SignWriting

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Signwriting
Type:	Alphabet
Languages:	American Sign Language, many others
Time period:
ISO 15924 code:	`Sgnw`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Sign Writing is a system of writing the movements and handshapes of sign languages. It was developed in 1974 by Valerie Sutton, a dancer who had two years earlier developed DanceWriting.

As Sutton was teaching DanceWriting to the Royal Danish Ballet, Lars von der Lieth, who was doing research on sign language at the University of Copenhagen, thought it would be useful to use a similar notation for the recording of sign languages. Sutton based SignWriting on DanceWriting, and finally expanded the system to the complete repertoire of MovementWriting. However, only SignWriting and DanceWriting have been widely used.

1 Basic Principles
2 See also
3 External links
- 3.1 On SignWriting
- 3.2 Other links

[edit] Basic Principles

In SignWriting, a combination of symbols for hand shapes, body locations, and movements are used to discribe a motion in sign language.

Different hand shapes have other symbols. For example, the fist uses a square. The open hand is represented by a pentagon shaped like a triangle over a rectangle. Fingers extended from the hand are shown with lines drawn attached to the handshape. The back of the hand is drawn in black, and the palm in white. The coloring of the hand allows the diagram to indicate the rotation of the wrist.

Arrows are used to indicate the movement of the hand, and small symbols such as a star, a spiral, a dot, etc. are used to indicate additional information about the type of movement. Arrows indicate the movement of the entire hand -- the right is shown with a black arrow head, and the left with a white arrow head. The small symbols indicate features such as contact, touching, brushing, or striking.

To show both the vertical and horizontal planes, the arrows and handshapes change. Arrows with double lines and unbroken handshapes are in the vertical plane. Arrows with single lines and handshapes with a break through them are in the horizontal plane.

A few additional symbols are used in some situations. A circle shows the head, and a horizontal bar shows the shoulders. A small curve (like a slur in musical notation, or a sideways parenthesis) is used to indicate the point of contact on the head, and there are symbols that indicate eyebrow and mouth shape and eyegaze.