How To Write a Sign Language
Part 1: Logographies
Whether you are new to sign languages or a native signer who has signed your entire life - you probably haven't heard about sign language writing systems. Spoken languages around the world have writing systems so surely sign languages can too? Well, many have been tried and used in brief corners of the world but none have been widely adopted by Deaf communities.
I recommend these resources if you want to learn more about all of those attempts and their histories:
But in this mini-series of posts I want to explain the different types there are so that you, intrepid future sign language writer, may better understand the options and pick which to learn or make. First I will cover Logographies.
Logographies
This is the rarest type of writing system, both for sign languages and spoken languages. For spoken languages this is how writing started - little pictures that represent words. From there it became more complicated then simplified. Even modern English letters, the ones I am using to write this very sentence, came from this. The capital A, for instance, is an upside-down picture of an ox's head.
Oral Language Examples
Spoken languages have a number of key examples. More used to exist, but now only one remains. Chinese Characters. It has evolved over time, once having been more pictographic (little pictures) before becoming more and more abstract and logographic (representing an idea).
But the Chinese script is not fully logographic. Instead many characters are "phono-semantic" meaning that within one character some parts hint at the meaning, and other parts hint at the sound.
Additionally languages like Japanese mix Chinese characters (which they call Kanji) with their own syllabic characters (called Hiragana and Katakana).
Even ancient logographic writing systems were often much more complicated than "little pictures which represent the meaning". Some glyphs meant sounds, others represented the meaning.
Mouth = "R", Arm = "A", Sun = the sun.
Total meaning: Ra, the sun.
So, all in all a logography need not be totally logographic in order to be one, and a logography doesn't need to be only a logography. It just needs to make significant use of logographic characters.
So, in sign languages I can think of precisely two examples:
Handtalk Pictographs
Much about the history of the indigenous north Americans has been destroyed by colonisation. One example is the pictographic script.
A number of surviving accounts (and, I believe, oral histories) link this script to Handtalk (aka Plains Indian Sign Language) - and numerous glyphs clearly have strong resemblances to Handtalk signs.
It is unclear how related they are/were - whether this is a written form of sign language or whether the Handtalk signs just provided the inspirations for individual characters, and that the writers were actually writing their own languages. Alternatively, it may not have been intended to be a direct and full representation of any language - instead acting as a mnemonic device, read and/or signed aloud with extra words inserted to produce the full story.
Image Source:
Universal Indian sign language of the Plains Indians of North America, together with a simplified method of study, a list of words in most general use, a codification of pictographic symbols of the Sioux and Ojibway, a dictionary of synonyms, a history of sign language, chapters on smoke signaling, use of idioms, etc : Tomkins, William : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
It is also unclear precisely how logographic this system was. The above examples are quite directly pictographic (little pictures) but other examples seem to be far more abstracted and complicated, implying more was going on than a the simplified "its little pictures" narrative would say.
Regardless of these uncertainties it is an often overlooked part of sign language history, and we should not under-estimate the people who used this script - who were clearly able to read and write this fluently, efficiency and with great depth of information.
Review
Going forwards I am going to be reviewing each of the scripts, but not this one. All other systems are attempts at writing sign languages. This was a success. Not only that - it arose naturally with no direct intent to create a writing system.
Its disappearance was not due to any design flaws, being replaced, being rejected by the community nor evolving into something else. Instead the culture it was a part of was brutally oppressed and the people who practice it were genocided.
I for one would love to see indigenous people revive this script. I think more people should know and remember it. I think we could all learn something from it.
Icoglyphs
Icoglyphs is my own system system which I have been making for a number of years. It is named Icoglyphs because it uses the same iconicity that signs themselves have.
Formerly called BANZSLogo, it is created to write the BANZSL language family, namely the British (BSL), Australian (Auslan) and New Zealand (NZSL) sign languages.
It is a mixed system similar to Japanese. As such the majority of glyphs are logograms / pictograms, but it also contains the alphabet, numbers, punctuation and ways of representing various parameters. These are intended to be used in conjunction to create a written form that is intuitive to read and write.
It takes inspiration visually from the Handtalk Pictographs, Sitelen Pona, Ancient Chinese (oracle bone script) and Ancient Egyptian - and structural inspiration from Chinese and Japanese.
As of right now this is still a work in progress and I have yet to fully release it. I will publish more about this system soon, so watch this space.
Review
I am of course biased because this is my project.
Positives: While the system is not fully released as of yet I have had a lot of success writing longer texts and reading back my own work. Additionally I have found feedback to be generally positive and people are generally able to make decent educated guesses of individual signs when written.
Negatives: I find there is some concern that this system is too complicated, with too many characters to memorise - and I agree. However I don't see this as the end-state but the start. It would start here and evolve towards something more streamlined by cutting away what we don't need.
Conclusions
The rarity of logographies is very understandable. They are hard to make and hard to memorise. Humans look for patterns and efficiencies wherever possible. Thus with writing it may often start logographic but often simplifies towards something more phonetic.
Logographies are particularly useful for sign languages as the imagery provided within the iconicity of a sign language (meaning that signs look like what they mean) can often be translated into the logographic/pictographic form.
I think if the world were full of sign languages, the first writing systems would have been logographies. Perhaps more would have survived into the current day also due to the nature of sign languages being. Perhaps if Handtalk hadn't been decimated, it could have provided a basis for true sign language writing. Perhaps if Icoglyphs is adopted by other it will also.
But regardless I consider logographies a good first step on the road, not a last step.
Stay tuned for next time where I will be looking at Projectional Systems!
o pona!
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