[Sw-l] Placement of Signs in Space

[Adam Frost]

I was doing some writing in SignWriting and came across an issue that I never really thought of in the past. In ASL, scores can be done by placing the teams in a location and then giving the numbers of the score in that location. For example, I can have one team on the right and another on the left. If I sign 4 on the right and then 5 on the left, it clearly says who has what score. This is easily done using the lanes in SignWriting.

The issue came into play when it was giving scores for “my team” vs “your team”. If I signed 4 near my chest and then 5 away from me, it would means “I have 4 and you have 5.” When I tried to write this, I wrote the shoulder line over 4 and wrote 5 as I do normally. This didn’t really seem like an issue to me until I had a friend asked me how I knew that 5 was signed away from my body rather than just in the neutral location when signing 5 on its own. I had said I just assumed it, but that got me thinking if there was a simple way to write it so that it would be clear and didn’t have to be assumed. Is there?


Adam


________________________________________________


SIGNWRITING LIST INFORMATION

Valerie Sutton
SignWriting List moderator
sutton at signwriting.org

Post Messages to the SignWriting List:
sw-l at listserv.valenciacollege.edu

SignWriting List Archives & Home Page
http://www.signwriting.org/forums/swlist

Join, Leave or Change How You Receive SW List Messages
http://listserv.valenciacollege.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=SW-L&A=1
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20210415/733e3a90/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: namesign.png
Type: image/png
Size: 440 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20210415/733e3a90/attachment.png>