Talk:SignWriting

Wikipedia in American Sign Language proposed

Please see meta:Requests for new languages/Wikipedia American Sign Language 2. Thank you.--Pharos 21:11, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Please see ASL Wikipedia on Incubator -Slevinski (talk) 20:23, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Popular? An opinion

I would seriously disagree that SignWriting is "popular" in the ASL community. There are not many ASL users, apart from those who study ASL as a lingustic field, that are familiar with SignWriting. The average ASL user does not know about SignWriting and those that might be familiar with SignWriting's existence do not use it. It is grossly misleading to say that it is "popular." -Mela —Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.99.135.160 (talk) 07:56, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Orthography

A standardized symbol set is not the same thing as a standardized orthography. The IPA is a standardized symbol set, but there are numerous ways to transcribe English in the IPA, both phonemic and phonetic. There are some rather nasty arguments here on Wikipedia about how English should or should not be put in the IPA. SignWriting isn't the same thing as SignWriting ASL, and it sounds as though there's a lot of variability in the SW community. That isn't necessarily a bad thing—English before Caxton was written however the writer saw fit—but it does cause difficulties. Actually, those difficulties may soon be a thing of the past, just as the problem with typography is now ancient history: with an electronic dictionary, the software could lead you to the entry no matter how you spell an entry. But I imagine that with a print dictionary, you often won't find an entry for a spelling you come across, which means you need to convert things in your head before you can look them up. — kwami (talk) 00:36, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

"Actually, those difficulties may soon be a thing of the past, just as the problem with typography is now ancient history: with an electronic dictionary, the software could lead you to the entry no matter how you spell an entry." Eye guess ewe haven't had two youse eh spell chequer. (I guess you haven't had to use a spell checker.) Errors caused by reliance on spell checkers are numerous. --Thnidu (talk) 23:17, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Collation

I removed the following statement from the problems section because it is incorrect and unsourced.

The lack of overt phonemic structure or standardized orthography makes alphabetization difficult. For example, the hand used to sign a word makes no difference to the meaning, but it does change the spelling.

SignWriting has had computerized collation since 1998. Users have found this method of collation to be natural and intuitive. You can read about it in detail in the SignSpelling Guidelines 2008. You can view a few dictionaries. You can download and use the SignBank Database. Click on any of the symbol in SignPuddle symbol frequence page and view the signs collated properly.

Not understanding how SignWriting does collation does not mean that it is difficult or a problem. Slevinski (talk) 18:48, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

I see Kwami put this back. I'm deleting it again because it's just original research. -- Evertype·✆ 22:30, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Okay, that difficulty has evidently been overcome. We should, however, retain a note that SW is not phonemic.

What of the lack of a standardized orthography? Has that been solved? Can't just write what you sign, since there is no inherent way to decide which elements are to be written. — kwami (talk) 22:37, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't think you've "proved" that it isn't phonemic. Or shown what it is if it is not. If you are moved to try to do this, you should post your essays here on Talk to see if there is consensus. It sounds like OR to me, though. -- Evertype·✆ 22:49, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

SignWriting is more phonetic that Stokoe Notation, but SignWriting is phonemic. A phonemic script will use a restricted set of symbols to capture the meaningful contrasts of a language. In sign language, there are 4 types of phonemes: location, hand shape, motion, and facial expressions. Let's analyze the hand shapes.

Computerized SignWriting has a limited number of hand shapes (261), more than Stokoe Notation, but still limited. For each hand shape, SignWriting adds 6 palm facings, 8 primary rotations (45 degree increments) and 8 mirrored rotations. These 6 palm facings are a restriction, but are they meaningful? If we can find a minimal pair of signs that only differ in palm facings, then the palm facings are meaningful. The signs for "ask you" and "ask me" use the same hand shape (index finger up) and the same motion (squeeze finger closed). The only difference is palm facing (palm facing away from the signer and palm facing towards the signer); therefore palm facings are indeed phonemic. The same can be done with rotation. For SignWriting to be truly phonetic, hand shapes would need to be able to be created with any finger arrangement, with any degree of palm facing, and with any degree of rotation. This type of phonetic writing is possible with SignWriting by hand, but computerized SignWriting uses meaningful restrictions and is phonemic. Slevinski (talk) 02:22, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

There are several sources which note that SW is not phonemic. I didn't think that was being questioned.

In order for it to be phonemic, all 8 orientations would need to be shown to contrast, not just rotation in general. Every variation in sign space would need to be shown to be distinctive as well, and AFAIK it hasn't. Also, to be phonemic, it would need to be based on a phonemic analysis of the language it is used to write, and our article (and AFAIR the Sutton site) brags that no such analysis is needed. Using SW for ASL is like using aspiration, vowel devoicing, dark els, and variant stress levels for writing English, and arguing that it's phonemic because English uses voicing, velars, and stress phonemically. — kwami (talk) 02:42, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I think that your insistence on comprehensiveness here is unwarranted. 'Every' handshape need not be shown to contrast "all" 8 orientations for orientation to be considered phonemic. Plenty of languages use voicing and voicelessness as phonemically distinctive features and yet do not distinguish /s/ from /z/. Irish is one of these. Velarization and palatalization are two other features which are not realized comprehensively throughout the phonology of Irish. I don't find your argument here convincing, Kwami. And indeed I find your tone to be very POV ("brags"). SW is a practical writing system for Signed Languages, just as Latin is a practical writing system for many spoken languages. In the main, most languages using Latin use it phonemically. (Latin distinguishes b and p, d and t, g and k, etc.) The same can be said for SW, and exceptions to the rule do not make either non-phonemic. -- Evertype·✆ 10:18, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Well sure, it can be used phonemically. It could be used as an abugida for English, for that matter. But it's presented as non-phonemic, that no phonemic analysis is required. The hand locations, for example, could encode a lot of phonetic detail. Irish may not have palatalization on all consonants, but it only encodes a 2-way distinction, which is what the phonology is based on. If it encoded a 4-way distinction, that would be non-phonemic.

If SW is used phonemically, we should be able to attest to that. — kwami (talk) 17:06, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Phonetic and Phonemic SignWrting

While we all like hard boundaries, there is usually more of a spectrum. Instead of phonetic and phonemic we can talk about emic and etic accounts (an observer versus a person within a culture). SignWriting started as a etic account (by someone outside the culture) and produced a phonetic script. The turning point for SignWriting happened when the people inside the culture started to use the script. The change is cemented in SignWriting history as the change from the receptive viewpoint to the expressive viewpoint. The receptive viewpoint is used in transcription. The expressive viewpoint is used for authorship. With this change, requested by those inside the culture, the SignWriting script moved from the purely etic account to include an emic component. This emic component has continued to grow over 30 years. The SignWriting script is neither phonetic nor phonemic, it depends on how it is used.

The latest symbolset of SignWriting (the ISWA 2010) could be said to be phonetic, but it is not equivalent to the IPA. The IPA contains every sound it is possible to use for a voiced language. If there is any argument within the IPA community, it is very small and very insignificant. The ISWA 2010 is extensive covering a reasonable 652 symbol bases and organizing 36,600 static and unique graphemes. However, the ISWA 2010 is not exhaustive like the IPA. The ISWA 2010 includes 261 hand shapes. There are hundreds of possible hand shapes that could have been added, but were not. The choice of hand shapes was based on the experience of an international user base. The choice of hand shapes is neither phonetic nor etic. The ISWA 2010 is a phonemic account of a phonetic ideal. Some international sign languages have multiple generations of writers. The most experienced are writing phonemically right now. Beginning writers most often write phonetically. The phonetic writing is useful for analysis to discover the phonemic component. The hand shape frequency reports are especially relevant. Low frequency hand shapes can be identified and possibly combined with a similar hand shape to reduce the size of the ISWA 2010 subset for a specific language. Slevinski (talk) 17:09, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

SignWriting is not featural

SignWriting is not featural. SignWriting does not identify features, but segments of gestures. A feature is an analysis of the physical mechanics of sound production. A feature is defined as meaningless because it is a physical account of a sound. For a voiced language, the sound is meaningful and the physical account is meaningless. Of course, it is not entirely useless because there is the skill and craft of lipreading. Lumping SignWriting as featural is a travesty because it has absolutely nothing to do with the original development nor the existing classification structure. I understand that Wikipedia can only reference existing information, but using a flawed classification is worse than no classification. The SignWriting script is better thought of as segments of articulatory gestures. Slevinski (talk) 17:09, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Of course it's featural. It illustrates the features of the elements of sign. The symbols for different phones are similar depending on how similar the phones are. If it weren't featural, the symbol for a palm-up orientation would look nothing like the symbol for a palm-down orientation. And since when is a feature "defined" as meaningless? — kwami (talk) 18:57, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

SignWriting is definitely featural, it specifies both phonetic features and segments. A SW character typically (eg. the sign MEET) indicates the beginning, middle and end segments of a one-syllable sign, and it also specifies many many features, notably [+/- bend] for each joint of each of the fingers.

Sound is irrelevant to the discussion. A linguistic feature is an analysis of the physical mechanics of language production. For a voiced language the sound is meaningful and for a signed/visual language the visual image is meaningful. The physical account describes via distinctive features how that aural or visual image is created. Sometimes the description is in terms of acoustic properties, more often it is in terms of the physical movements of articulators e.g., [+/- nasal] describes whether or not the velum is raised; [+/- bent] describes whether or not a joint is straight; [+/- round] describes lip positions used with both signed and spoken languages. Dzho (talk) 03:39, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

I think I finally understand how SignWriting is featural. SignWriting is not featural because it writes the visual appearance or place of articulation. SignWriting is featural because many of our symbols contain featural information that aid in the understanding of the symbols as a whole. The handshape symbols of SignWriting are full of featural information. We can tell the orientation, rotation, and articulation of individual fingers. That is definitely featural. Our symbols represent concepts of SignWriting such as hands, movement, dynamics, timing, head, face, trunk, or limb. We combined our symbols (phonemes) in 2-dimensions to build words (morphemes) unlike any other script.The SignWriting symbol for tension is interesting to consider. Does tension represent a phoneme, or does it represent a smaller building block of a larger phoneme? A phoneme is a basic unit of a language's phonology, which is combined with other phonemes to form meaningful units such as words or morphemes. (I can't believe the phonology page is so audio-centric.) Slevinski (talk) 02:03, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Three comments here which I hope will help further the discussion.

1) The idea of featural writing systems, as opposed to alphabetic, has to do with whether one symbol encapsulates everything (or virtually everything) that is happening in the production of a word/sign at a given time. So, in a spoken language, a letter represents a whole phoneme--its a summary statement about the combination of all the features that are needed to produce that phoneme (with certain exceptions such as tone). Change one feature, such as voicing, and you need a completely different symbol, such as changing t to d. I don't know the details about Hangul, but if I understand it right, if you change voicing you only change the symbol that indicates voicing, the rest of what is written stays the same. SignWriting is like that, in that it writes several things that are happening at the same time. Change one of those things, such as handshape, and all you have to change is the symbol for handshape, not the whole sign. Given the nature of sign languages, it's hard to see how it could have been otherwise. From that standpoint, all writing systems that have been proposed for sign languages are featural, in that there are separate symbols for each parameter of handshape, location, motion, etc.

2) Using the terms "phoneme" and "phonemic" in connection with sign languages is not likely to be helpful. Even for spoken languages, linguists disagree whether it is useful. For those who accept it, a phoneme is first of all a segment--a combination of all the features that make up the pronunciation of a sound. Thinking in terms of simultaneity, that would be like the whole sign in a sign language. Not very useful in that sense. Instead, people talk about handshapes, locations, etc. as the "phonemes" of a sign language--but that seems to me to be forcing a concept from spoken languages onto sign languages which doesn't fit the nature of sign languages. Some terms drawn from spoken language linguistics fit sign languages neatly; this one doesn't. Instead, I find it better to talk in terms of "contrast" and what features are "contrastive". This better expresses the concept that people are trying to get at when they talk about "phonemes" in connection with sign languages.

3) Whether a script is phonetic or phonemic has to do with the level of detail that is written. If one only writes details that are contrastive in a language, the script is being used "phonemically" (sorry, I don't know an alternative term for this concept), or what is sometimes called a "broad phonetic transcription". If further, non-contrastive details are written, then it is being used "phonetically" or in a "narrow phonetic transcription". Any script can, in theory, be used either phonetically or phonemically, although in practice some scripts may not have enough symbols available for (narrow) phonetic transcription. Latin script, for example, had to be augmented with many extra symbols in order to use it phonetically, the result being the IPA. SignWriting does have enough symbols to be used phonetically, but that doesn't mean you have to write all the details; it could also be used "phonemically". With time, people will develop a sense of what details can be omitted because they are predictable from other details. So, whether a script is "phonetic" or "phonemic" is not an inherent characteristic of the script, but simply a statement of how it is used.

I hope this helps clarify things, rather than just muddying the waters further. AlbertBickford (talk) 16:19, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

How popular is SignWriting?

As a user above noted, the article contains no hard facts on how widely used SignWriting is. Is it even well known among the deaf? It mentions some "student magazines" that use SignWriting, but how many magazines? Are these magazines widely read? Are they notable? Why isn't there a criticism section? I would be quite surprised if nobody had any problems with this. Does the article even mention how SignWriting is written? All I see is a listing of symbols. cntrational (talk) 16:04, 19 March 2011 (UTC)

Supposedly there is a manual script, not just computer input, but I haven't seen it. You're right, arguments of it being popular could be propaganda, but it would appear to be more popular than Stokoe notation, which is almost entirely unknown in the Deaf community. — kwami (talk) 18:59, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

A wide variety of texts are available, including bible translations. SignWriting is used in many countries. There are no censuses though. -- Evertype·✆ 00:45, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

The thing is, for a bible translation to be available you only really need a single person, so it's no proof of popularity. And if there are no censuses and there is no extensive body of published works by different writers, then any claim to popularity is original research and doesn't belong on Wikipedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.61.180.106 (talk) 18:41, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Signwriter - other use???????

According to the OED a signwriter is someone who paints shop signs and adverts. That is certianly normal English usage in the UK. This article seems to be about a novel use of the word. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.5.5.210 (talk) 13:02, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

With SignWriting, we can write all the sign languages of the world. IJKL (talk) 17:47, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

Updated external links

Below are my suggestions for external links, but I'm an involved party so it may not be appropriate for me to make the update myself. The Internet Draft, Unicode proposals, and Binary SignWriting reference are all deprecated so they should probably be removed.

• ISWA 2010 HTML Reference
• ISWA 2010 Font Reference
• Modern SignWriting Specifications
• SignWriting Image Server
• SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin
• SignPuddle Online – Dictionaries and documents
• Dictionary of the Flemish Sign Language (uses SignWriting)
• The Bible in SignWriting
• MA thesis A Grammar of Signwriting

For what it's worth... Slevinski (talk) 13:18, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Encoding layout, theory vs practice

The article contains the phrase "as yet there is no agreement in the SignWriting community as to how to encode layout of symbols within a sign." This is a bit misleading.

In theory, there are many ways to encode layout within a sign. However, in practice, there is only one encoding technique that has ever produced a working implementation.

From 1986 till today, sign layout has been handled with 2 dimensional freeform placement using Cartesian coordinates as X, Y values. The existing international corpus has nearly 1 million encoded sign examples.

There are two potential reasons why the other layout encoding designs have never been used. Either they have not received enough attention or they are unworkable. After 25 years, many potential design documents, and several academic theses: lack of attention does not seem to be the cause.

Until a proof of concept for an alternate layout encoding exists, it seem disingenuous to say there is no agreement. Slevinski (talk) 13:09, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

The issue here centers around the definition of "encode". If you mean it in the broader sense of how layout is represented in actual implementations, then certainly, there's only one basic approach. However, the Unicode Consortium is not likely to consider that to be an "encoding" in the narrower sense that they use (which I don't fully understand; maybe Michael Everson can explain). So, perhaps this distinction needs to be drawn out carefully in the article. AlbertBickford (talk) 16:39, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

The current encoding (draft-slevinski-signwriting-text) is available as Unicode Private Use Area characters with a proof of concept TrueType Font. If you install the local font and enable Graphite in Firefox, you can see a working example of 2-dimensional spatial layout with characters by visiting SignPuddle.com.

There is no guarantee that any encoding of spatial layout for SignWriting will fall under the narrower sense of Unicode "encoding". Ultimately, only a working implementation that is used within an international community should be considered for inclusion into Unicode, regardless of the sensibilities of those defining the scope of the encoding definition. Slevinski (talk) 19:26, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. So, I suggest that the article should express the following points 1) Representing layout is a challenge. 2) The current approach used in all working implementations relies on X-Y coordinates. 3) People disagree whether that approach is satisfactory over the long term (in particular, whether it would be suitable for representation of layout in Unicode). 4) Other approaches have been proposed but not implemented, and without an implementation there is no way of knowing whether there is *any* way of representing layout that would be suitable for Unicode. Are those things that we can all agree on? If so, I can do the changes, unless someone feels that even I am too involved to do this neutrally. AlbertBickford (talk) 19:34, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

Sounds reasonable to me. If you feel comfortable making the changes, please proceed. Slevinski (talk) 17:02, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Take a look. When I started working on it, I realized that my proposal above was unwieldy in the context of the article, so I abbreviated it somewhat so as not to throw this one bullet point out of balance with other items listed. Hopefully it still covers the most important points, though. See what you think. AlbertBickford (talk) 03:18, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I also just noticed that the bulleted list was introduced as a comparison of SignWriting to other writing systems for sign languages. As such, the discussion of Unicode doesn't belong in the bulleted list, because no other sign language writing system is in Unicode either. If anything, SignWriting has a head start by actually having a proposal on the table (although the others, were they to be proposed, wouldn't face the layout issues). So I pulled that paragraph out of the bulleted list and put it in a separate paragraph afterward. AlbertBickford (talk) 03:34, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Nice rewrite. Should the Unicode paragraph be moved to a new section? The SignWriting Unicode proposal is in active technical balloting. range of 1D800..1DAAF The proposal's UTC status is Accepted, set on 2012-Nov-08. The proposal's ISO status is stage 5, set on Oct 26, 2012. Compared to other sign language scripts, this is an advantage since no other script has even submitted an initial proposal. Compared to other scripts in Unicode, this is a disadvantage because SignWriting is not in Unicode yet.

If the Unicode portion was split into a different section, should the Private Use Area characters on plane 15 be mentioned? How about the proof-of-concept working TrueType Font? These characters fully support the script as it is used by the international community. These characters are isomorphic with the lite ASCII markup. Slevinski (talk) 14:32, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Glad you like it. I like your idea of making a separate section for Unicode. I did so, and doing so allowed more explanation about the layout problem. I'm hesitant to bring in too many technical details though. AlbertBickford (talk) 01:18, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

User Kwamikagami deleted two of the paragraphs I had added. One detailed some of the alternate ways of representing layout and the need for successful implementation before making a proposal. (I realize this is not a normal requirement for a Unicode proposal, but in the case of Unicode, the layout issues are so new that a proof-of-concept implementation is almost certainly going to be needed before a proposal would be accepted.) The other talked about encoding of SignWriting in Unicode relative to other scripts. The edit summaries didn't communicate to me the nature of the objections. I've requested further explanation here. AlbertBickford (talk) 13:24, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

I believe Kwamikagami removed the 2 paragraphs because they constituted original research. He called it an essay. If you can find a relevant source for the material you want to add, it will have a stronger case for inclusion.

I'm not sure why Kwamikagami removed the phrase "which requires a one-dimensional sequence of character codes". Unicode strings are one-dimensional by definition: one character code followed by another. Slevinski (talk) 13:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

The latter may have been a mistake. The implication in several places was that SignWriting is 2D and so cannot be encoded in Unicode, which is 1D. That is clearly nonsense: Unicode is only 1D in the sense that it's a linear string of codes, and it handles glyphs in 2D all the time. The positioning issues of SignWriting are not easily handled by current Unicode conventions, but in that they're no different than those of Egyptian or Mayan, which can be similarly described as distributing glyphs in boxes along two axes. This is a tricky issue for all three scripts, not something unique to SignWriting. — kwami (talk) 23:21, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

In talking about dimensions, I was trying to make clearer what the problem with layout is. I agree, we don't want to say SignWriting can't be encoded in Unicode, but simply that there is no agreement how to do it. Some feel the Cartesian coordinates don't have a chance of being accepted into Unicode, or at least they would not be willing to support a proposal that included them (which may lead the Unicode consortium to not approve a proposal that didn't have consensus behind it). Some feel they would work fine. As for the other proposals, nobody has worked them out in enough detail to know if they would work. The net effect is that no one knows whether an encoding is possible. So, anyway, I tried again to insert this idea; see if the second try is more acceptable. AlbertBickford (talk) 00:38, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

In addition, it seems to me that the layout problem for SignWriting is considerably more complex that for Mayan glyphs, because the ones I've seen seem to be packed fairly tightly in a box with very little flexibility, so there's not much information required to get them positioned correctly. I don't know much about Egyptian hieroglyphics, but would be interested to know if they have to combine as many symbols as SignWriting does into one sign box. Where are they described? AlbertBickford (talk) 00:33, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

SignWriting Viewer as user script and gadget

The extension, the SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin, has been rewritten as a user script on Incubator and the English Wikipedia.

For Incubator, the script has been packaged as a Gadget and enabled by default as can be seen on the American Sign Language Wikipedia on Incubator.

Should the accessibility section be updated accordingly? -Slevinski (talk) 20:36, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Unicode 8 and the SignWriting 2010 Fonts

The symbols of the International SignWriting Alphabet 2010 have been accepted for inclusion in the next release of Unicode next year.

The SignWriting 2010 Fonts use the 670 Unicode characters to reference the 37,811 glyphs in the symbol set. Released under SIL Open Font License.

The SignWriting 2010 JavaScript Library uses the fonts to display the symbol and sign images. Released under the MIT License.

-Slevinski (talk) 21:19, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Written ASL Wikibook

I started a wikibook on the most used ASL writing and notational systems[1]. Thought some folks here might be interested in filling out the SignWriting section!

LeptonMadness (talk) 17:45, 24 April 2016 (UTC)

Current custom software does this

Hi, could sb. please add an example of a 'current custom software does this'? Thanks in advance. --Backinstadiums (talk) 21:13, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

Hi Backinstadiums. I'm not sure exactly what you are looking for. You may be interested in the Sutton SignWriting Project (Github repo) and SignMaker (Github repo). Currently the SignWriting images are a combination of SVG and Fonts. Development is underway for a pure character/font implementation: SignWriting in Unicode Next presentation. For more details, an Internet Draft has been submitted to the IEFT: draft-slevinski-formal-signwriting. -Slevinski (talk) 14:28, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

@Slevinski: First of all, thanks for the info. The sentence I've put in quotation marks appears in the article itsself, so I wanted to know what kind of software it refers to. --Backinstadiums (talk) 08:02, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

Images of glyphs

Could someone please add the images of the Unicode glyphs to the table? All I see are a bunch of dashed boxes with numbers in them. Yes, I will download the SignWriting font from https://github.com/Slevinski/signwriting_2010_fonts/releases/tag/v3.0.2, but it'd be nice if that page worked without people having to do that. Ben (talk) 19:37, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

Clarification of shading rules

Is an icon shaded black when the palm is facing away from the signer or the viewer? This article isn't clear. --Numberguy6 (talk) 18:17, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

"somacheirographic" and "somacheirogram" aren't real words.

Why is Wikipedia using these completely made-up terms to describe and categorise a type of script? The ONLY website on the entire internet that uses these words is WIkipedia, or websites that copy Wikipedia articles. There is not a single dictionary that contains these words, and yes I've checked my physical copies of Oxford and Collins' dictionaries. So what gives? Did some rabid, overzealous editor make up these words and foist them upon everyone else without discussion? I can't imagine how else this would have happened. It makes absolutely no sense to use an unheard-of neologism in a Wikipedia article. 1.157.95.133 (talk) 16:42, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

I think you posted this on the wrong page. Those words are not used on SignWriting's main page or on the talk page. -Slevinski (talk) 21:30, 12 June 2021 (UTC)

I'm confused as well - those words don't appear in the article either now or at the time of that comment. I'm even more confused as the IP posted this comment four minutes after posting a similar, albeit longer, comment on Talk:ASLwrite. I see that ASLwrite uses "somacheirographic" but not "somacheirogram". — Smjg (talk) 12:47, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Requires special software?

"SignWriting currently requires special software; SignWriting cannot be used as ordinary text within normal word processors or other application software."

This seems nonsense. Surely it can be done using a standard vector (preferably) or raster graphics application. The presence of the symbols in Unicode would make it fairly easy to do, subject to having a font containing the symbols. Even in the absence of this, it would be doable by hand-drawing the symbols within such an application. While this doesn't constitute using SignWriting "as ordinary text", this is evidence that it doesn't require special software as that statement claims. — Smjg (talk) 10:26, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

I would consider vector and raster graphics applications as "special software". They're certainly more specialized than email, word processors, and web browsers that can be used with "ordinary text". I think the most important part is that tools for SignWriting basically create images that can be used/shared whereas other writing systems in Unicode (Cyrillic, Devanagari, etc) can be exchanged effectively as text. DRMcCreedy (talk) 14:47, 16 August 2024 (UTC)

@Drmccreedy: Thank you, but I'm inclined to disagree. Windows Paint, for instance, is far from specialised in my mind. In any case, I can't see whether a program manipulates text or graphics (among other possibilities) to be a defining factor for whether it is "special". Text editors, document preparation tools, graphics editors, programming tools and no doubt other categories of software have varying degrees of specialisation within each category.

As written in the sentence, "special software" reads to me as implying something more specialised than any general-purpose graphics editor. But I suppose it's subjective. I'll think about how the statement can be written better. — Smjg (talk) 10:44, 3 October 2024 (UTC)

Furthermore, a pen or pencil and paper clearly aren't "special software". These are probably how SignWriting was very frequently used when originally invented, and still a widely-available option now. — Smjg (talk) 16:42, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

I should have realised sooner that I'm no less puzzled by this statement:

"As a work-around, software (SignMaker and Rand Keyboard) is available on the SignWriting website which allows a sign, once assembled with special SignWriting software, to be copied easily as a graphic image into word processing or desktop publishing software."

So there is a further category of specialised software, which serves as an intermediary between the software used to write in SignWriting ("SignWriting software") and word processors? Is this what it was meant to say? If the SignWriting software itself isn't directly capable of emitting something that can be embedded in documents, but relies on this intermediary software to do so, it's bizarre. But I guess when I've a bit more time I should actually investigate SignMaker and Rand Keyboard.... — Smjg (talk) 18:42, 17 October 2024 (UTC)