Stokoe Notation (sign language)

[William_J_G Overington]

Ken Whistler asked:

> And for those who never saw a systematic collection of marks on paper that they didn't think deserved immediate encoding in the Unicode Standard, riddle me this:

Well, I am not quite congruently in that category, but not far off, so I will answer the question anyway.

> Would anyone be willing to put in the effort to define a formal markup language (ML) specification that would accurately cover all aspects of the notation and its use?

Yes, I would. It seems a very worthwhile project.

I am not a linguist, though I am interested linguistics. I have very little knowledge of sign language. I do not remember knowing of Stokoe Notation before reading this thread.

What interests me about this project and where I feel that I could make a contribution to a group effort is that Ken included the following.

> .... figuring out how to "flatten" all that markup complexity and create a text model and plain text encoding for the same notation?

Now that interests me and is the sort of problem that I enjoy trying to solve.

Some time ago there was discussion of encoding Ancient Egyptian and I devised an idea for solving the advanced issues of that encoding. At first glance, the encoding of Stokoe Notation seems to have some similarities to what is needed regarding the encoding of the advanced glyph layout of Ancient Egyptian.

I published my ideas, in fact including them as a chapter in my novel.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_009.pdf

I used the technique of including the idea in a chapter of the novel as it allows a dialogue of discussion about the ideas. 

The document has been deposited at the British Library.

Today Unicode has tag sequences available as a technique and it might be that by using the ideas in Chapter 9 of my novel, in particular of having a Glyph as a type in the object code of a virtual computer so that glyphs could be scaled, moved and added together, that the implementation would be fairly straightforward by using short pieces of software each expressed as a tag sequence to produce a result. Thus implementing the spatial layout of the system by software in a virtual computer rather than by a sort of hardwired encoding. 

Ken also wrote:

> Particularly if there is very little indication that implementers of generic rendering systems have the interest, time, or resources to then add that complexity to their text renderers.

Well maybe the implementation of that complexity might make a good student project or a good student group project somewhere.

I opine that progress is important.

William Overington

Wednesday 8 March 2017


----Original message----
>From : kenwhistler at att.net
Date : 07/03/2017 - 17:04 (GMTST)
To : simon at simon-cozens.org
Cc : unicode at unicode.org
Subject : Re: Stokoe Notation (sign language)


On 3/6/2017 2:48 PM, Simon Cozens wrote:
> A few years back, there was a set of questions to the UTC (L2/12-133)
> asking for direction on encoding Stokoe notation. Did these ever get an
> answer, and is there anything currently happening with Stokoe encoding?
>

The short answer is no.

Stokoe notation has a bunch of features that make it a very low priority 
for UTC attention.

And for those who never saw a systematic collection of marks on paper 
that they didn't think deserved immediate encoding in the Unicode 
Standard, riddle me this:

Would anyone be willing to put in the effort to define a formal markup 
language (ML) specification that would accurately cover all aspects of 
the notation and its use? If not, why would you expect the UTC to devote 
time to figuring out how to "flatten" all that markup complexity and 
create a text model and plain text encoding for the same notation? 
Particularly if there is very little indication that implementers of 
generic rendering systems have the interest, time, or resources to then 
add that complexity to their text renderers.

--Ken