[Sw-l] To "V" or not to "V", that is the question.

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
February 12, 2022

So now, onto the V handshape…..

The SignWriting system will be 48 years old in 2022. In the fall of 1974, I started writing Danish signs at the University of Copenhagen using SignWriting. It was written by hand of course because personal computers were not developed yet. And the symbols were very different because we were using stick figures and the hand symbols changed quite a bit in these 48 years.

We wrote the SignWriter Newspaper by hand and those deaf people who worked with me at that time gave me wonderful feedback and together as a team the hand symbols became what they are today. Lucinda O’Grady and other writers deserve great credit in giving us vertical columns, writing in lanes to show spatial comparisons, and many of the handshapes were reviewed and we had to redo a lot of documents!

Adam and I FaceTimed the other day about this issue and Adam explained to me that the V hand can look like a K. I can imagine it does. It may not look that way to people from other countries but perhaps in ASL and especially for you, AnnaGrace, it does. I respect that. We all see things differently. I could not read it, but I know you can, and that is wonderful. Not a problem if SignWriting hadn't become so used all over the world.

And for personal handwriting of course! We all write by hand differently -

But for publishing SignWriting in books and lessons...

The symbols became standardized inside software over the years and those standards spread to projects in around 60 countries and many sign languages within those countries and I would say there are thousands if not tens of thousands of people using these symbols right now. On Facebook I have around 5000 people as my friends and I know this sounds surprising but I'm getting documents every day now from people privately on messenger and they're using the ISWA 2010.

I definitely would love to make some changes to some of the symbols if I could but I cannot now because in 2008 the symbols were approved by the Unicode committee which is an international organization. And then Steve Slevinski improved the SignWriting in Unicode further giving us SWU and that is used in computers all over the world.

So we are perhaps victims of our own success? Before computerization we had the flexibility of writing by hand, but had no publishing software, and technically we still do when we're writing for ourselves. But we need the computer programs for publishing.

Here are the computer programs that use the International SignWriting Alphabet:

SignWriter DOS
SignPuddle Online
SignMaker 2017
SignMaker 2022
DELEGS Editor
SignWriter Studio
SW QuickSignEditor

and I know there are a few more…

Here is a Reference Manual online to show you the listing of the 261 handshapes:


SignWriting Reference Manual ISWA 2010
International SignWriting Alphabet 2010
https://www.signbank.org/iswa


Hand Symbols in the ISWA 2010 (261 symbols)
https://www.signbank.org/iswa/cat_1.html





Val ;-)

Valerie Sutton
sutton at signwriting.org


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