, Charles Butler wrote:

Jonathan, What I really want is SignWriter DOS on a modern system.

In that program you could interleave written alphabets and sign writing.
Clunky, but effective.

You could clip signs from a narrative and put them somewhere else.

It was a true typing system for signing so that you could assemble a sign by
typing on a keyboard not a mouse. Yes, I know that the current encoding of
the ISWA is dependent upon a linking of graphemes and coding equivalents.

None of the Studios or other efforts have gone back to actual interleaved
Spoken Language and Signed Language.  I can clip a sign and put it in here

<http://www.signbank.org/SignPuddle1.5/glyphogram.php?ksw=AS15a30S15a30S2ea3
aS2ea4eS2fb04M30x28S15a30n24xn28S15a309xn28S2ea3a5x3S2ea4en30x3S2fb04n6x22>
, in TEXT, when does THAT come back in a program. I feel like we are
continuing to take a great leap backward. Until one can type or easily
assemble, one can't' send email that is in sign language with a spoken
language. IF Chinese can do it, I am disappointed in every Sign Writing
compiler on the market that can't interleave. 

Charles Butler

This is an email program and I can do that, but the SW studio and all other
programs do not do that. 

Charles Butler
chazzer3332000 at yahoo.com <http://mc/compose?to=chazzer3332000%40yahoo.com> 
240-764-5748
Clear writing moves business forward.

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<http://mc/compose?to=duncanjonathan%40yahoo.ca> 
         joyoduncan at gmail.com <http://mc/compose?to=joyoduncan%40gmail.com> 
Cel: 9983-1204
Tel: 2213-5285
Skype: yojoduncan

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