A Linguistic Comparison
Two Notation Systems for Signed Languages:
Stokoe Notation & Sutton SignWriting


Joe Martin
Western Washington University
Martinj4@cc.wwu.edu

 

COMPARISON continued...

Figure 11f. ASL children's story written in SSW
An excerpt from Goldilocks shows facial expressions.
It is written down the page in vertical columns, read from left to right.

Baby Bear asked, "Who are you?"
Goldilocks saw the three bears, became frightened,
shot out of the house, and ran all the way home.

As always, SSW shows these without reference to any linguistic structure, and so won't be bothered if they should eventually prove to be more than one new parameter. This is unlike traditional approaches, which depend on first isolating the parameters of the language, then assigning symbols for their different settings. In the case of non-spoken languages we simply do not yet know what those parameters are.

 

...back to Table of Contents....

I.
Introduction

III.
Scripts

 V.
Comparison

  VII.
Conclusions

II.
Describing Language

IV.
Origins

 VI.
Structure

VIII.
References