Re: SLIPA vs Gesture spelling

Gary wrote:

<<
There is a fundamental difference between ordinary
English spelling and IPA.  IPA is meant to describe
the exact sound of a word to someone who has never
heard that pronunciation of the word, whereas English
spelling is meant only to approximate the sound and
evoke that word in the mind of the person already
familiar with the word.
 >>

Ah.  You seem to have "discovered" what I wrote
explicitly on the site.  Did you happen to check out the
section "How to Use SLIPA"?  It essentially states
exactly what you were trying to get in your post:
SLIPA is an IPA *NOT* an orthography.  Similarly,
the IPA is *NOT* an orthography.  If I may direct
your attention to the bottom of the fourth paragraph
in section XIIIA, I give a narrow IPA transcription
of my Southern Californian pronunciation of the
English word "hole".  If that were an orthography,
it would be ludicrously impractical--especially since
you'd have to describe it differently every time you
said it, probably.  However, the IPA is there if you
*need* to specify how a given word is said.  That's
what the IPA is for.

Back to SLIPA, that's what SLIPA is for.  It's there
to describe exactly how signs are made, but *not*
to be an orthography.  In fact, I say those exact
words in section XIIIE:

"I don't think SLIPA is a good orthography or romanization
for a signed language, just like I don't think the IPA is
a good orthography for any spoken language (if you've
ever seen large blocks of text transcribed using the IPA,
you know how hairy it can get)."

So what you say isn't really new.

Regarding your project:

Gary wrote:

<<
I'm putting together a set of symbols and designing a
font for them.
 >>

This is great for a particular signed language.  This is not
going to work for all signed languages.  This is because
what's normal for a given signed language can differ.
For example, for the romanization for the CSL I'm creating,
I use an orthographic "z" to represent neutral space.  Every
signed language has neutral space.  However, what that
space is differs.  So in order to use this romanization system,
you have to know that the neutral space is on the signer's
dominant side at chest level, and out slightly.  If you were
to try to use my romanization system with ASL, the neutral
space would differ.  As would the handshapes and the
movements.

Using movement as an example, I cataloged the 372 basic
words I created, and noticed that there were a finite set
of movements.  So rather than using a coordinate system,
I created a vowel system that encodes movement and
direction.  This system couldn't handle ASL, though, which
has a lot more movements than the language I'm creating.
So my orthography would be totally impractical for ASL.
It just wouldn't be powerful enough.

There are some orthographies that are powerful enough
to handle, say, every language.  When the orthography
is too powerful, though, the effect can be ugly (e.g., using
IPA with any spoken language).  If you move a step down,
and, say, use the roman alphabet as an orthography for
a language, you'll end up with having to use a lot of
diacritics and bizarre letter combinations to get the proper
effect (e.g., using the roman alphabet to transcribe Hindi,
which has more coronal stops than the roman alphabet).

So, my point is this: An ideal orthography or romanization
system will be designed for a *specific* language, or a
small set of closely related languages.  This is what I *think*
you're doing, but I don't see how it's a counterargument
to SLIPA.  When presenting your language on the web,
it might prove helpful to have an IPA so that people can
learn how your orthography is used, but if you'd rather
people fumble around with it, that's your decision.  It
seems that we've returned to your objection to "mouth
noises", even though we're talking about a signed
language (though research suggests that there really
is little difference).  If that's the case, then I'm fairly
confident that there's no way to convince you that an
IPA is useful, and I won't try.

-David

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