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From:
Joe Martin Date: Wed Aug 25, 1999 9:18 pm Subject: SignWriting principles | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Martin (and everybody): Reference: Valli, Clayton & Lucas, Ceil. Linguistics of American Sign Language; An Introduction. Washington DC. Gallaudet U Press. 1992 This is a good overview of the whole business, for beginners or others. Mainly in English, only some basic linguistish. You won't find this stuff on the web. Something to chew on.... any and all comments welcome) Like Valerie says, Signwriting isn't like Written Chinese, or written English either. Although all three consist of a sequence of units strung together, in Chinese writing the units are words. (morphemes if you wanna be all precise) In the other two the units aren't words, they're something smaller. People often assume that signing takes place in three dimensional space, and that speech has a fourth dimension of time with one sound following another. Actually, signing also happens in time with one sign following another, and if speech doesn'take place in three dimensional space, where does it? If all we had was the one dimension, time, then speech would be a boring continuous ........uuuuuhhh...... Lucky for us though things change within each segment of time. When the second segment changes, instead of [ uu ], we get .[ up ]. Same in signed languages; James is very right that sign language is linear. A classic example in ASL is two signs that start by moving a B-hand out from your mouth .. First two segments are the same in both, third segment is different in one because in that one you close your hand to a fist. First one means "THANK YOU, second one means BULLSHIT. The two signs are identical except for that last linear segment. What changes to make that second segment different is the position of the articulators. Articulators is a linguistish word for all the stuff we use to make language; vocal cords tongues, faces, fingers, hands, ...all that. So the job is to describe those articulators. In signed languages, you can take a picture. Or draw one; then you can make it real schematic so it just has what you need and no distracting junk. That's what SignWriting symbols do. But with speech--hooo, boy!--how do you make a picture of an ...uuu...sound? Or any sound? Ya can't! James put his finger on it when he said that it was harder to change from an aural to a visual mode. In order to represent speech on paper you gotta make up some arbitrary symbols, and have them arbitrarily stand for .the sounds. SignWriting, on the other hand, isn't arbitrary. Actually, you could draw pictures of the vocal tract--the articulators of speech--and show gross little tongues and vocal cords and stuff, but nobody ever wanted to. (except I think it's kinda fun) Instead, linguists describe things in terms of parameters; it's more precise. For example they describe a spoken consonant sound by where the tongue is, what it does, and whether or not the vocal cords vibrate. Those three things are what's important in telling consonants apart (in speech). We call 'em parameters. Every unit of language has certain parameters. The three above are Place, Manner, and Voicing. Obviously, signed languages have a little different parameters since they've got different articulators, but it's the same idea; parameters for signed consonants are Location, Handshape, Orientation, and Facial Expression. Each parameter is a set (like in math) of a certain number of "features." Voicing is easy, there's only two; voiced or voiceless. Location, for speech, is the five or six places where you can put your tongue, from the back of the throat to the teeth; but in sign language there's gobs of Places. So anyhow, we pick one Feature for Location and one for each of the other Parameters, and that's how we describe a linguistic unit. All this info is written down in a big complicated grid with all the features listed one way and the time segments the other way. They take up a lot of space and they're awful to read. Each bundle of features makes up a phoneme, which could be from German, or ASL, or whatever. But it couldn't be Chinese, cuz each Chinese character stands for a whole word, not just a phoneme. Totally different from an alphabet where each character stands for a complete feature bundle. Also different from SignWriting where the characters mostly stand for individual features, like [bent thumb] or [brows up]. What's cool is that when you look at a SignWriting symbol you can see all the little features without having to deal with those huge, complex, technical feature grids. And as James pointed out, evidently without ever having to sit through a lot of boring grammar lessons. (like this one). _______________________________________ Joe Martin, Plain Old Ordinary Student Top Left Corner USA | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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