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	June 16th, 2009 - 09:45 pm

*fights instinctive but she's a really lovely person! reaction*

I view J's hostility more as a symptom than anything else. She's sixtyish; she grew up internalising a lot of anti-sign preconceptions, and her hostility to sign is a product of that. Yeah, it's not helping, but it's not her fault, you know?

And personally? I find your dismissal of 'takes too much time' a little rankling. What about audiobooks? Some of those are very long, and made and created on what you term temporary media ...

Clearly should have gone through with my impulse to address this question. Basically: I also find that audiobooks take too much time. I have tried to listen to them, for various reasons, and am unable to do so. Intellectually, I now recognise that this is probably a byproduct of my ADHD, but that diagnosis is recent enough that I'm still in the process of integrating it into my understanding of stuff.

Also, audiobooks are usually alternative versions of printed stuff, so the less-fragile form is still there.

I don't process information fantastically well unless it's written; maybe on some level there's a factor of feeling like if I'd been deaf all my life, I'd be so profoundly alienated from *everything* I couldn't stand it. (If I were to become deaf now, it would be different, unless I had the kind of brain injury that would take away the ability to *remember* spoken language, and then I would still have a large set of new problems that aren't deafness-based.)

Stokoe Notation is more academic than anything, as far as I can tell, and SignWriting is localised American and still very static to boot. Really, you need three-dimensional paper for it to work, and at that point you might as well have video ... look, I don't know. But the examples you've cited earlier -- Chaucer to Shakespeare to Austen, well, sign language is in a roughly Shakespearean form at the moment, and I think thats part of why your approach bothers me a little -- novels are RECENT in the English language.

Yeah, that's why I figured both Stokoe Notation and SignWriting ~~suck~~ were not even close to what I was thinking of.

Novels took off just after the historical period where language was codified - which is also dependent on the Industrial Revolution, and yes, changes in leisure as well as printing technology, so maybe deaf novels will take off when we have some kind of nanotech moving paper or something, but the ways SN and SW don't work are precisely why I was thinking in terms of a new alphabet, one that wasn't an attempt to transliterate sign movement processes, but functioned as abstraction, the way existing written languages do.

... and now I shoudl go back to sleep, as it's a quarter to six and I'm supposed to go striaght back to sleep when I wake up too early. >.>