Everyone, I'm new to this list so I do hope u don't mind me asking a naïve question here. It is great to see that there are wikipedia's in spoken/written languages - but being from a Northern Ireland Sign Language community myself, I wonder if it is possible for Wikipedia to create Sign.wikipedia.org to imply that it is for national sign languages - the real beauty about national sign language communities is that we tend to work together, crossing the borders, encouraging the development in protection and support for our national sign languages etc. Is it possible? Let me know, Shane Gilchrist Ó hEorpa

Kaixo! On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 08:44:01AM +0100, Skriptor wrote: Writting sign languages with alphabets makes no sense at all, as there is no sound to encode, but motions and expressions instead. An ideographic system is much more logical to the nature of the languages; and while current representations are quite far away of what we would expect a written language to look like, if it spreads in use it could well evolve to be something looking like chinese writting. -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]

Mark Williamson wrote: The important question is: what do our potential deaf users _themselves_ want? Then we can worry about who's going to find the motivation to adapt the software appropriately to support their needs. Given the choice of an underlying notation, a nice general way to proceed would to be able to define a vocabulary in some notation, and to then reference that vocabulary using {{template}}s, thus allowing the re-use of the quite complex gestural symbols units that make up sign language. Multi-layered templates could allow whole phrases or sentences to be built up. Presumably the Holy Grail of any such notation would be that it would be expressive enough to allow the generation of sign-language animations at some later date... -- Neil

All of these notations are standardised and can be used for any signed language. Unfortujnately, nonve of them are widespread and the only universally understood option would be to use video clips, which is horrendus (vrml might work too, but it's still not a viable option) Mark On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 01:59:17 +1100, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

Kaixo! On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 01:59:17AM +1100, David Gerard wrote: On the other hand, the very nature of collaborative work of wikipedia drives toward writting standardization. While the writting production of a language is limited to authors works like poetry, novels, etc; it can remain unstandardized, each author using his own spelling, and all is right; but when several people can work on a same article, with a signle phrase being potentially written by several different people, then common spelling conventions are a necessity. And it is quite interesting for me to see how the wikipedia work has given increased focus on the standardization problem for languages that until then didn't thought much about it. Think simply about articles titles and linking; how would you be able to correctly link articles if you can't guess what the article title may be because of lack of standardization? There is a writting system yes (actually several, it seems), it is standardized in its principles; now, it seems sign languages have quite a large dialectal variation (maybe the almost inexistant writting in sign language is an explanation of that); but that problem is no bigger than for any spoken language in a similar situation (that is, with a weak written tradition). That being said, I'm not sure that the initial question was about a wikipedia written *in* sign language; maybe it was just about providing information in other languages (like English) about sign language, in such case of course a different wikipedia is not needed, and specialized articles could perfectly fit the existing wikipedias. Until a reply about that question isn't done, we can't know what the initial intent was. If it is about writting in sign language, a difficulty is that what seems the most widespread writting system is not encoded in unicode, so it needs extra work; but as hyerogliphs are supported in wikipedia (the only site I know that allows to type and read hyeroglyphs, btw), and as the writting system for sign language I saw has some similarity to egyptian hyeroglyphs (not in shape, in logic) a similar solution could be done if that is actually needed. Now, as said previously, I don't know if that is what was asked for; but even if it isn't, it won't surprize me if some day there would be sign languages wikipedias; Wikipedia has made so many inroads and pioneering in languages support it is likely that the first wiki site for a written sign language would be in wikipedia; and it is definitively in the scope of the project. -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]

Neil: Not to discourage, but I can well imagine that many deaf users are quite happy with what is already there. Sign language is probably their first language, but many will have their literacy in the spoken language - that's the language they read and write, often on a daily basis. It's the same with many other speakers of dialects and smaller minority languages - the 'big' language is the language of schooling and written communication. Smaller languages often remain just oral languages - or in the case of sign language, signed languages. Of course this is all spoken by someone who does not have any direct experience with deaf people, so I gladly admit I'm wrong if someone else with more direct experience tells me differently. :-) Andre Engels

Thanks to everyone for their contributions :-) 1. there are many different subgroups that makes up the deaf community - but often it’s the national sign language that unites us. 2. there are hundreds of different sign languages around the globe - that’s why I have asked for sign.wikipedia.org to put them together instead of us asking for say, bsl.wikipedia.org, asl.wikipedia.org etc etc - it would be a central point for sign languages - and once we go to sign.wikipedia.org we can go into subgroups there in whatever group suits - for instance, there would be a NISL section for Northern Ireland Sign Language community etc. It can be in any written languages or sign-writing systems - but the main thing is that we need a central point for the national sign languages to be in the same category - and it can help us build information up etc. 3. There are 3 "sign-writing" systems out there - Sutton Writing System, Stokoe Notation System and HamNoSys (Hamburg Notation System) but it is felt that the Sutton one will become the most popular as its simple to use and easy to use - whereas Stokoe and Hamnosys are more used by academics (deeper note-keeping really) Shane

(by machine) from English to the Sutton SignWriting - yeah - but from SignWriting to English, I don’t think so. It will take us a while before we can reach an agreement on this. Shane

The writing systems, not exactly, but machine conversion would for sure be possible (I think). Mark On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 01:56:59 +1100, David Gerard <fun(a)thingy.apana.org.au> wrote:

Yes, but here we are talking about how there is a language barrier between, for example, American Sign Language speakers and Indian Sign Language speakers since they are not related. I don't see why we should do this if we don't also have an oral.wikipedia.org to unite spoken languages. Interlingual communcation is just as difficult as between any other two Wikipedias, and there is just as much of a potential for growth. The main problem here is that there is no consensus on what writing system to use, and it's impractical to create differnet Wikipedias for a single signed language to such a degree where we end up with thousands for all signed languages. This is not true, there are many more. Most of them are derivatives of Stokoe and used in educated (not nessecarily academic, though) communities. There are quite a few more that are used by individuals or small groups of individuals which they invented themselves. As far as the names for the systems, yours are inaccurate. They are Sutton Sign Writing (which is copyrighted and difficult to compute with, but popular), Stokoe (William Stokoe didn't name it himself, so it only has one word in its name), and HamNoSys (which you got right). Stokoe was invented first and isn't really very complicated - in fact, it's easier than SSW - but there's really only two books that will teach it to you (Stokoe's ASL dictionary, a different BSL dictionary which made minor improvements to the system). HamNoSys was derived from Stokoe but is meant to be more exact, so you can write allophones, it's sort of like the IPA of signed languages, and it's very very difficult to learn. Sutton Sign Writing came last, and was invented by a woman who invented some sort of dance writing. It has had by far the most promotion (Stokoe just put his out there, expecting people would use it, and HamNoSys was intended only for the scholarly community), is copyrighted, and is by far the most difficult to encode. It's definitely more difficult than Stokoe, but easier than HamNoSys. Mark

While this may be true in some parts of the world, many users of Chinese Sign Language and Indian Sign Language do not have this luxury. Mark On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 11:08:26 -0800, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:

Kaixo! On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 05:59:22AM -0000, Shane Gilchrist Ó hEorpa wrote: There are two major problems with that: - writting of sign languages is not yet standardized in computers (there is writtign system; but it isn't in unicode; and there is opposition to it, some people thinking that sign languages must be "oral" only (well, visual actually, but not written)), that is actually the most important problem, lack of standardization to encode it (often a lot of gif images are used instead) and the problem of the input; however, the wikipedia has come with a way to encode and display egyptian hyerogliphs; so a similar solution could maybe be developped. - there is not a single sign language, but a variety of them, so a unique sign.wikipedia.org would not be possible, there should be a different one for each different languages (and I have no idea of how much different sign languages exist) Or, if your proposal was not for a wikipedia written in sign language, but for content about sign languages written in other languages (eg: in English), then a specific wikipedia is not needed, you can just create/enrich the articles on the wikipedia of the language you want to write in. PS: for people maybe not aware of it: a writting of sign languages is a system that describes the body movements used in sign languages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SignWriting http://www.signwriting.org/ -- Ki ça vos våye bén, Pablo Saratxaga http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/ PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466 [you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Catalan or Esperanto] [min povas skribi en valona, esperanta, angla aux latinidaj lingvoj]