Talk:Written ASL

= Welcome =

Thanks for stopping by! As you can see, there's a lot of uncreated chapters, so if you think written ASL is an interesting topic, please help us flesh it out! We also need to develop our Contributor's Guide so people who know about ASL writing know how to get involved. LeptonMadness (discuss • contribs) 16:27, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Your Thoughts
Joining the discussion is easy - just click the add topic button above and then add your thoughts! You can start an account, or just edit/discuss anonymously. LeptonMadness (discuss • contribs) 16:27, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Purpose and Structure
Great idea to start a wikibook on written ASL. I'd be happy to contribute where I can. I am actively involved with SignWriting on computers and I have many resources available. Feel free to use anything you find useful. Everything is licenses for open and free use. If you need another license, please let me know.
 * Short write-up on the SignWriting Script
 * Presentations on SlideShare
 * Projects on GitHub

I was curious about the purpose of the book. The contributors page says "Our goal is for this wikibook to be the best place to go for anyone interested in learning how to write ASL."

I've never participated in writing a wikibook, so I've been reading some of the resources on the Contributor's Guide. One particular section on the Starting A New Wikibook page caught my attention.
 * One chapter is going to lead into another. The material will be presented in a comprehensible order. Books that are just collections of related information are known as "macropedias" and are not acceptable on Wikibooks. A good plan helps to ensure your book has a unified narrative throughout, to prevent it from becoming a macropedia.

The way the book is currently setup, it seems more like a macropedia than a cohesive story that leads from one chapter to the next. For my concerns, I'm really interested in getting more people involved with the sign language Wikipedia and Wiktionary projects. For me, this would be the culmination of the book. First, people learn to read and write by hand. Then they learn to write with computers. Then they start to contribute to the sign language wiki projects.

Going this route, the book would need a new structure. Rather than separate chapters for SignWriting, Si5s, and ASLWrite, they would be combined under general sections where applicable. Each section could discuss the topic in general and then have subsections that are system specific.


 * Introduction
 * History
 * Philosophical Approaches
 * Contributor's Guide
 * Handwriting
 * Hand shapes
 * Contact
 * Movement
 * Location
 * Strategies for Clear Writing
 * Position of contact
 * Every sign has a center
 * Writing with computers
 * Drag and Drop
 * Typing
 * Contributing to Sign Language Wiki Projects
 * Wikipedia
 * Wiktionary

Just a few ideas I thought I'd share. -Slevinski (discuss • contribs) 16:37, 26 April 2016 (UTC)

Re: Purpose and Structure
That's an interesting idea. I think you're right about not being a macropedia. On the other hand, I do feel the systems currently in use are different enough that it would be confusing to jump between them. When you go to write ASL, the first thing you decide is not the handshapes or locations, but which system you will use, because they have very different approaches:


 * SignWriting is more iconic-featural (each feature, such as +/- finger, has a grapheme)
 * ASLwrite is more iconic-phonemic (each phoneme, such as 1hand/2hand has a grapheme)
 * si5s is more abstract-featural (features such as +/- bend have abstract diacritics) as well as logographic (some words have "reserved" characters, like ME, or PERSON).

Because of the differences in what each system represents, choosing a system feels a little like choosing between Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, if the three of them looked similar and described the same language. If those three systems were all used for English by different people (hey, why not, Japanese does use katakana, hiragana, kanji, and romanji :P), I would expect to learn them in different chapters. Especially since there aren't (to my knowledge) any ASL texts or transcriptions that mix and match writing systems.

In addition, each system has different number of symbols (SignWriting has around 500, ASLwrite, around 100, and si5s I believe around 50). And that's not even mentioning the marginal systems like Stokoe Notation and HamNoSys used by some academics, the ASLphabet with its teeny bank of 32 symbols, or the numerous attempts to make a human-readable transcription using only latin/ascii characters.

Simply put, there are so many systems in use, with significant differences across the board. If I'm a researcher, and I see someone using ANY kind of written ASL, I want to be able to come here, learn how to read it, and go back to my research, that way I don't have to scour the web for lessons in each one. If I saw every system's handshapes in one chapter, followed by every system's locations in the next, et c, I don't think I'd be able to learn any of them!

My question is this - how can we get a happy medium between:
 * Proper flow (not being a macropedia),
 * proper scope (giving each system fair representation)
 * proper pedagogy (anyone can learn how read/write in the system(s) they're looking for)

LeptonMadness (discuss • contribs)


 * Interesting thoughts. I guess one all-inclusive book will still maintain flow within the different sections.  While the whole book can share the introduction, the sections on SignWriting, ASLWrite, and Si5s will each have their own internal flow.  Slevinski (discuss • contribs) 19:45, 28 April 2016 (UTC)