Hello my name is Valerie Sutton and I believe the question is how did the idea of writing sign languages come  about? My answer to this question is a little complicated because there are two issues. There are many people in history who have tried to write sign languages. It certainly didn't start with me, but there's also SignWriting which is my invention. So I'm going to answer this question first discussing what happened in the past with other people's inventions briefly and then in a second page of answers I'll try to respond to why and how I developed SignWriting. To  explain in general there are a lot of languages in the world. Before the internet it was hard for all of us to realize how big the world was. And can you imagine even being a caveman or a cavewoman? People had ways of writing things on caves. We know that that historically has been proven by researchers. All kinds of beautiful research has been done on the subject of language related to people from way back in time. We all evolved and as we evolved the languages evolved but getting a writing system is a different story. Communication can be one-on-one. But how many languages are there? How many communication systems do we have in the world and how many of them have writing systems? That's a big question so in this answer I'm going to discuss the fact that in current research and information that's on the internet at the end of 2023 (I\'92m recording this video on November 20, 2023) and if one looks on the internet to find information one finds that there are approximately 7,000 or 7,300 languages in the world today as far as everybody knows and around 7,000 of those are spoken languages not signed \
languages. But there are according to the World Federation of the Deaf and the \
United Nations there are approximately 300 signed languages. Now years ago \
people didn't even think of sign languages as real languages I know this \
because when I developed SignWriting years ago, in 1974 was the beginning of \
SignWriting, for me, I had no clue that there were so \
many sign languages in the world. In fact in those days most hearing researchers \
who didn't know sign language themselves but who were excellent researchers for \
other reasons. They knew Linguistics. They felt that languages had to be \
spoken. That they had to be sound based languages because they didn't realize \
that sign languages were real languages so I came into the development \
of SignWriting at a time when researchers were just finding out, \
just starting to acknowledge that maybe sign languages were real languages \
too. So this means that \
it was a very complex world because hearing people had no choice but to base \
it on their own experiences and so the researchers simply knew that there were \
spoken languages and were investigating the Linguistics and had no idea that \
there were sign languages that also had grammar and structure and \
syntax. So way back in time there were of course deaf people and certainly nobody \
questions that and a certain small number of people in the world are born \
into deaf \
families and that means that the mother and the father are perhaps deaf with \
perhaps a gene that might give them profound deafness from birth and often \
times their children are also deaf and \
families that are born deaf often times have sign language as their basic native \
language and sometimes they're hearing people who are born into deaf families \
and they also use sign language as their native language because \
they also were raised by deaf adults and for them that's their natural native \
language. The fact that there are born-deaf families started to be researched just \
around the time when I developed  SignWriting, so I came into the world of sign \
languages at a very \
wonderful, remarkable time just as the hearing world in 1974 was waking up to \
the fact that there were languages that were not sound-based but still had \
grammar and structure and sentences and a population that use the \
language and those native signers as they're called or people who use sign \
language on a daily basis are considered to be prime \
subjects for research. And because a great many researchers learned from the \
native signers or the signers who use sign language every day that their \
language was rich, filled with great vocabulary \
and very beautiful poetry that was expressed \
by deaf people through their native language but they never had a written \
form so let's talk about the world before I came into it. I I was born in \
1951 and in 2023 I'm 72 years old. My invention SignWriting started in \
1974 and we're coming into 2024 and so you can see that it soon \
will be 50 years old and this is a remarkable development \
because I never thought that I would be sitting here right now \
and talking to the world about a 50-year-old \
invention. SignWriting really works and is used all over the world and that's \
what my next message will be about but right now I want to explain to you that \
when I was born in 1951 I had no clue that there were \
people who use sign language on a daily basis. I was born hearing into a hearing \
family and I did not have any background in deafness. In my case I became a dancer \
so I came from the movement notation profession into writing sign languages \
which will be discussed next video therefore I want you to know that \
what I have learned since that time recently is that there are 300 sign \
languages possibly in the world maybe even more right now and it's wonderful \
that they are acknowledged and counted. That's important because before, they \
weren't even acknowledged and counted now they are and we know that they're \
valuable languages and what has been obviously evident is that as technology \
has developed we have all learned that we \
can communicate with each other if we use a computer or a cell phone or a \
tablet and when we do that how do we \
communicate with another country who you know that a country that uses a \
different language than we do like for example I speak English and I know in \
Brazil people speak Portuguese. Well how would I communicate \
with somebody in Portuguese if I didn't know Portuguese? which is true I go up to \
Google Translate. I\'92m sure you have heard of it \
today but can you imagine in 1951 there were no personal computers. The \
internet may have existed for the military or something but that was never, \
you know, widely distributed in the world so I had no clue that there were any \
kinds of other languages that I could translate easily. This is an important \
point because today we take it for granted that we can put something, let's \
say an English paragraph, into Google Translate and then I can push the button \
for Portuguese and whoops here's Portuguese! Actually I \
can't be sure it's correct because I can't edit it because I don't know \
Portuguese but I can still paste that document in Portuguese based on my own \
English and I can paste it into a text and send it to somebody today only to \
find they can read it. I just communicated with somebody in another \
country imagine that that could never be done when I was a child so I'm trying to \
explain to you that we are very fortunate today we have a lot of \
Technology but it has also exposed the fact that there are power bases in the \
world. All the countries that have a spoken language that can be translated \
in a service like Google Translate or other programs that also do \
translation, those translation programs are all based on the fact that some \
spoken languages are very powerful because they \
are used more than other spoken languages and they have a writing system \
so then programmers can program the writing system to work in Google \
Translate. This means that let's take the language Portuguese and English and of \
course Spanish and so many other powerful languages. They're powerful \
because they have a way to be translated between countries and also in politics, \
the countries that are ruling the world are the ones that can be translated in \
Google Translate and I bet you think that sounds silly but it isn't silly. \
That's where the power lies, is in the writing \
systems. And it's my understanding after looking on the internet for the \
information, they don't believe (the researchers) that more than around \
300 languages have any written form at all and out of the 7,000 that I told you \
about of the spoken languages only around 300 of those 7,000 languages have \
writing systems that are well known. There may be individuals who developed \
their own writing system for a language we don't know well, but those are not \
being programmed in Google Translate, so I believe that power lies in \
writing and when I started working in Denmark in \
1974 I found out very fast that it was a writing system that mattered for any \
language if you wanted to learn it. I was an American girl and I needed to learn \
Danish and I did (I proud to say). I was even able to speak for a while. It's been \
many years since I've been in Denmark but there was a time when I was thinking \
and dreaming in Danish and I loved being in Denmark and becoming a part (as \
much as I could)of the Danish culture but in the process I had to use \
dictionaries. I mean what else would you do in those days? Because we didn't have \
cell phones. They didn't exist yet. We didn't even have credit cards yet. \
Everything was just really really different and I had to learn \
Danish. So how would I do it? I would buy a beautiful Danish dictionary between \
Danish and English or English and Danish I had both of them of course, and then I \
would look up a sentence and I would find out how to say something that I \
wanted to say in Danish and then I would memorize it. Now all of that was based on \
the fact that I had a writing system for English (my native language) and a writing \
system for Danish (the language that I was trying to learn). If I had not had a \
writing system for both languages how could I learn them? unless I knew \
somebody personally who would be my private trainer and that I didn't have, \
so I would get on the bus and I (in Denmark) going somewhere right and I \
would see a sign on the bus that said something like \'93don't \
stand up while the bus driver is talking\'94 or whatever it said. I had, I remember, \
I memorized this sentence and I looked up every word and I kept saying that \
sentence to myself even in the middle of the night and I slowly learned how to \
speak Danish, all based on the fact that the Danish spoken language and the \
English spoken language use the same alphabet, the Roman or Latin alphabet as \
you may want to call it. It is one of the many writing systems in the world that \
bring people together. So what brought the idea of writing sign languages? Well not only that experience that I just told you \
about which I, as I said, will explain further, but there's also the fact that \
there are those who are born into deaf families or who use sign language on a \
daily basis and all of those people that go back from the beginning of the human \
race have had a need to write down their language too because sign languages are \
real languages. So how did they do that? Did they write? Yes they did. This is my \
point, which is that there isn't just one writing system for sign languages in the \
world. Certainly SignWriting is the only one that I know of that's used in 40 to \
60 countries at this time and it is the only one that I know of that can write \
all sign languages because it's it's a form of an alphabet that can write what \
we see or what we feel so it can technically write any sign language. All \
of that may be true but back when people for example were developing deaf \
education with sign language in France, at the time of Gallaudet,  \
there were people who were writing sign language. It's just that they were \
never accepted. They tried. There were some \
people who were very upset that it wasn't accepted. There is a \
history, but the school system for the deaf have been very difficult because \
they're under pressure by hearing people to make sure that deaf people can read \
and write a spoken language and so reading and writing sign \
language was a frightening event in deaf education for many hearing Educators who \
were worried about the fact that born deaf people may never learn to read and \
write a spoken language if they were allowed to write their own language sign \
language. This of course is a false premise. \
Everybody I believe is intelligent enough to learn two languages at least \
in most cases and one can learn how to read and write one language and read and \
write the other language and still not lose either \
language. In fact reading and writing your native language even if it's not  \
a well-known language can help anybody then translate into the spoken language \
that you want to learn so SignWriting and other writing systems for sign \
languages are definitely positive experiences and something very valuable \
for anybody so that they also can be translated. \
So what brought about the idea of writing sign languages? Well I suspect \
anybody who uses sign language has had that idea in their head probably from \
the beginning of their lives and also since the beginning of the human race so \
I would like to say that sign languages have been written in the past and \
there's documented history which I can provide you but the real question is \
this question: was \'93Why and how SignWriting \
began?\'94 I suggest that you go to the next video and I will answer that question \
thank you very much.