[Sw-l] SignWriting in a Quiz Show

Sat Apr 19 22:45:41 UTC 2025

SignWriting List
April 19, 2025

Ha! I just listened to this in full (before I skimmed the transcript) but it took a lot patience to hear how they had no clue but later at the end I think the interviewer did an excellent job giving the answer - he did a very nice job summarizing it.

So, thank you again, Amit, for finding this interview!

I will write to lateralcast.com to thank them -

Val ;-)

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> On Apr 19, 2025, at 2:57 PM, Valerie Sutton <sutton at signwriting.org> wrote:
> 
> SignWriting List
> April 19, 2025
> 
> Hello Amit and everyone on the SW List!
> 
> So great to hear from you, Amit.
> 
> ….and thank you for telling us about this Podcast Quiz Show - I need to listen to it carefully and I wonder if they would except my opinions on what they said? I need to study their “obvious answer”...
> 
> I skimmed the transcript quickly and found the information about Lars von der Lieth and why Lars asked me to present at his research lab at the University of Copenhagen. That is so much fun! Lars is no longer with us, but I am sure he would get a little chuckle from it too!
> 
> I do not want to embarrass the host or the people who responded because this is a very complicated subject, but they missed the point entirely - their information they were asking for was why I was asked to talk with Lars’ research lab - and it had nothing to do with linguistics, although later we all learned that linguists now know that American Sign Language and British Sign Language are very very different languages, but that has nothing to do with SignWriting!
> 
> And I never claim to be a linguist - I write body movement, and what we see and feel.
> 
> I was not at the Royal Danish Ballet in the Fall of 1974 training with the Royal Danish Ballet. I had been in Denmark 2 years earlier studying dance, that is true, but my reason being in Denmark in the fall of 1974 was the opposite - I was invited to teach a brief 8 week course at the Royal Danish Ballet - to teach the dancers how to write their dance choreography with Sutton DanceWriting.
> 
> And even though later I definitely learned to sign and learned about linguistics from other people, Lars von der Lieth read the newspapers and read about my course at the Royal Danish Ballet and he was looking for a way to compare body movement gestures of hearing people vs Deaf people signing their native language, Danish Sign Language, and this written comparison of the gestures that was so different for hearing people vs Deaf sign languages, needed a “movement writing system” to be applied to writing the gesture comparisons - The person writing his dissertation with this comparison was named Jan Engaard - which was published in 1978.
> 
> Early History Sutton SignWriting
> https://www.signwriting.org/library/history/hist002.html (scroll down)
> https://www.signwriting.org/library/history/hist003.html
> 
> I enjoyed talking with Danish researchers smoking pipes and musing over writing body movement, and I accepted the challenge of comparing video footage of people signing who were Deaf and videos of hearing people sitting on a couch and using “hearing person’s gestures” and so based on DanceWriting I suggested I could write sign language movement as well as dance movement. And that was the beginning of Sutton SignWriting - 
> 
> I informed the group of researchers that it is real clear, without me being a linguist, that the Deaf people who were signing their native language to each other, had a real language with facial expressions that made it clear they were expressing their language, but the hearing people did not depend on their gestures in the same way - they were secondary to their spoken Danish conversation -
> 
> I told them that I would like to go to some Danish Deaf clubs and chat with the club members and show them what I had written in SignWriting and they were reading it and discussing it with me as if it were a part of their lives from the beginning - So I went home to California and started writing the different sign languages of the world, and was invited back in 1982 to Denmark, and Sutton SignWriting became a part of the Danish School System at that time and was used there from 1982 - 1988, when everything changed in Denmark - but that is another story!
> 
> But I am flattered that they would ask such a question on a Quiz Show and I do not believe anyone could have given the proper answer, but they certainly knew a lot about linguistics and I am impressed with them!
> 
> So to finish, everyone please know I am not telling anyone how to sign any sign language. I just invented a bunch of symbols that write body movement, but it is up to all of you, the signers, to apply them to write your languages, and that is important because then that means that it is a true writing system that is not based on one little person’s knowledge, but a tool you can use for your own linguistic research to change the world for the better! And indeed you can!
> 
> Also see:
> 
> SignWriting History Videos
> https://www.signwriting.org/symposium/presentation0097.html
> 
> Thanks again, Amit!
> 
> 
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> 
> Val ;-)
> 
> Valerie Sutton
> sutton at signwriting.org
> SignWriting.org
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> 
>> On Apr 19, 2025, at 1:46 PM, Amit Moryossef <amitmoryossef at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> There's this quiz podcast I like, and one of the questions in the last episode was about Valerie, with the obvious answer being... you know.
>> 
>> Here's the episode:
>> https://lateralcast.com/episodes/132/
>> Timestamp: 15:04
>> 
>> Enjoy,
>> Amit
>> 
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