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Please do not give up. Dictionaries are very tough to write. But the feeling of joy is unendless, once the work is done.
All the members of our crew have thought of giving up thousands of times in the past. But now that it is done, we are all very glad we didn´t. Keep up the great work.

Dear friends:

With respect to the alphabetic x logographic issue, my wife and I have just published a book (Literacy acquisition: phonics method) that describes a number of intervention studies in Portuguese (a fairly transparent orthography, although not as much as the beautiful one used in Maria´s country) showing the tremendous importance of phonological awareness skills in reading acquisition in Portuguese. With respect to SignWriting and deaf children, the principle is expected to be the same, with the difference that instead of phonological awareness training, deaf children would probably benefit from a cheremic awareness training. Such a training is expected to substantially improve working memory in signing and SW fluency. If I may add something, I have notice that some people (from English-speaking countries) frequently write, in the context of grapheme-phoneme correspondences, that Spanish is "shallow" whereas English is "deep". I would like to reply to them that such a dichotomy does not pertain not to the phoneme-grapheme relationship realm. As we know, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, German etc are transparent but shallow orthographies; whereas English and French are opaque but deep ones. Thus, when it comes to phonemic decoding via phonological route (but not to word recognition via lexical route) children from Italy, Spain, Germany and South America have a transparent orthography. That is something to be cellebrated, since it increases the power of the phonics method in helping kids who present problems in literacy acquisition.
With respect to SW, the notion of transparency becomes even more fascinating, because we would have 2 types of transparency: the chereme-handshape one (the equivalent to grapheme-phoneme, that is SW as an alphabetic system) and the iconic one (the equivalent to the ideographic iconicity, that is SW as an ideographic system). As we see, SW is like a coin, and the more we work on both faces, the greater the benefits that accrue to the deaf child.

Thank you for the attention.

Fernando Capovilla (capovilla@usp.br)

Reference:
Capovilla, A.G.S., & Capovilla, F.C. (2002). Alfabetizacao: Metodo fonico. Sao Paulo, SP: Memnon.
 
 
 

SignWriting List
March 14, 2002

Maria Azzopardi wrote:
>the thing is, at the moment we are still working on the dictionary and
>unfortunately are far from finishing it- for a while now we have been
>constantly bumping (if not crashing) into problems, which of course slows down
>the progress (grumble, grumble)

Hello Maria -
If it makes you feel any better, it takes a lifetime, if not longer,
to create good dictionaries, and every dictionary-maker will tell you
that it is never perfect, but an on-going experience...so you are not
alone!

Are you using SignWriter 4.4 to type your dictionaries in
SignWriting? SignWriter dictionary files can hold up to 10,000 signs
at one time. Stefan, in Germany, tells me that he has a dictionary
over 8,000 signs now. Congratulations, Stefan!

Val ;-)

	Replies	Author	Date
6506	Re: SW transparency: ideographic iconicity & alph	Valerie Sutton	Fri  3/15/2002
6541	Re: SW transparency: ideographic iconicity & alph	Flavio Medina	Tue  3/19/2002
6508	Re: SW transparency: ideographic iconicity & alph	Dan Parvaz	Sat  3/16/2002
6509	Re: SW transparency: ideographic iconicity & alph	Valerie Sutton	Sat  3/16/2002
6513	Re: SW transparency: ideographic iconicity & alph	Dan Parvaz	Sat  3/16/2002
6510	Re: SW transparency: ideographic iconicity & alph	Valerie Sutton	Sat  3/16/2002
6511	Sign for "animation" ?	Valerie Sutton	Sat  3/16/2002
6512	Re: SW transparency: ideographic iconicity & alph	Dan Parvaz	Sat  3/16/2002