Question mark question

[Jonathan Duncan]

Hi all,
     I was wondering about question marks in Signwriting.

I found this

http://www.signwriting.org/forums/research/rese025.html


Any word written in SignWriting has the face, or shoulder bar on top (if 
necessary) and the handshape(s) around the face or shoulder bar. General 
movements are below the handshape(s) , but finger movements are 
indicated by the fingers of the handshape(s) and head movements are 
indicated by the face symbol . A sign dictionary written in SignWriting 
looks up lexical items based on the ten groups of handshapes, then on 
the movements, also broken down into groups, then facial expressions, 
then head and body positions as demonstrated in Appendix G.

Two questionable SignWriting practices involve punctuation and the 
writing of fingerspelled words. Punctuation in SignWriting makes use of 
bars. One vertical, slightly thick bar placed after a sign indicates a 
period. Two thin vertical bars indicate a pause or comma , and two thin 
vertical bars slightly further apart indicate a longer pause or 
semi-colon . Two bars next to each other, one thin and the other thick 
indicate a question mark . Two thick bars indicate a colon . Parentheses 
and quotes look similar to the punctuation marks used in English. All of 
the punctuation marks used in SignWriting can be the same as those used 
to write English: . , ; ? : ( ).


There is no reason for SignWriting to adopt unique punctuation marks for 
American Sign Language and it does not take away from the writing of 
SignWriting to use English punctuation marks. Furthermore, when a signer 
fingerspells an English word in ASL, SignWriting uses the appropriate 
handshape symbol to write the letters in the English word. This is also 
possibly a convention that could be changed. Writing SignWriting by 
hand, one would probably write the fingerspelled word in English letters 
instead of writing the handshapes for each of the letters...*Footnote 15...


It describes a question mark as "Two bars next to each other, one thin 
and the other thick indicate a question mark" but that description fits 
the Semi-Colon.  And in the example above it there seems to the 
semi-colon symbol after the questions.
.


So is the symbol for the semi-colon the same as the question mark?
-- 

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