Talk:SignWriting

message: Please see meta:Requests for new languages/Wikipedia American Sign Language 2.  Thank you.--Pharos 21:11, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Please see ASL Wikipedia on Incubator -Slevinski (talk) 20:23, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikipedia in American Sign Language proposed 

message: I would seriously disagree that SignWriting is "popular" in the ASL community.  There are not many ASL users, apart from those who study ASL as a lingustic field, that are familiar with SignWriting. The average ASL user does not know about SignWriting and those that might be familiar with SignWriting's existence do not use it.  It is grossly misleading to say that it is "popular." -Mela  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.99.135.160 (talk) 07:56, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Popular? An opinion

message: A standardized symbol set is not the same thing as a standardized orthography. The IPA is a standardized symbol set, but there are numerous ways to transcribe English in the IPA, both phonemic and phonetic. There are some rather nasty arguments here on Wikipedia about how English should or should not be put in the IPA. SignWriting isn't the same thing as SignWriting ASL, and it sounds as though there's a lot of variability in the SW community. That isn't necessarily a bad thing—English before Caxton was written however the writer saw fit—but it does cause difficulties. Actually, those difficulties may soon be a thing of the past, just as the problem with typography is now ancient history: with an electronic dictionary, the software could lead you to the entry no matter how you spell an entry. But I imagine that with a print dictionary, you often won't find an entry for a spelling you come across, which means you need to convert things in your head before you can look them up. — kwami (talk) 00:36, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: "Actually, those difficulties may soon be a thing of the past, just as the problem with typography is now ancient history: with an electronic dictionary, the software could lead you to the entry no matter how you spell an entry." Eye guess ewe haven't had two youse eh spell chequer. (I guess you haven't had to use a spell checker.) Errors caused by reliance on spell checkers are numerous. --Thnidu (talk) 23:17, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Orthography

message: While we all like hard boundaries, there is usually more of a spectrum.  Instead of phonetic and phonemic we can talk about emic and etic accounts (an observer versus a person within a culture).   SignWriting started as a etic account (by someone outside the culture) and produced a phonetic script.  The turning point for SignWriting happened when the people inside the culture started to use the script.  The change is cemented in SignWriting history as the change from the receptive viewpoint to the expressive viewpoint.  The receptive viewpoint is used in transcription.  The expressive viewpoint is used for authorship.  With this change, requested by those inside the culture, the SignWriting script moved from the purely etic account to include an emic component.  This emic component has continued to grow over 30 years.  The SignWriting script is neither phonetic nor phonemic, it depends on how it is used.
The latest symbolset of SignWriting (the ISWA 2010) could be said to be phonetic, but it is not equivalent to the IPA.  The IPA contains every sound it is possible to use for a voiced language.  If there is any argument within the IPA community, it is very small and very insignificant.  The ISWA 2010 is extensive covering a reasonable 652 symbol bases and organizing 36,600 static and unique graphemes.  However, the ISWA 2010 is not exhaustive like the IPA.  The ISWA 2010 includes 261 hand shapes.  There are hundreds of possible hand shapes that could have been added, but were not.  The choice of hand shapes was based on the experience of an international user base.  The choice of hand shapes is neither phonetic nor etic.  The ISWA 2010 is a phonemic account of a phonetic ideal.  Some international sign languages have multiple generations of writers.  The most experienced are writing phonemically right now.  Beginning writers most often write phonetically.  The phonetic writing is useful for analysis to discover the phonemic component.  The hand shape frequency reports are especially relevant.  Low frequency hand shapes can be identified and possibly combined with a similar hand shape to reduce the size of the ISWA 2010 subset for a specific language. Slevinski (talk) 17:09, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Phonetic and Phonemic SignWrting

message: As a user above noted, the article contains no hard facts on how widely used SignWriting is. Is it even well known among the deaf? It mentions some "student magazines" that use SignWriting, but how many magazines? Are these magazines widely read? Are they notable? Why isn't there a criticism section? I would be quite surprised if nobody had any problems with this. Does the article even mention how SignWriting is written? All I see is a listing of symbols. cntrational (talk) 16:04, 19 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Supposedly there is a manual script, not just computer input, but I haven't seen it. You're right, arguments of it being popular could be propaganda, but it would appear to be more popular than Stokoe notation, which is almost entirely unknown in the Deaf community. — kwami (talk) 18:59, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: A wide variety of texts are available, including bible translations. SignWriting is used in many countries. There are no censuses though. -- Evertype·✆ 00:45, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The thing is, for a bible translation to be available you only really need a single person, so it's no proof of popularity. And if there are no censuses and there is no extensive body of published works by different writers, then any claim to popularity is original research and doesn't belong on Wikipedia.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.61.180.106 (talk) 18:41, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  How popular is SignWriting? 

message: According to the OED a signwriter is someone who paints shop signs and adverts. That is certianly normal English usage in the UK. This article seems to be about a novel use of the word.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.5.5.210 (talk) 13:02, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: With SignWriting, we can write all the sign languages of the world. IJKL (talk) 17:47, 27 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Signwriter - other use??????? 

message: Below are my suggestions for external links, but I'm an involved party so it may not be appropriate for me to make the update myself.  The Internet Draft, Unicode proposals, and Binary SignWriting reference are all deprecated so they should probably be removed.
* ISWA 2010 HTML Reference
* ISWA 2010 Font Reference
* Modern SignWriting Specifications
* SignWriting Image Server
* SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin
* SignPuddle Online – Dictionaries and documents
* Dictionary of the Flemish Sign Language (uses SignWriting)
* The Bible in SignWriting
* MA thesis A Grammar of Signwriting
For what it's worth... Slevinski (talk) 13:18, 19 May 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Updated external links 

message: The extension, the SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin, has been rewritten as a user script on Incubator and the English Wikipedia.
For Incubator, the script has been packaged as a Gadget and enabled by default as can be seen on the American Sign Language Wikipedia on Incubator.
Should the accessibility section be updated accordingly? -Slevinski (talk) 20:36, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  SignWriting Viewer as user script and gadget 

message: The symbols of the International SignWriting Alphabet 2010 have been accepted for inclusion in the next release of Unicode next year.
The SignWriting 2010 Fonts use the 670 Unicode characters to reference the 37,811 glyphs in the symbol set.  Released under SIL Open Font License.
The SignWriting 2010 JavaScript Library uses the fonts to display the symbol and sign images.  Released under the MIT License.
-Slevinski (talk) 21:19, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unicode 8 and the SignWriting 2010 Fonts 

message: I started a wikibook on the most used ASL writing and notational systems. Thought some folks here might be interested in filling out the SignWriting section!
LeptonMadness (talk) 17:45, 24 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Written ASL Wikibook 

message: Hi, could sb. please add an example of a 'current custom software does this'? Thanks in advance. --Backinstadiums (talk) 21:13, 27 April 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Hi Backinstadiums. I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for.  You may be interested in the Sutton SignWriting Project (Github repo) and  SignMaker (Github repo).  Currently the SignWriting images are a combination of SVG and Fonts.  Development is underway for a pure character/font implementation: SignWriting in Unicode Next presentation.  For more details, an Internet Draft has been submitted to the IEFT: draft-slevinski-formal-signwriting. -Slevinski (talk) 14:28, 2 May 2017 (UTC)
replies: text:   First of all, thanks for the info. The sentence I've put in quotation marks appears in the article itsself, so I wanted to know what kind of software it refers to. --Backinstadiums (talk) 08:02, 28 May 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Current custom software does this 

message: Could someone please add the images of the Unicode glyphs to the table? All I see are a bunch of dashed boxes with numbers in them. Yes, I will download the SignWriting font from https://github.com/Slevinski/signwriting_2010_fonts/releases/tag/v3.0.2, but it'd be nice if that page worked without people having to do that.  Ben (talk) 19:37, 31 January 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Images of glyphs 

message: Is an icon shaded black when the palm is facing away from the signer or the viewer? This article isn't clear. --Numberguy6 (talk) 18:17, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification of shading rules 

message: Why is Wikipedia using these completely made-up terms to describe and categorise a type of script? The ONLY website on the entire internet that uses these words is WIkipedia, or websites that copy Wikipedia articles. There is not a single dictionary that contains these words, and yes I've checked my physical copies of Oxford and Collins' dictionaries. So what gives? Did some rabid, overzealous editor make up these words and foist them upon everyone else without discussion? I can't imagine how else this would have happened. It makes absolutely no sense to use an unheard-of neologism in a Wikipedia article. 1.157.95.133 (talk) 16:42, 11 June 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I think you posted this on the wrong page.  Those words are not used on SignWriting's main page or on the talk page. -Slevinski (talk) 21:30, 12 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "somacheirographic" and "somacheirogram" aren't real words.