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Information about Signwriting

Signwriting
TypeAlphabet
LanguagesAmerican Sign Language, many others
Time period
ISO 15924Sgnw
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
Sign Writing is a system of writing the movements and handshapes of sign languages. It was developed in 1974 by Valerie Sutton, a dancer who had two years earlier developed DanceWriting.

As Sutton was teaching DanceWriting to the Royal Danish Ballet, Lars von der Lieth, who was doing research on sign language at the University of Copenhagen, thought it would be useful to use a similar notation for the recording of sign languages. Sutton based SignWriting on DanceWriting, and finally expanded the system to the complete repertoire of MovementWriting. However, only SignWriting and DanceWriting have been widely used.

Basic Principles



In SignWriting, a combination of symbols for handshapes, body locations, facial expressions, contacts, and movements are used to describe a motion in sign language.
Enlarge picture
Handshapes and their equivalent in SignWriting
Over 200 symbols represent handshapes. For example, a fist uses a square. The open hand is represented by a pentagon shaped like a triangle over a rectangle. Fingers extended from the hand are shown with lines drawn attached to the handshape. The back of the hand is drawn in black, and the palm in white. The coloring of the hand allows the diagram to indicate the orientation of the palm. Each handshape has six palm orientations, three in each of the vertical (wall) and horizontal (floor) planes, and multiple rotations. Handshapes that are solid and unbroken are in the wall plane; handshapes with a white line through the area where the knuckles would be are in the floor plane.
Enlarge picture
Palm Orientations in SignWriting. White indicates the palm, black is the back of the hand. A line through the knuckles shows floor plane orientation.


Arrows are used to indicate movement. As with handshapes, arrows change to indicate in which plane movement is happening, as well as which hand is doing the moving. The right hand is shown with a solid black arrow head, and the left with a white arrow head. Movements in which both hands follow an overlapping path are shown with a simple line arrowhead. The arrow stem changes to show the vertical and horizontal planes. Arrows with double lines are in the vertical plane. Arrows with single lines are in the horizontal plane. Movement arrows include straight, curved, circular, wrist movement, rotational movement, diagonal movement and shaking movements. Additional movement symbols represent the opening and closing of fingers. A dot represents movement at the middle joint of a finger or fingers, black for closing the joint, and white for opening. A chevron shows movement at the joint where the fingers connect to the palm, pointing down for closing and up for opening. Contact symbols show body contact: an asterisk or star for a simple touch; a circle with a dot inside for a brush; a spiral for a rub, a pound sign for a strike; and a plus sign for a grasp. Two lines on either side of one of the contact symbols indicates that the contact happens between something; usually between fingers, or inside a circular handshape.

Additional symbols are used to represent body parts other than the hands. A circle shows the head. There are symbols to represent facial movements that are used in various signed languages, including eyes, eyebrows, nose movements, cheeks, mouth movements, and breathing changes. The direction of head movement and eyegaze can also be shown. Shoulders are shown with a horizontal line. Small arrows can be added to show shoulder and torso movement. Arms and even legs can be added if necessary. There are also symbols that indicate speed of movement, whether movement is simultaneous or alternating, and punctuation.

By combining various symbols, signs can be written. A person who has learned this system can "feel out" unfamiliar signs in the same way an English speaking person can "sound out" unfamiliar words written in the Roman Alphabet.

Signs are written in vertical columns. Within a column, signs may be written down the center or to either side. These are referred to as 'lanes,' and are used to indicate role shifting and body movement.

See also

External links

On SignWriting

Other links

ISO 15924
| | | | | |
List of ISO 15924 codes
ABCs redirects here, for the Alien Big Cats, see British big cats.


An alphabet is a standardized set of letters
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American Sign Language (ASL; less commonly Ameslan) is the dominant sign language of the Deaf community in the United States, in the English-speaking parts of Canada, and in parts of Mexico.
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ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems (scripts). Each script is given both a four-letter code and a numeric one.
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International Phonetic Alphabet

Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

The International
Phonetic Alphabet
History
Nonstandard symbols
Extended IPA
Naming conventions
IPA for English The
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Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the world's writing systems. Developed in tandem with the Universal Character Set standard and published in book form as The Unicode Standard
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sign language (also signed language) is a language which uses manual communication, body language and lip patterns instead of sound to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1971 1972 1973 - 1974 - 1975 1976 1977

Year 1974 (MCMLXXIV
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Valerie Sutton (born February 22, 1951) is a developer of movement notation and a former dancer.

She was born in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City, the daughter of a physicist father and a poet/model mother. She has an older sister Pam, a doctor of medicine.
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worldwide view of the subject.
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Dance (from French danser, perhaps from Frankish) generally refers to movement used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a
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DanceWriting is a form of dance notation. Developed in 1972 by Valerie Sutton, it is part of a greater body of work called MovementWriting or the International Movement-Writing Alphabet.
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DanceWriting is a form of dance notation. Developed in 1972 by Valerie Sutton, it is part of a greater body of work called MovementWriting or the International Movement-Writing Alphabet.
..... Click the link for more information.
The Royal Danish Ballet is one of the oldest ballet troupes in Europe. Based in Copenhagen, Denmark, it was founded in 1748 in response to the great popularity of French and Italian styles of dance.
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University of Copenhagen (Danish: Københavns Universitet) is the oldest and largest university and research institution in Denmark.
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sign language (also signed language) is a language which uses manual communication, body language and lip patterns instead of sound to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to
..... Click the link for more information.
DanceWriting is a form of dance notation. Developed in 1972 by Valerie Sutton, it is part of a greater body of work called MovementWriting or the International Movement-Writing Alphabet.
..... Click the link for more information.
Handshape refers to specific shapes formed with your hand(s) that are used in signed languages and manual communication methods such as American Sign Language, other international signed languages, Signed Exact English, and cued speech among others.
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sign language (also signed language) is a language which uses manual communication, body language and lip patterns instead of sound to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to
..... Click the link for more information.
Latin alphabet
Child systems Numerous: see Alphabets derived from the Latin
Sister systems Cyrillic
Coptic
Armenian
Runic/Futhark
Unicode range See Latin characters in Unicode
ISO 15924 Latn

Note
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sign language (also signed language) is a language which uses manual communication, body language and lip patterns instead of sound to convey meaning—simultaneously combining hand shapes, orientation and movement of the hands, arms or body, and facial expressions to
..... Click the link for more information.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
The Stokoe notation for American sign language (ASL) was the first writing system designed for a sign language.
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DanceWriting is a form of dance notation. Developed in 1972 by Valerie Sutton, it is part of a greater body of work called MovementWriting or the International Movement-Writing Alphabet.
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Java

Paradigm: Object-oriented, structured, imperative
Appeared in: 1995
Designed by: Sun Microsystems
Typing discipline: Static, strong, safe, nominative
Major implementations: Numerous
Influenced by: Objective-C, C++, Smalltalk, Eiffel,[1]
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DOS (from Disk Operating System) commonly refers to the family of closely related operating systems which dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995 (or until about 2000, if Windows 9x systems are included): DR-DOS, FreeDOS, MS-DOS, Novell-DOS, OpenDOS, PC-DOS,
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Extensible Markup Language

File extension: .xml
MIME type: application/xml, text/xml (deprecated)
Uniform Type Identifier: public.xml
Developed by: World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format: Markup language
Extended from: SGML
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Scalable Vector Graphics

File extension: .svg, .svgz
MIME type: image/svg+xml[1]
Developed by: World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format: vector image format
Extended from: XML


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ISO 15924, Codes for the representation of names of scripts, defines two sets of codes for a number of writing systems (scripts). Each script is given both a four-letter code and a numeric one.
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This is the list of ISO 15924 codes by alpha-4 code as of 15 July 2007.

Alpha-4 Numeric Name
Arab 160 Arabic
Armn 230 Armenian
Avst 134 Avestan
Bali 360 Balinese
Batk 365 Batak
Beng 325 Bengali
Blis 550 Blissymbols
Bopo 285 Bopomofo
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