xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) (03/03/91)
Note newsgroups; followups are back to comp fonts, where this discussion is ongoing, briefly. hamlin@ral.rpi.edu (Gregory Hamlin) writes: > Does anyone know of any fonts available which depict the finger > spelling alphabet? How about American Sign Language or Signed English? > My mother teaches a class in sign language, and would like to make up > worksheets and flash cards for the students. Postscript, fig, or other > representations would be useful, also. Thanks wilcox@hydra.unm.edu (Sherman Wilcox) writes: > There is a fingerspelling font available from sumex. It is called > something like AMSLAN, but it is really fingerspelling. > I have in the past seen implementations of Stokoe notation on the Mac > but don't know where you could get a copy. > Emerson & Sterns, in San Diego, developed an ASL orthography a couple > of years back, including a Mac font (called SignFont). It is available > from a commercial distributor in Washington state, I believe, but > can't recall their name. You could track it down by contact E&S. You > should realize, as I mentioned, that this is a true orthography of ASL > -- a phonemic based, alphabetic writing system. I.e., it would > probably be of very limited use to your mother and her sign language > students. Also, it would be of limited use in writing Signed English, > since it is designed to include only ASL phonemes; Signed English uses > an overlapping but typically different set of primes (especially, for > example, handshapes). > Hope this helped a bit. > Sherman Wilcox, Ph.D. Dept of Linguistics University of New Mexico Well, it certainly raises some interesting questions. By means I've forgotten, but it looks like a used book store was involved, I have in hand a copy of Stokoe, Casterline, Croneberg, _A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles_, Gallaudet College Press, 1965. I confess to having opened it a few times for amusement. Is the Stokoe notation in active use? It seems excellent for handwritten work, but definitely penalty-time priced work for typesetting; from a casual glance-by, it seems to be a highly "diacritical mark" oriented language, with a central pair or trio of symbols (a "Tab" followed by one or two "Dez"), highlighted by under and overscores, superposed dots, and other markings, followed by a 2 by 2 grid the size of one of the major symbols, in which one to four minor ("Sig") symbols are laid out to indicate more temporal or positional or motion information. That's the introductory form; looking through the dictionary, it seems to get much more complex, with Sigs hung off of Dezs at (naively) arbitrary locations and orientations. Or, it may be quite regular, and I'm visually associating the wrong pieces. I'm also the proud possessor of MetaFont and TeX, an Amiga, and a mind, frankly, full of termites. If I bullied what I have, over time, in my extremely few lucid moments, into some set of Metafont source files and TeX commands to set them at the appropriate locations, would it be useful to anyone? The MetaFont work would be, frankly, child's play, the Stokoe symbols are all made of constant width lines with undecorated ends, in a very small variety of heights and widths, with no descenders or ascenders (almost like a small caps font), mostly stick figures or simple curves, and there are only 55 of them, much less trouble than metafont coding an ASCII international code sheet of a couple hundred symbols, for example, and with simplified rasterization modifiers (fixed width strokes are ugly, but a joy to program). There is a bit of a question about the symbol indices in the resulting stokoe.mf file, though; the current indices are 1-55; would that cause some collision with control characters? I don't use this stuff much; I enjoy the symbol coding a lot more than the document creation afterward. All the real effort would be the TeX layout commands, which might require more knowledge of the language (AmSLan ala Stokoe) than I could acquire, but might be possible to me. On that base, the whole Stokoe Dictionary could be laid out by someone else as \TagSomeASLwordInEnglish definitions which would allow a certain stilted source document writing style to be set as Stokoe notation AmSLan. Someone else with more experience and the ability to focus for more than a few minutes at a time might want to take this on instead of me, if it were useful; it looks like a month of evening hours could have it done. How, if at all, does this Stokoe notation compare to the Emerson & Sterns work noted above? At a higher level, does any agreement exist on _any_ AmSLan orthography, or family of orthographies, so that one is a refinement of previous work, or is the situation more one of lots of folks hieing off in different directions with no coordination? I comment that the Sotkoe notation, or my ability to catagorize memes, one, seems inadequate, since the dictionary is full of words that are different in English, have the same Stokoe notation (apparently) and are differentiated by the intensity, speed, or broadness with which the corresponding sign is made. The orthography seems not to encode these adverbial modifiers. Is this me only seeing one kind of snow to the Eskimo's couple dozen because I have a deficient vocabulary to support the needed thought processes, or does AmSLan support a continuum of memes in which my phonemeal limitations only allow me to perceive the fixed points which to me are separate words? Seeking education, looking for useful passtimes. Kent, the man from xanth. <xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us>
EZ-as-pi@cup.portal.com (Bruce Robert Gilson) (03/08/91)
Emerson & Stern's SignFont was quite
different from Stokoe's system, but
before explaining E&S I have to de-
scribe yet a third system: Sign Writ-
ing, developed by Valerie Sutton. The
Sutton system was designed to be much
more graphic -- the symbols are styl-
ized pictures of the movements, with
conventions for representing 3rd di-
mensions, contact, etc. The E&S sys-
tem was developed by someone who had
originally gotten a grant to compu-
terize Sign Writing, but ended up
with a very much more abstract and
(I think) less readable system, with-
out the Stokoe advantage of using a
lot of letter-like symbols. In short,
neither fish nor fowl.
Stokoe's system is used by some re-
searchers; I have never heard of any
use of it in writing connected text.
It sore of functions as a Sign equiv-
alent of the IPA.
Sutton's system is being used for
writing a newsletter, a dictionary
exists, and I believe it is used in
Denmark as an instructional medium.
Bruce R. Gilson
ez-as-pi@cup.portal.com
or
9398@mneuxg.uucp