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From:
Steve/Dianne Parkhurst Date: Fri May 21, 1999 6:47 pm Subject: Expressive View Point | ||||||||
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Dear Joe and everybody else, Joe wrote: <<Unfortunately, my beat-up feeble old brain is not able to wrap itself around this description. How does this relate to the "expressive viewpoint" that is used in SignWriting?>> Here is my impression of what expressive viewpoint means: you write what you are doing, not what someone else is doing. In otherwords, when I write, my left hand it is left of center on the page and my right is on the right. (Receptive viewpoint says that I see someone else's right hand and write it the way I see it--left of center). However the expressive point of view is not really what my eyes see but rather what I would see if I stood behind myself and could look right through me. For example, when I touch my ear I cannot see my hand. If I turn and look at it I would see my palm. If a person were standing right behind me they would see my head, my ear, and the side of my hand, so that is what I write. So, no, I am not writing what my eyes really see but it is still from my point of view, the expressive view. The same goes for the view of looking down on my hands. It is not really what my eyes see but rather what someone would see if they were looking down on me. Sort of an "out-of-body" experience :-). But still it is what I do, not what others do. <<In the Spanish sign for /door/, I don't understand how the hands can be one in front of the other. Does it mean they overlap in the frontal plane? Wouldn't you write the handshape symbols overlapping then? (No entiendo, sorry)>> Yes the fingertips do overlap. That us precisly the problem. Since the SW symbols are two dimensional and see-through there is no way of knowing which hand is in front of the other. When I write by hand, and take the extra time, I can draw it so that the hand closest to me covers up the part of the hand that it overlaps. But right now you can't do that on the computer and it's more work than it's worth when writing fast. So, for this reason looking down from the top gives me the depth I need to clearly understand how it's signed. <<If the hand is above the head, and this is something I've wondered about, wouldn't that be shown with a "head" symbol, and a hand symbol written above it? I thought you would write it as if looking up at it (expressive viewpoint again) and so it would be white, i.e. not filled in.>> Yes, you would need to put the head in there to show the height of the hand but the hand would still be black as if you were looking down on it. Picture yourself hovering over your own head and looking down on yourself. <<Finally, I like the idea of different "spellings," and I wonder if what you are describing here is evolving a phonemic way of writing the symbols. That would be fascinating to see.>> One of my goals in encouraging writing here in Spain is to encourage people to write phonemically--write enough information that a knowledgable signer would have absolutely no doubt what was being signed/written--and nothing more. Unfortunately that means that you, or Valerie, or anyone who does not know Spanish SL may not pronounce everything exactly right. If I write for linguists or foreigners I need to write phonetically and add the detail that the Deaf Spaniard would assume. Different audience, different type of writing. Hope that helps clarify things a bit. Have a good day, Steve | ||||||||
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