"Alphabet"? "Syllabary"? How to categorise sign language writing systems? A Proposal.
"Alphabet"? "Syllabary"? How to Categorise Sign Language Writing Systems? A Proposal The following article will assume the reader has a familiarity with sign languages, Deaf culture and sign language writing systems. Sources will be given where available. All of the sign language writing systems covered should be available in Zrajm's page (link below). I am in a weird nerd corner of the internet where we talk about sign language writing systems quite a bit. These are orthographies or notation systems used or proposed to write sign languages. Another nerd in this space is collating a bunch of these sytems into a big page containing as many as possible - Sign Language Writing (© 2025 Zrajm) (WIP). My discussions and perusal of this list has lead me to some thoughts about how to categorise said systems. Looking at the above list, at time of writing (09/2025) gives the following chart; This is a mixture of two separate scales - Linearity and Unicode Compatibilit...