Writing Sign languages: analysis of the evolution of the SignWriting system from 1995 to 2010, and proposals for future developments.

Écriture des langues des signes: analyse de l'évolution du système SignWriting de 1995 à 2010, et propositions pour son futur développement

Scrivere le lingue dei segni: analisi dell'evoluzione del sistema SignWriting dal 1995 al 2010 e proposte di sviluppo

Claudia S. Bianchini (1, 2) , Fabrizio Borgia (3)

1 Poitiers UFR LL - Université de Poitiers - UFR Lettres et langues
2 FoReLL [Poitiers] - Formes et représentations en linguistique et littérature [EA 3816]
3 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier

SignWriting (SW) is a method for representing on paper the Sign languages (SLs), the visuo-gestual communication mean employed by a large part of deaf people that, similarly to many spoken languages, has still to develop an own writing system. Many tools have been envisaged to the scope, but in general they lack a way to record the non-manual aspects of the Signs - such as facial expressions, glance, body posture and movement, etc. - which are essential to convey the true signed meaning; on the contrary, SW presents itself as a comprehensive system, able to represent every component, manual and non-manual, of the Sign: in fact, it has been demonstrated that SW can be used successfully both for transcribing signed discourses and for writing LS narratives.SW has been designed as part of a larger frame for coding movements, the Sutton Movement Writing (SMW), aimed at representing all kind of active body appearances, from dance (DanceWriting) to sport, e.g. skateboarding (SportWriting).SW is made of a complex of symbols, a.k.a. glyphs, allowing the description of every, even minimal, Sign component, i.e. hands configurations, facial expressions, body and head movements; glyphs are organized, thru a univocal numeric code (UNC), in an International SignWriting Alphabet (ISWA).This paper analyzes the evolution of SW from 1995 to 2010; actually, in its first digital implementation, SW had a little less than 4000 glyphs, and that amount increased 10 times, reaching almost 38000 glyphs in the latest version.These changes did not only influence the numbers, but other aspects of glyphs as well:•numerosity: the internal variations, i.e. the creation or elimination of whole groups and the glyphs increases and decreases by category, will be used to show how the initial bond between SW and SMW became more and more lax, at the end making SW an independent, specialized instrument for representing SLs;•graphic appearance: notwithstanding the great amount of glyphs, improved drawing stressing the iconicity and coherence of symbols has made learning SW a not-too-difficult task;•organization: in some instances the SW development had negative consequences on ISWA and the compatibility of its codes when passing from a previous to a following version - even if Sutton had non-automatic mechanisms for upgrading -, in fact suggesting that the UNC stability cannot be maintained within the present systematic structure.This paper emphasizes the strength that the continuous evolution gives to the SW system, at each version becoming a more specialized and performing tool for representing SLs, able to ever finer precision on the annotation of deaf communication.Finally, a restructuring of the SW “taxonomy” is proposed, which will leave ample space for further modifications and extensions, with minimal impact on the UNC and on the classification structure.

Domaines: Linguistique

Claudia S. Bianchini, Fabrizio Borgia. Writing Sign languages: analysis of the evolution of the SignWriting system from 1995 to 2010, and proposals for future developments.. Int. Jubilee Congr. of the Technical University, University of Varna, Oct 2012, Varna, Bulgaria. ⟨hal-02558770⟩