ASL Wikipedia Project

shimo

shimo

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Hi everyone,

I have been wondering if there was a writing system to write down ASL the way it is signed, and from google, I came across this site:

ASL Wikipedia Project

So my question about this is:
1. Is it part of deaf child ASL education to learn about ASL writing?
2. Do many adults know how to read ASL writing?
3. Is there any political reason why ASL writing is unpopular? (invented by a hearie or someone against Deaf culture?)
4. Do you feel it is adequate to express ASL? I know for hearing me, it is difficult to figure out how to pronounce a word I don't know out of a dictionary. For example, I used to read "lyrics" (lee-ricks) as "Lie ricks" until someone finally corrected me. Also even though there is silent K such as in "know" and "knife", there is also Knoebels (amusement park in pensylvania) that is read "Kuh-no-bulls"

It was my understanding that many signs were passed down from one signer to the next or through video. I haven't seen a lot of talk about ASL writing!
 
Other than for linguistic studies, can anyone tell me how sign writing would benefit the average deaf person's daily life?
 
If english is expected to be one's primary language, then ASL writing would encourage improper grammar use.

I remember a teacher complaining about her students' writing assignments. When they got back to school after the summer, she had them write about what happened during the summer. She noticed a lot of students using AIM and online lingo (GTG, BRB, WTF, LOL, kewl, etc). Turns out those students spent most of their time talking that way via email, text, blogs, etc... during the summer.

I sign ASL, but I prefer writing in english.
 
Reba said:
Other than for linguistic studies, can anyone tell me how sign writing would benefit the average deaf person's daily life?
Click to expand...

Yeah.. I guess not very much, other than when the power goes out and you really want to look up a sign you saw before but no one around you remembers what that sign means.

I was also going to list "if you saw a written sign in a written sign book you didn't understand...!" but seeing how unpopular written sign is, I guess it would be very unlikely that someone would need to look up written sign.

I've been wanting to make flash cards with ASL vocabulary so that I can study even when I'm away from the computer, but I realized this was meaningless because I would be writing everything down in English. ack..
I guess I could draw pictures, but I wondered if there wasn't already an abstract way to represent a signed word. I looked on google and came across the above website, but there were only a few examples on how to write using their system. I thought "if this is supposed to be a well used writing system, wouldn't there be more examples? How is this written if it is handwritten?"

I guess I thought there may be a way to write down ideas in a way that is an abstraction of ASL sign rather than based on its English counterpart.
 
Aslsj

I am a (hearing) computer programmer. I designed a way to write ASL using the English alphabet. The start of my website is at ASLSJ. You can e-mail me from there if you wish to discuss further.

I agree that there is little interest in learning ASL writing among the Deaf. They are required to learn English in school. Therefore unless the schools require them to learn ASL writing, they would not have any reason to put forth the effort.
 
My opinion? It's something that's best left alone to signing and not writing.
 
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