From: Deborah W. Anderson (dwanders@sonic.net)
Date: Mon Jun 14 2010 - 17:28:31 CDT
>Because sign writing has not had the extensive history of print and then
>digital publication as mathematics or music, a lot of issues probably
>need to be settled, and that will take time.
In 2006 I did some background work trying to estimate the number of publications in SignWriting, and at the time Valerie Sutton estimated there to be over 1000 documents in print in SignWriting. (Valerie Sutton was the person who invented SignWriting in 1974, see: http://signwriting.org/library/history/hist003.html)
In 2006 Valerie had mentioned the Parkhurst Mystery Novel, written in Spanish Sign Language from Madrid, with 140 pages of pure SignWriting. Since then, I see the SignWriting website (http://signwritign.org) has links to more texts, including Biblical texts in Signwriting (prepared using SignPuddle Software by Stephen Slevinski) at: http://www.signwriting.org/library/bible/Gospel_John.html.
(Note: I did discover a SignWriting Markup Language: http://signwriting.org/forums/software/swml/swml01.html, but the links don't seem to be working.)
>I want to caution that any proposal for characters must make clear what the size is of the existing user community making active use of the characters >as described. It is not clear from what has been said whether there is such a community, or whether this is a new invention.
It is used in at least 38 different countries (http://www.signwriting.org/about/who/). I don't have the figure for the number of users, however.
In sum, I don’t think it should be categorized as "new".
Debbie
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