Sign writing

Example: "American Sign Language" in SignWriting

A sign writing is a writing system for the representation of the linguistic signs of a sign language .

developments

In the 19th century created Roch-Ambroise Bébian in Paris and later from Scotland native George Hutton in Nova Scotia a sign writing, both Mimographie were called. William Stokoe developed further writing systems for sign language for the American Sign Language (ASL), Eshkol-Weissman for the Israel Sign Language , and in the tradition of the Stokoe system at the University of Hamburg, the scientifically oriented HamNoSys (Hamburg Notation System) appeared for the German sign language and a phonetic / phonemic system SignLettering by Hartmut Teuber (USA).

The SignWriting system developed in 1974 by the former dancer Valerie Sutton is of particular importance here . This is cross-lingual and is therefore becoming increasingly popular. In the following, this article is about this font, which is also called GestärdenSchrift (with an internal major to distinguish it from the generic term).

SignWriting

SignWriting
Font	Pictograms
languages	Sign language
inventor	Valerie Sutton
Usage time	from 1974
ancestry	synthetic font SignWriting
relative	DanceWriting
Unicode block	U + 1D800-U + 1DAAF
ISO 15924	Sgnw

Examples of equivalent representation of isolated hand-shapes

SignWriting (also known as Sutton SignWriting ) was developed for the University of Copenhagen . In addition to this font, only DanceWriting for the notation of dances and choreographies is widely used.

Signwriting uses to represent the sign a large amount of well-defined icons for hand shapes and facial expressions, as well as arms, legs, shoulders, if they are relevant to the gesture, and various additional symbols like different arrows, stars, waves and the like to describe the movement . Because of the pictogram character of the characters, recognizing the writing is comparatively easy.

In Germany , SignWriting is already being used in the teaching of deaf children in some places, for example in the state education center for the hearing impaired in Osnabrück . The same thing happens in a school for deaf children in East Nicaragua.

history

In 1966, at the age of 15, the American Valerie Sutton developed a personal note-taking system for writing ballet choreographies. In 1970 she moved to Denmark to practice in the Royal Danish Ballet . There she used her dance notebook to write down choreographies from the Bournonville School that threatened to be forgotten. A publication of the system in 1973 and a dance writing course for members of the ballet made the notation known in a 1974 newspaper report read by scholars at the University of Copenhagen. The suggestion for further processing of MovementWriting for sign language came from the anthropologist Dr. Rolf Kuschel and Lars von der Lieth . The former had recorded the signs of a single deaf inhabitant of a South Sea island on film. A written record was necessary to analyze this man's speech. They asked Sutton to write down the signs on film. The transcription by means of SignWriting by this deaf “inventor” of a sign language can probably be regarded as the first recording of signs of the deaf in modern times. The writing system developed further and further away from the original movement writing and was adapted to the requirements of a sign writing script. The gestures and facial expressions of hearing Danes were also recorded by the research group led by Lieth using SignWriting symbols .

From 1975 to 1979 Valerie Sutton worked in the dance department of the Boston Conservatory. Meanwhile, she continued to develop her SignWriting when she joined the New England Sign Language Research Group. 1977 learned first deaf adults, actor of the National Theater of the Deaf, which Signwriting . In 1979 she worked for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf , which publishes American Sign Language writings that are illustrated in SignWriting .

From autumn 1981 the SignWriter , a quarterly magazine with texts in SignWriting , was published. By being used in a regular, periodical publication, SignWriting has been simplified to meet the requirements for fast and easy writing. The project was abandoned in 1984 because the effort - all characters had to be written by hand - far exceeded the benefit.

In 1986 the computer program SignWriter was written and published.

Since the 1980s there have been a wide variety of instructions, dictionaries, etc. for SignWriting , and italic and shorthand fonts have also been developed.

Since 1985, people have been writing from the signer's point of view instead of the observer's point of view, and since 1997 SignWriting has been officially written in columns from top to bottom.