About the existing ASL orthographies such as Stokoe
and SignWriting,
aside from the issue of copyrighted or patented or whatever systems,
and aside from the issue of their not being (currently) known by a
majority of ASL signers, I haven't seen the questions addressed (or
even asked) (1) are the systems relatively easy to learn if you
already know ASL — rather like a phonetic alphabet or syllabary — say
with a discrete symbol for each chereme and an intuitive way of
handling stress exaggeration or whatever you call the way a sign can
be exaggerated in whole or in part (sort of like lengthening a
Yes, in fact Stokoe is easier to learn for ASL users than users of
other signed languages (many of the symbols for handshapes are based
on which letters use which handshapes in ASL fingerspelling, making it
less intuitive for, say, BSL users, although not impossible as it's
certainly been used for BSL as well)
SuttonSignWriting is supposed to be easy to learn, but the fact that
it has two differing systems (one for printing and one for
handwriting) makes it a bit more confusing.
I don't know about HamNoSys. It's based on Stokoe, but it's far more
complex (you could perhaps compare Stokoe and HamNoSys to the Spanish
alphabet and the IPA -- Stokoe itself is relatively straightforward,
but the precise way in which a specific series of characters is signed
may differ slightly between signed languages, similar to how the
pronounciation of the Latin alphabet sequence "calpricap" differs
across languages although usually very similar; HamNoSys on the other
hand is more precise)
Mark