si5s is a writing system for

American Sign Language American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expre ...

that resembles a handwritten form of

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 ...

. It was devised in 2003 in

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by Robert Arnold, with an unnamed collaborator. In July 2010 at the Deaf Nation World Expo in

Las Vegas Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Veg ...

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, it was presented and formally announced to the public. Soon after its release, si5s development split into two branches: the "official" si5s track monitored by Arnold and a new set of partners at ASLized, and the "open source"

ASLwrite ASLwrite (ASL: ) is a writing system that developed from si5s. It was created to be an open-source, continuously developing orthography for American Sign Language (ASL), trying to capture the nuances of ASL's features. ASLwrite is currently ...

. In 2015, Arnold had a falling out with his ASLized partners, took down the si5s.org website, and made his

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

account private. ASLized has since removed any mention of si5s from their website. Arnold completed his Masters thesis, "A Proposal Of the Written System For ASL," at

Gallaudet University Gallaudet University ( ) is a private university, private University charter#Federal, federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. for the education of the Hearing loss, deaf and hard of hearing. It was founded in 1864 as a gramma ...

in 2007, looking at the need for a written form for ASL, and proposing the use of si5s. si5s stresses that the "written system is not to offer readers and scholars how sign language functions but how signers think and communicate in sign language." Its objective is to provide transparency between ASL, as a written language, and other written languages, to allow for a literary study of sign language without glossing. Arnold is currently a faculty member of the Sign Language & Interpreting program at Mt. San Antonio College. Brief Comparison of ASL Writing Systems

Components

si5s and ASLWrite are built from five primary components: the digibet, diacritics, movement marks, locatives and extramanual marks. Not every component is needed for every word, but ASL employs each consistently. At its core, any word written is built from the digibet bank and additional features are added. Words such as "I-LOVE-YOU" do not necessarily need anything more than its handshape, whereas others can employ each or nearly every component. Some words are in fact

logograph In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, '' kanji'' in Japanese, '' hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, ...

s such as "WHO" and "FOR-FOR." To build a word, handshapes are bounded to locatives with diacritics and movement marks bounded to the handshape

grapheme In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system. The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called '' graphemi ...

s themselves. Extramanual marks are inserted above to the left or right of the word. As such, there is no set positioning or graphic orientation of the handshape or movement marks.

Digibet

The core of the writing system, the digibet, represents many handshapes of ASL. They are conditioned by left-/

right Rights are legal, social, or ethical principles of freedom or entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal system, social convention, or ethical ...

handedness In human biology, handedness is an individual's preferential use of one hand, known as the dominant hand, due to it being stronger, faster or more dextrous. The other hand, comparatively often the weaker, less dextrous or simply less subject ...

, orientation and relative

location In geography, location or place are used to denote a region (point, line, or area) on Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term ''location'' generally implies a higher degree of certainty than ''place'', the latter often indicating an entity with an ...

. There are 67 handshapes within the digibet as of yet.

Diacritics

Diacritics mark movement of the hand itself such as a flutter in "FLIRT" or hinge in "YES" or "CAN." The diacritics are: Hinge, Rotational, Rattle, Flutter, and Edge.

Movement marks

Movement marks indicate the movement of the word itself. Some movement marks are systematic, such as move outward, others are less so, such as "WALK-DRUNKENLY."

Locatives

Locatives indicate when a word is bounded to the body (rather than produced in the signing space). They are subcategorised into two fields: frontal and profile. * Frontal: The frontal locatives are: forehead, chin, neck, shoulders, forearm and waist. * Profile: The profile locatives are: forehead, back of head, full face, nose, chin, torso and knee.

Extramanual marks

Extramanual features include facial configurations and body movements. si5s/ASLwrite extramanual marks are subcategorised into four: eyebrow marks, questioning marks, mouth morphemes and body movements. The eyebrow marks are: raise, knit, wan, slanted and squint; questioning marks: who, what, where, when, which, why, how and for-for; mouth morphemes: smile, frown, flat lips, pressed lips, tongue out, pursed lips, lips out, open mouth, barred teeth, cha, round mouth, puffed cheeks, puffed and round and pulled to the side; body movement: head nod, shoulder shift and nose crinkle. In total, there are 30 extramanual marks.

Bibliography

* ASL Writing - Blog. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. . * "Si5s Writing LLC , Facebook." Facebook. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. . * "Sign Language & Interpreting - Mt. San Antonio College." Mt. San Antonio College. Web. 13 Dec. 2011.
. * Twitter. Web. 13 Dec. 2011. . * Write in American Sign Language! Web. 13 Dec. 2011. . * ASLwrite History/FAQ. Web. 17 Feb. 2014 .

References

External links

* * http://www.aslian.com/ * American Sign Language Writing systems introduced in 2010 Sign language notation {{list of writing systems