I meant that it's unsuitable for a dictionary.
Any good dictionary will tell you how a Chinese character is
pronounced in any given variety.
Chinese characters wouldn't be so difficult to learn for somebody who
only knew a signed language (in much of the developing world, deaf
people don't learn to read and write spoken languages), because they
can be associated with signs on a morphemic basis.
However, a spoken language written alphabetically used for glosses
will require that any given deaf person learn said spoken language
before being able to read a text.
This also means that a deaf man in Boston who wants to know the ASL
equivalent of the English word "boarish" will not get an answer by
looking in a dictionary and finding the gloss "boarish" in the field
for an ASL translation.
Mark
On 27/08/05, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
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
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