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From:
Valerie Sutton Date: Fri Jan 28, 2000 4:56 am Subject: SignWriting Report, Jan 27 | ||||||||||||
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SignWriting List January 27, 2000 Hello Everyone: I would like to welcome several new members to the SignWriting List. We are happy to have you with us! I hope you will free to introduce yourselves to the List. The SignWriting List includes teachers, linguists, researchers, signers, Deaf people, interpreters, and even movement notators (grin ;-) And we have members from at least 21 countries, including Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Malta, Norway, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, UK, and the USA. If I have forgotten your country, please tell me ;-) Some List members travel between two countries, such as the USA and Nicaragua, and the USA and Taiwan. In the past week much has happened. I am not even sure if I can remember it all! I received orders for books, videos and software from several universities this week. Judy Kegl is teaching a course at the University of Southern Maine on linguistics, and will be including SignWriting as a part of the course. I am sure Judy can explain the course much better than I! Since I print all the books, and package all the videos myself, it was lucky that I had three textbooks and three sets of Lessons In SignWriting videos already printed, and I was able to ship the box immediately to Maine. There was also an order from Brazil that was urgent, and had to be sent immediately, an order for software from a school that teaches German Sign Language in Cologne, Germany, and we have orders for dictionaries from several libraries. And the Deaf children in South Africa and France are waiting for their materials too. Today I had a wonderful conversation with Margalit Fox, a journalist from the New York Times. It is my great pleasure to welcome Margalit to the SignWriting List as a new member. Please feel free to ask any questions you would like, Margalit....and thank you for the interview today ;-) And I also want to thank everyone on the SignWriting List who supplied me with wonderful information about Chinese and the International Phonetic Alphabet! We were writing a comparison between SignWriting, Chinese and the IPA...which I hope to post on our web site shortly. Cecilia Flood, who teaches SignWriting in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sent me some lovely new photos of children learning SignWriting. The children are quite young. One adorable little girl is sitting at the computer grinning - that is a classic! And little Lance is reading his writing from the Workbook - showing what he had written. He had written rows and rows of the flat hand and was totally absorbed in reading his own writing....I really got goosebumps when I saw them, and I look forward to posting them soon. Thanks Cecilia for that great gift - Tomorrow morning our computer programmer, Richard Johnston, who is terribly busy, is starting work again part-time on SignWriter 5.0. Juggling two programming jobs is not easy, especially when he is an expert in SWING, a special part of Java programming that not everyone knows. He is also programming specialized programs for the Navy (San Diego is a Navy town), and they are using SWING....so he is in demand. I am disappointed that I do not have the funds to pay him full-time, but he is very loyal to the project and we are fortunate to have a specialist willing to work on the weekends with us. I hope and pray that someday we could have one full-time programmer, but that is not possible right now. I hope, after I meet with Rich tomorrow, to be able to start updating our web site, which is long overdue. Joe Martin, a linguist from Washington State, is writing a paper on comparing SignWriting with the Stokoe transcription system, and the paper is being revised right now. I will start working on the web design for Joe's article this weekend. But since I know it will take Joe and me some time to complete this large job, I will post a new Special Feature for Monday that will be a new Lesson In SignWriting...the basics of writing Curved Movement. So that is my little report...which really isn't that little! More soon - Val ;-) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Valerie Sutton at the DAC Deaf Action Committee for SignWriting SignWriting https://www.SignWriting.org Center For Sutton Movement Writing an educational nonprofit organization Box 517, La Jolla, CA, 92038-0517, USA ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ | ||||||||||||
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