Saturday, July 30, 2011

#Email in #SignWriting

When it was announced that it is possible to send an e-mail in SignWriting, it was Thorsteinn who posted the first message on a public list as far as I know. He added a message in English saying that he may have selected a wrong sign and he expressed his hope for all the recipients to be able to read it.

When your ability to sign is as good as mine; it is not only a different language, a different script but also a different delivery system, it will be hard to understand what this messages is about. What we have are the different symbols expressing gestures and facial expressions. There are the vertical lanes for the direction of the text. There are the breaks between the sentences.


The hope is that SignWriting will soon become accepted and encoded by Unicode. This will realise much needed momentum for every sign language. The hope is that shaping engines like HarfBuzz will adopt the shaping rules quickly so that Wikipedias in sign languages will no longer be a dream waiting to come true.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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