I received an e-mail that mentions a 69 page document is SignWriting. At this moment a document in SignWriting is still considered to be exceptionally large. It does prove that people are able to write documents in their sign language that are this big. As more texts are written it will be not be special much longer.
The reason for me to mention it is that it indicates that SignWriting is stepping over a threshold. It is enabling American Sign Language to be a literary language. This is another step closer to the realisation of a Wikipedia for ASL.
Thanks,
GerardM
2 comments:
Hello Gerard -
Thank you for this blog. There have been other larger documents written in other Sign Languages, in SignWriting, in the past...For example, in Spain, there is a novel written in Madrid Sign Language
and it is 140 pages, and there have been several large documents from Nicaragua in Nicaraguan Sign Language, but in ASL we have tended to write shorter ones, like 10 pages, instead of 69 pages. We hope to complete the entire Gospel According to John in 2008, which will be around 400 pages is my guess (21 chapters), and Nancy plans to continue to translate all four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John....
Cat in the Hat and Sleeping Beauty will be fairly large too, depending on the accompanying illustrations. And yes, this is quite an accomplishment, because the older documents from Spain and
Nicaragua were published with our old (classic) SignWriter DOS program that only writes from left to right on the page (there was no other software at the time of those publications). This is the first
time that we are writing large documents with vertical columns, which encompasses important aspects of Sign Language grammar called Lanes...so we are glad to have the two programs we have: SignPuddle and SignBank, to produce these new vertical-column documents with Lanes...SignPuddle is the program we use to write in vertical lanes, and SignBank DocumentMaker is a program that helps us put those columns into book format....
Just to give you some insight...and yes...this all leads to a future Wikipedia in ASL and other signed languages - that is for sure!
Val ;-)
PS. You are welcome to place this message on your blog if you wish!
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