My name is Valerie Sutton and this video  
is also about SignWriting history but in the  
1980s. The first video asked “How was  SignWriting developed? How did it begin?”  
and I discussed the  
history of SignWriting in Denmark which  is where SignWriting began but in the late  
1970s I moved    
to Boston to teach Sutton DanceWriting at  the Boston Conservatory of Music's Dance  
Department  
and then I was able to meet Dr. Judy  Shephard-Kegl and presented SignWriting  
for the first time in  
the United States to the Linguistic Society  of America. What an honor, and it was  
It was held at MIT, Massachusetts Institute  
of Technology, and that was the beginning of my  
presenting SignWriting in the United States.  But not really working with people yet who were   
deaf or  
sign language experts. At that time, I was just  presenting the idea to other countries, other   
than Denmark,  
and was blessed to present in 1977 with Dr.  William Stokoe at a conference in Chicago   
and I also was able to work with the National  
Technical Institute for the Deaf in 1979 for  
6 months as a consultant on the “Technical Signs  Manuals” books where they use SignWriting for   
that purpose  
and I also worked with actors such as Bernard  Bragg and Linda Bove at the National Theater   
of the Deaf in  
Connecticut. All of those events were important  to SignWriting. But what really mattered   
was in 1981 a wonderful writer named Nancy Ellen  
Woo started the first newspaper that you could  
pick up and read and we called it the  SignWriter Newspaper and then in 1982 it  
officially began as  
a research project with our nonprofit organization  called the “Center for Sutton Movement Writing”  
which  
was located in California and I moved back to  California and I ran this out of our house and   
we collected small  
amounts of money through the nonprofit  as donations to pay to hire born deaf   
individuals  
or people who were native to American Sign  Language but were born into deaf families but   
were possibly  
hearing. We had two hearing staff members  and around eight deaf staff members and   
what did they  
do? they … I gave them the symbols of  SignWriting and said “Here look at this now.  
You know your  
language. I don't know ASL. You know ASL.  Please write your language.” That was a really   
interesting experience because, first of all,  
we had no computers. This was 1981 - 1982 and as  
you may know the real personal computers  started around 1984-1985. It's not that  
they didn't exist.  
There was the Commodore and the Atari. Do you  remember these old machines? um but the truth   
is most people didn't even know about personal  
computers until around 1984. So our SignWriter  
Newspaper project was written by hand with  ink pens and our beautiful deaf staff members  
wrote  
articles in the SignWriter Newspaper. We  did a tabloid that was big and the Tabloid   
uh size 20  
Pages written by hand with ink pens and most  articles were in American Sign Language and   
they wrote about,  
you know, events in the community etc all  written in the movements of American Sign   
Language for the  
first time in history. But we also had some  articles from Denmark, from my old friends   
who knew  
SignWriting in Denmark um and that was also  a wonderful experience that happened later   
in about mid 1980s. 1981-1982 was the beginning of  
us applying the symbols to really writing the  
language and you would think that it would have  been easy but it wasn’t. It actually was hard to   
take  
symbols that were in general fine for writing the  movements but applying them to languages that   
had never been  
written before and even though the deaf  people we hired were some of the very best   
who later  
went on to be quite well known um, even though  that was the case, it was hard for them to   
write their native  
language. They had never written it before.  They were always told that they had to   
read and write English,  
so they were never allowed to write it.  Nonetheless they had no way to write   
it anyway  
so this was a brand new experience and they  felt really frustrated because they were so   
used to writing  
English. Because the school system had been,  you know, encouraging that of course, that   
they found it  
hard to apply it to their language and then  we were lucky to get the donation of a   
printing press that chose to print the SignWriter  
Newspaper for free for us as a donation to our  
nonprofit and um they printed 11,000 copies of the  SignWriter Newspaper and then they also paid   
for the  
postage. This is just amazing to send it all  over the world and we sent out 11,000 copies   
of a newspaper written in the movements of  
sign languages. For four years and it went four    
times a year so every 3 months it was a  quarterly, 20 pages long, and we chose to  
write in different    
formats. We chose to write “Full Body” we called  it, when we had all of our stick figure and the  
whole  
body and then we chose to write some  articles in what we called “Handwriting”  
which was more like    
what we do today, by the way, which is just the  hands and the facial expressions but we don't   
always use the  
whole body in the Handwriting, as we called  it and we also tried writing in Shorthand. 
I developed a way to write at speed where we would  
write really really fast you know and uh  
we used to take notes in classrooms very  quickly. No matter what we had a wonderful  
time. It was one  
of the greatest experiences of my life, and  a lot of people were really shocked by it  
because they    
had never, I mean they received the newspaper  in the mail because they were on the mailing  
list for  
Gallaudet University for example, and so  everybody at Gallaudet had the big newspaper  
and were reading it  
and trying to figure it out. You would think  that everybody would say “Oh, I can't read  
that. That looks    
hard.” Instead we got letters back written on  pieces of paper by people who knew American  
Sign Language, 
writing back to us in American Sign Language  using the SignWriting system of that time,  
based on just  
looking at the newspaper and figured it out  and wrote us a letter. I thought that was  
one of the  
most remarkable experiences in my life  because would you have really expected  
somebody to write 
back when they had never had training in  it? The reason this worked is because it  
looks a little    
bit like the human body and that's the  visual nature of writing with the movement  
notation  
system that I developed. It's writing the way  it looks and feels and not writing rules about   
7:49 grammar yet.  
We weren't quite there yet. Later on, we got  into grammar rules, but at the time we didn't   
have the grammar  
rules. We just were lucky to be able to  write anything at all. We even got some   
angry letters  
from linguists saying ”You shouldn't be doing  this. You people aren't important enough...  
…but I can  
read it and by the way you put this grammar  wrong. You should have put this sign here…  
…because then it  
would make a better sentence in ASL.” You  know what that meant? That meant they could   
read it, and that's what mattered to me, because  
I knew that even though I didn't know American    
Sign Language, I could give them the tools and  then they could write their own language and   
they could do  
the arguing amongst each other, as to what  the grammar should be, and that's the way   
it should be, because I have no right to tell  
anybody how to sign. I am only a little person  
who developed some symbols that shows the visual  nature of the language, and that's exciting but   
that also means that we can apply it to write  
any sign language in the world. So after around  
1983 or so, and we were still writing, and this  newspaper was getting exhausting because we had   
to turn in  
articles you know every 3 months it was a big  job um I finally hired some of our old deaf   
friends from Denmark who already knew SignWriting   
for another reason which I will get to next and  
they wrote some articles in Danish Sign Language,  so we even had some newspaper articles in four   
languages: English, Danish, Danish Sign Language  
and American Sign Language, and that was truly  
historic. So now how come I knew so many Danish  people who knew SignWriting? Because in 1982,  
right  
around the same time of the SignWriter  Newspaper, we sent newspapers to Denmark.  
That 11,000 copies    
that we got donated to us, I sent back to  Denmark and Britta Hansen, who is my wonderful  
boss from from  
that time period, uh um she read the newspaper  and she contacted me and said: “Valerie,  
please come and    
teach us. We're interested because we are “KC”,  which stands for K-C for Kommunication Center   
in Copenhagen  
where they were doing research on sign  language and they wanted to read and write   
Danish Sign Language,  
so the very people I had met at the Deaf  Club in previous years in the 70s, when I   
was working  
at the University of Copenhagen, those same  wonderful deaf people were working at KC and   
I and Britta Hanson  
and Annegrethe Pedersen and Ole Faustrup, and  a lot of other people, helped us write books   
and Bente  
Sparrevohn and they wrote video of Danish Sign  Language using SignWriting and all of this was   
done by  
hand or by putting ink or we we had wax paper  like transfer sheets and we'd put them down   
on the paper  
and rub on them and symbols would come up  so we had ways of getting the symbols onto   
the page  
but we ended up with a bunch of beautiful books  from Denmark in written Danish Sign Language.   
I had the  
experience of my life. I taught teachers of the  Danish School System how to read and write   
signs with SignWriting  
for around 4 weeks. We had an intensive  program. I trained them. We did what   
we called  
“certification” which simply meant that they  had passed their exams and they knew how to   
read and write and  
they went on to teach a whole generation  of deaf children in Denmark from 1982   
to 1988. It was really,  
I think, the first time that there had  been a written form for a sign language   
actually,  
taught in the deaf schools, especially in  Denmark and I also later on was able to come   
back and forth,  
back and forth, between the United States  and Denmark, and I was able to visit these   
deaf schools  
and to see how beautifully the Danish deaf  children were reading and writing their sign   
language. I'll never forget being welcomed by, uh,  
the Aarhus School for the Deaf. I'm sorry the  
AALBORG School for the Deaf and that's  “A-A-L-B-O-R-G School for the Deaf”. They  
were so kind to me and  
welcomed me. Just really beautifully and I got  off the train and there they were waiting for  
me and  
all these deaf children and all these teachers  of the deaf and I went from room to room it  
was like  
a, a moment of magic where each room was  using SignWriting in a different way. There  
was SignWriting    
all over the walls and even one classroom had  children who had a whole myriad of physical   
issues and  
were not just deaf, in other words, but also  had other issues and they were reading and   
writing sign  
language too so there was an “ERA” in Denmark  when Danish Sign Language was considered   
an equal language to Danish spoken language,  
and it was written with SignWriting. And then  
their world changed and I must explain  this. From 1982 to 1988, SignWriting was  
used in the Danish
School System. That was also the time  when sign languages were considered equal  
languages but  
as history goes there are always changes in  Deaf Education and tragically, that's the way  
I see it, 
the Danish School System changed, so that they  only required Cochlear Implants to be implanted  
in deaf    
children and slowly sign language education was  banned so that they only now have Cochlear   
implanted deaf people and I don't quite know how  
their educational system functions but Danish    
Sign Language is no longer taught so of  course if you don't teach Danish Sign  
Language there's no  
reason to read and write it. On the other  hand, we had those years: 82 to 88 in which  
we proved it    
could be done and I'm just going to express that I  love Denmark and I love Danish Sign Language and   
I hope that it will continue to be written and  
I hope to write more of it in the future. I want  
to thank everybody who worked with me in  those years. And the 1980s was also quite  
remarkable    
for one last reason which is the development  of the SignWriter Computer Program and the  
software    
development that abolutely changed the world.  SignWriting is all over the world now   
because of the fact that  
we developed, Richard Gleaves specifically,  the SignWriter Computer Program. It   
started with SignWriter Apple 2E and SignWriter  
Apple 2C and then moved on to MS DOS to Sign    
Writer SignWriter DOS and we could type  17 Fingerspelling Keyboards of different  
countries. We  
could type any sign language in the world with  the  SignWriter Computer Program. It spread  
throughout  
Brazil, starting around 1996, because we  started on the internet in 1996 and Antonio  
Carlos da Rocha Costa
brought the SignWriter Computer Program and  other developments to Brazil so then from the  
SignWriter    
Computer Program, in the 2000s, began SignPuddle   and other programs like SignBank but no matter   
whether it's SignWriter DOS or SignBank  
or SignWriter Java or SignPuddle or all the new  
animation programs that are being developed  now, no matter what the software development,  
it is    
because of the software development that  SignWriting spread around the world and  
as soon as  
it was at the fingertips of every computer  user, no matter what the generation,  
SignWriting spread and  
whether the Deaf School System in Denmark  continued using sign language at all,  
was not the point. The    
point was that because of Denmark, I'm  so grateful to the 1970s and 1980s,  
that they gave me that  
chance to develop it with beautifully  intelligent people who believed in sign  
languages as real  
languages. So I thank you for listening to  the history of SignWriting and there's 's a  
lot more    
but at least you get the the picture that it  was the spreading of the writing system with  
computers  
and other technology that brought it to the  world.  And it is now being used in over 60  
countries. We    
have documents of different sign languages  being written. Also I want to say that even  
if a school    
system stops using sign language and only is oral,  the truth is that all sign languages continue   
anyway,  
as natural native languages of the families who  have the born deaf gene or have people with   
deafness in their  
family. Sign languages do not stop just  because school systems cannot use them.  
Sign languages  
will always continue, especially because  they are now written languages. Thank   
you very  
much and I look forward to seeing you soon.  Write to me anytime: sutton@signwriting.org