Figure 2a: GIVE according to SignWriting
Figure 2b: GIVE according to Si5s
With the SignWriting representation, the two stylized drawings are arranged in a vertical fashion
(and the string of drawings are ‘read’ from top to down). The top depicts the sign's movement with the
use of an arrow. The bottom has two drawn pieces with the bold referring to the handshape and the
non-bold on what orientation of the handshape is (i.e., palm facing up). A person fluent with
SignWriting is supposed to read the drawings and put together the information to come up with the
sign GIVE.
For the Si5s representation, the stylized drawings are, this time, in a linear fashion (reading from
the left to right). The first drawing depicts the signer's chest. The following drawings indicate that the
handshape is not only closed, but in a straight angular form and moves in an arch manner and stops in
the end. Upon reading, a person has somewhat different information to work with (in comparison to
SignWriting) to come up with the sign GIVE.
The ASL-phabet, Stokoe’s Notation, and SignFont are the ones that best fit the grapheme-
based writing system type. Graphemes can be described as symbols that stand for themselves (not
something heavily influenced or shaped by the visual resemblance with the real world as discussed for
the stylized drawings). In terms of timeline for how the systems came into being, the ASL-phabet was
developed in 1998. Stokoe’s Notation was introduced earlier through the 1965 publication of “A
Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles”. With this system, William Stokoe and
his colleagues relied on the conventional typewriter keyboard for the graphemes, and the total number
is 55 (which is larger than the ASL-phabet). As shown in Figure 3, the written word for GIVE is done
based on the system’s distinctive order of the phonological parameters: Location, Handshape, and
Movement.
(Continue on the next page)
The Power of ASL
10
Winter 2018 – Issue 12