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