Mark Williamson wrote:
1) With word-for-word glosses in a spoken language. For
ASL or BSL
this is usually English; for InSL it may be Hindi or another Indian
language or English; for Chinese SL it will probably be Chinese. While
this is suitable in most cases for writing whole sentences and
recording syntax and grammar, it gives no specific information about
what a sign looks like and thus is completely unsuitable.
Why does this make it completely unsuitable? A large proportion of
Chinese characters give no specific information about how they are
pronounced---and indeed are pronounced radically different by Mandarin,
Cantonese, and Japanese speakers---but that doesn't seem to have led to
them being deemed unsuitable for use in a written language. At the very
least, using Chinese characters to write Chinese SL is no worse than
using Kanji to write Japanese.
-Mark