The Hamburg Sign Language Notation System, or HamNoSys, is a transcription system for all sign languages, not only for ASL, with a direct correspondence between symbols and gesture aspects, such as hand location, shape and movement. It was developed in 1985 at the

University of Hamburg The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vo ...

, Germany. it is in its fourth revision. Though it has roots in

Stokoe notation Stokoe notation () is the first phonemic script used for sign languages. It was created by William Stokoe for American Sign Language (ASL), with Latin letters and numerals used for the shapes they have in fingerspelling, and iconic glyphs to trans ...

, HamNoSys does not identify with any specific national diversified fingerspelling system- and as such is intended for a wider range of applications than Stokoe, which was designed specifically for ASL and only later adapted to other sign languages. Unlike

SignWriting Sutton SignWriting, or simply SignWriting, is a system of writing sign languages. It is highly featural and visually iconic, both in the shapes of the characters, which are abstract pictures of the hands, face, and body, and in their spatial arr ...

and the Stokoe system, it is not intended as a practical writing system. It's more like the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

in that regard. Both systems are meant for use by linguistics, and include detail such as

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...

s that are not relevant to those actually using the language. The HamNoSys is not encoded in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

. Computer processing is made possible by a font, which uses

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearl ...

characters.

References

University of Hamburg Sign language notation Writing systems introduced in 1985 {{writingsystem-stub