I meant that it's unsuitable for a dictionary.
Any good dictionary will tell you how a Chinese character is pronounced in any given variety.
Chinese characters wouldn't be so difficult to learn for somebody who only knew a signed language (in much of the developing world, deaf people don't learn to read and write spoken languages), because they can be associated with signs on a morphemic basis.
However, a spoken language written alphabetically used for glosses will require that any given deaf person learn said spoken language before being able to read a text.
This also means that a deaf man in Boston who wants to know the ASL equivalent of the English word "boarish" will not get an answer by looking in a dictionary and finding the gloss "boarish" in the field for an ASL translation.
Mark
On 27/08/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
- With word-for-word glosses in a spoken language. For ASL or BSL
this is usually English; for InSL it may be Hindi or another Indian language or English; for Chinese SL it will probably be Chinese. While this is suitable in most cases for writing whole sentences and recording syntax and grammar, it gives no specific information about what a sign looks like and thus is completely unsuitable.
Why does this make it completely unsuitable? A large proportion of Chinese characters give no specific information about how they are pronounced---and indeed are pronounced radically different by Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese speakers---but that doesn't seem to have led to them being deemed unsuitable for use in a written language. At the very least, using Chinese characters to write Chinese SL is no worse than using Kanji to write Japanese.
-Mark
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