capri0mni | (Reply)

From:

But why don't you include credits in the video?

I should start to do that, shouldn't I?

(My old college Humanities Scholar brain answered first, with: "But I don't need to cite my sources -- I wrote it myself!" Then, the rest of my brain remembered that most of the people watching on YouTube don't have the assumption: "Unless credit is given to someone else, the person speaking is the author" hammered deep into their subconscious)

One of the Deaf vloggers I follow is DrDonCGus. And over the last few years, he's been trying to come up with a new phonetic alphabet for Signed Languages one that a) is free from "English Alphabet" order, and b) can be turned into a font that can be typed on a computer (so you don't have to be competent at drawing to use it, the way you have to be with SignWriting). He's broken his symbols into 5 groups, which would appear in the "alphabet" in this order:

Hand shape
Orientation
Location
Movement
and Non-Manual Signs

And, within the Hand Shape group, for example, he's ordered the shapes in the order that babies born to Deaf/Signing parents learn to recreate them.

So the order within the phonetic writing system has a logical progression from simple to complicated. That strikes me as similar to the Chinese Character order you mention.

BTW, I've made a play list of Dr. Don's SignScript discussion (to facilitate my own study of it) here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL13921A5089930A02