[Wikipedia-l] sign.wikepedia.org?

Fri Jan 28 04:02:09 UTC 2005

> Thanks to everyone for their contributions :-)
> 
> 1. there are many different subgroups that makes up the deaf community - but
> often it's the national sign language that unites us.

Yes, but here we are talking about how there is a language barrier
between, for example, American Sign Language speakers and Indian Sign
Language speakers since they are not related.

> 2. there are hundreds of different sign languages around the globe - that's
> why I have asked for sign.wikipedia.org to put them together instead of us
> asking for say, bsl.wikipedia.org, asl.wikipedia.org etc etc - it would be a
> central point for sign languages - and once we go to sign.wikipedia.org we
> can go into subgroups there in whatever group suits - for instance, there
> would be a NISL section for Northern Ireland Sign Language community etc.

I don't see why we should do this if we don't also have an
oral.wikipedia.org to unite spoken languages. Interlingual
communcation is just as difficult as between any other two Wikipedias,
and there is just as much of a potential for growth.

> It can be in any written languages or sign-writing systems - but the main
> thing is that we need a central point for the national sign languages to be
> in the same category - and it can help us build information up etc.

The main problem here is that there is no consensus on what writing
system to use, and it's impractical to create differnet Wikipedias for
a single signed language to such a degree where we end up with
thousands for all signed languages.

> 3. There are 3 "sign-writing" systems out there - Sutton Writing System,
> Stokoe Notation System and HamNoSys (Hamburg Notation System) but it is felt
> that the Sutton one will become the most popular as its simple to use and
> easy to use - whereas Stokoe and Hamnosys are more used by academics (deeper
> note-keeping really)

This is not true, there are many more. Most of them are derivatives of
Stokoe and used in educated (not nessecarily academic, though)
communities. There are quite a few more that are used by individuals
or small groups of individuals which they invented themselves.

As far as the names for the systems, yours are inaccurate. They are
Sutton Sign Writing (which is copyrighted and difficult to compute
with, but popular), Stokoe (William Stokoe didn't name it himself, so
it only has one word in its name), and HamNoSys (which you got right).

Stokoe was invented first and isn't really very complicated - in fact,
it's easier than SSW - but there's really only two books that will
teach it to you (Stokoe's ASL dictionary, a different BSL dictionary
which made minor improvements to the system).

HamNoSys was derived from Stokoe but is meant to be more exact, so you
can write allophones, it's sort of like the IPA of signed languages,
and it's very very difficult to learn.

Sutton Sign Writing came last, and was invented by a woman who
invented some sort of dance writing. It has had by far the most
promotion (Stokoe just put his out there, expecting people would use
it, and HamNoSys was intended only for the scholarly community), is
copyrighted, and is by far the most difficult to encode. It's
definitely more difficult than Stokoe, but easier than HamNoSys.

Mark