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From:  Valerie Sutton Date:  Tue Aug 7, 2001  1:41 pm Subject:  Re: Visitors from Nicaragua ;-)

Helen Stickney wrote: > I have been fortunate enough to get to work in both Bluefields and Condega and it is exciting to see how SignWriting has enhanced the accessibility of knowledge in both schools. SignWriting List August 7, 2001 Hello Everyone! Thank you, Helen, for the lovely message about Nicaragua and your work with SignWriting. Yes...of course I remember you! James told me a great story about how documents in SignWriting were written in Bluefields, and then those documents were mailed to the other school in Condega. Apparently the teachers in Condega were then able to share the same SignWriting literature with the students there. That is the test of a true writing system. Before now, the only way to share Sign Language literature between two schools would be to send a videotape of the signing to the other school. That requires video equipment in both schools, which you may not have in Nicaragua, plus a child cannot hold the videotape on their lap and study the literature and learn to read from it. James also stressed to me that more students read SignWriting than write it... That is true for most written languages. Usually more people can read than write. But at least written literature can be read and shared. In the history of the written English language, the writing of the Bible is the classic historic comparison...Monks could read and write, and they wrote the Bible by hand...but the general population learned to read from that, even though they could not write themselves. So it sounds like you are doing an excellent job in Nicaragua, following the natural evolution of writing systems... Val ;-) Valerie Sutton

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