Stokoe notation

Infobox Writing system
type = iconic alphabet
name = Stokoe notation
languages = American Sign Language
time = 1965 to presentThe Stokoe notation for American Sign Language (ASL) was the first writing system designed for a sign language. It was published in 1960 and became the organizing principle of "A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles", which Stokoe wrote with two deaf colleagues and which is arranged according to the pronunciation of the signs in ASL, rather than by their English translations as in all other ASL dictionaries.

The Stokoe notation is mostly restricted to linguists and academics. Unlike SignWriting, it is arranged linearly on the page. Unlike SignWriting or [http://www.sign-lang.uni-hamburg.de/Projects/HamNoSys.html HamNoSys] , it uses elements of the Latin alphabet and is phonemic, with a reduced set of symbols to match the needs of ASL rather than attempting to capture all possible signs. For example, there is a single symbol for circling movement, regardless of whether the plane of the movement is horizontal or vertical; this is because the orientation of the motion is determined by ASL phonotactics and need not be indicated in a phonemic system.

William Stokoe coined the terms "tab", "dez", and "sig", meaning sign Location ("tabula"), Handshape ("designator"), and Motion/Orientation ("signification"), to indicate different categories of phonemes in ASL, somewhat like the distinction between consonant, vowel, and tone in oral languages. A serious deficiency of the system is that it does not provide for facial Expression, as Stokoe had not worked out the phonemics of expression in ASL, but this is easy to remedy. (One proposal adds a symbol for Expression in parentheses at the beginning of the word.) Verbal inflection and non-lexical movement is awkward to notate, and more recent analyses such as those by [http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/supalla/ Ted Supalla] have contradicted Stokoe's set of motion phonemes. There is also no provision for representing the relationship between signs, which restricts the usefulness of the notation to the lexical level.

The Stokoe notation has been extended to other sign languages, including British Sign Language and the Australian Aboriginal sign languages. However, each researcher has made idiosyncratic modifications to the system. There are also several proposals for typable ASCII equivalents; one of these is shown below. (For this system, Orientation symbols occur before the "dez" rather than being subscripted after it.)

ymbols

"Tab" (Location)

Orthography

A sign is written in the order "Tab Dez Sig".

ee also

* SignWriting

External links

* [http://www.signwriting.org/forums/linguistics/ling006.html Description on the SignWriting site]
* [http://www.musslap.zcu.cz/en/about-project/ The MUSSLAP Project] Multimodal Human Speech and Sign Language Processing for Human-Machine Communication.
* [http://www.speakeasy.org/~mamandel/ASCII-Stokoe.txt ASCII-Stokoe Notation] Method for writing Stokoe in ASCII by Mark A. Mandel