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Sutton SignWriting is a writing system for sign languages

Sutton SignWriting is a writing system for sign languages

6 comments

·July 19, 2025
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zahlman

I don't believe I see the purpose of this. Is it:

* Empower deaf people to feel like they have a shared, global language distinct from and on par with spoken languages? (but there are other sign languages besides ASL...)

* Serve people who are sighted, but both deaf and dyslexic? (Would the symbols actually help?)

* Teach people how to use sign language? (same objection as before, plus it just doesn't come across as very informative)

* Something else?

I will say that featural scripts like this are cool in general, though, and also congrats to the parties involved on getting it into Unicode.

teraflop

If you recognize that sign languages such as ASL are distinct languages, as linguists do, then it naturally makes sense that native speakers of those languages would want a way to write them down in a static symbolic way, for all the same practical reasons that we use the Latin alphabet in English.

For instance, being able to quickly scan through a piece of text instead of having to watch it play in video form, or being able to search and index it, or providing a way to organize dictionaries.

There's no inherent problem with using the same notation scheme for different sign languages, just like we use essentially the same alphabet for English, Spanish, French, German, etc.

pitpatagain

SignWriting is closer in purpose to the International Phonetic Alphabet for spoken languages. It attempts to allow detailed recording of the actual signing as it is signed for any sign language.

It has a lot of the disdvantages of IPA as a practical writing system as well.

Sign languages are not the same as spoken languages used in the same countries, as is very apparent if you look at transliterations of ASL using latin glyphs, there are some standardized ways to do this but they drop a lot of information and don't have the same sentence/word structure.

There is also a long history of attempts to create notation that can record this type of language, the first for ASL being Stokoe notation, which represents hand shapes for example, but can't represent for example facial elements, and is specific to ASL, can't represent things in other sign languages.

agarsev

Interestingly, one advantage SignWriting may have over IPA is that while you cannot easily represent sounds in a visual medium (thus letters are mostly arbitrary) movement and hand depictions in SW are highly iconic.

Also, just as you can drop many IPA symbols and just get the basic set needed to represent a particular language, I guess you could use "simplified" SW ignoring the fine differences.

agnishom

I don't have a good answer to this question at all, since I know barely anything about this.

However, something to keep in mind is the following: signed languages are not a signed transliteration of the local language. For example, American Sign Language is not a signed way to communicate English. It has its own grammar. Therefore, when you serialize something like ASL, you do not get back something like English.

So, you have to have a different way to serialize ASL, and this is that.

agarsev

It's a way to write sign languages. Think of like the alphabet, but for hands, movements etc instead of sounds.

Now, it may not be obvious that there is a necessity for a writing system for a minority language embedded in a larger community (spoken language), but there are many uses: preservation, digital use, teaching, linguistic study...