Hello. My name is Valerie Sutton and I
have the question from someone: “What was
the response when the SignWriting
Script was designated as a World Script
by the
ISO?” The ISO is the
“International Standard of Organizations”,
I think, on the internet,
ISO, and they need to have coding uh for
languages to be able to help programmers
program with those
languages and there had never been a
sign language, I don't believe, with such
an encoding, but it is true that SignWriting,
the script itself, was given this
encoding, “a World Script”. One of the world
scripts, that is of course an enormous
honor, and it is “Sgnw”.  “Sgn” stands for
sign. “w” I’m not sure. Sgnw (095),  I
believe. So how can you learn more about
this? Simply uh go to
Wikipedia, the English version of
Wikipedia, and type in SignWriting and
find the article on SignWriting and on
the right side on the screen if you're
on a computer of course, in the Wikipedia
page about SignWriting, you will find
sort of a column where they're
discussing this, that that SignWriting
is one of the world's scripts and this
we feel was extraordinarily valuable for
our software development and Steven
Slevinski made the most of it and
programmed with it and it has been
extremely valuable for all programs
since we were given that status and it
involves Unicode. It's intertwined with
the Unicode committee that did put
Sutton SignWriting into Unicode as well
and it was partly because we had that
World Script uh you know marking. That
helped us get into Unicode, is my guess
or perhaps it was the reason that we got
the marking. I have no idea but I do know
that we're greatly honored and listed as
one of the World Scripts. Thank you for
asking. As far as what did it do for us?
Well, who is “us”? “Us” are people who are
writing sign language and so all sign
language users who choose to write it
with SignWriting are benefited by the
fact that the writing system was
acknowledged as a World Script because
it can be then compared to other scripts
of our globe and there is a website
called Omniglot, if I remember correctly,
and because of
that, that acknowledgment of being a
World Script, SignWriting was then
compared to Hangul, as you know that's the
name of the alphabetic script
from uh Korea, from Korea, which was
developed by their their King in you
know many centuries ago. It's such a
brilliant and fascinating script and the
reason that SignWriting had been uh
compared to Hangul is
because
Hangul is visually writing certain
features of the tongue, I think.  I'm not
an expert. Please forgive, but the point
is they called the Hangul writing system
“featural”. That was a term. You can read
this on the Omniglot website about
Sutton SignWriting, to understand it
better, and Omniglot felt, as other groups
do, that SignWriting is a “featural
writing system” meaning we are
alphabetic but we are writing what we
see or feel. We are not just uh writing
something abstract. It’s it's connected
to something visual or our features and
that's why we're “featural” and Hangul was
also featural because the tongue. Some of
the symbols in their writing system is
really beautiful and it shows the mouth
and the tongue and the relationship that
was needed for writing that particular
sound or concept. So that's what happened.
When we became a World Script we were
honored by being compared to other world
scripts. Thank you for asking that
question.