October 8, 2019

Hello João!

Adam and Steve have already answered but I wanted to say "hello" too ... Thank you Adam and Steve, for your answers, and thanks for the question, João -

In SW software, such as SignPuddle Online, SignPuddle 3, SignMaker 2017, SignWriter Studio, and the old 2008 SignBank Dictionary program, the SW dictionaries can be sorted by "SignSpelling Sequence".

The person who enters the written signs in the dictionary can choose to manually state which symbols come first, second and third when sorting signs in the dictionary. Not everyone who enters signs in SignPuddle Online, for example, realizes they can do this, so some entries online have SignSpellings, and others do not. We hope to someday create an "edited dictionary" online, for viewing and printing, that has a SignSpelling for every entry, but that has not been done yet.

The sequence theory I developed in 2008 is explained in this document:

SignSpelling Guidelines 2008

It was based on my experiences sorting fairly large dictionaries. In the beginning, we tried sorting by Location first, such as putting the Head Symbols first, since so many signs contact the Head and Face, but then we learned that people did not want to look up first by Location. Looking up by Handshape and then Movement, seemed more natural. If there were multiple signs that had the same handshape and movement ... then the next thing to look up would be the Location of where the sign takes place - that would include Head, Torso, Shoulders and other places along the body and also depth - close and far - but most dictionaries were not large enough to require advanced lookups.

In the SignSpelling Guidelines I used the term "Syllables". Attached is a screen capture of a diagram in the book:

I can imagine you will have other questions... Maybe I can show you a PDF of a dictionary sorted by SignSpelling Sequence - I will post it shortly.

Val ;-)