Indic Fingerspelling Project

Ref:  IF-PUB1/0
Project URL: http://www.altruists.org/projects/if/
Prepared by: Dr. R. J. G. Upton & Miss S. H. Cho
Contact: if@altruists.org
Last Modified: 2003-01-03





1.	Fingerspelling	What is Fingerspelling?
2.	How Many Hands?	Should this be a 2-hand or 1-hand system?
3.	Linguistic Fundamentals	Signing conjuncts, different vowel forms etc.
4.	Necessary Compromises	Ease of use, clarity & inter-language issues
5.	How to Help The Project	Taking the project to the next stage...



1. Fingerspelling

Sign language is a system of communication where the units of communication are not words 
but gestures, including hand gestures, facial expressions and body movements. Fingerspelling, 
sometimes referred to as a Manual Alphabet is an extension of this system to complement sign 
language communication between individuals. 

As the name suggests, it involves a series of hand gestures that spell out a word letter by 
letter. It is used most commonly either to translate from a written language in cases where no 
sign exists for a particular word (e.g. for names of people or places) or else where the sign for 
a particular word is unknown or has not yet been standardized between users.

Whereas the English alphabet has only 26 letters, Indic languages have about 50. The major 
Indic languages can be represented by a joint alphabet of about 65 characters (and 
innumerable more conjunct characters). This is not the only important different when 
designing an Indic finger system; the writing systems are much more complicated than the 
English, and so the one-to-one correspondence between letters and signs is not as 
straightforward.


2. How Many Hands?

*	1-handed systems are easier to sign but harder to interpret; they are used for speed 
	such as in a one-to-one context or between familiar sign language users.
*	2-handed systems allow a wider variety of gestures; they are slower to sign, but 
	easier to interpret, so are used where clarity is important, such as for addressing a 
	large audience.

The number of letters in the Indic languages means that the system must be capable of a 
much wider variety than most other such systems. A system of 50 single hand gestures would 
require much more complicated gestures and so some of the speed advantage would be lost. A 
2-handed system is more suitable for Indic Fingerspelling because it allows for a much wider 
range of gestures and hence greater clarity. Indian words tend to have fewer characters than 
their English equivalents, so although individual gestures may take longer (just as Indian 
letters take longer to write than Roman), the speed issue would be offset somewhat.


3. Linguistic Fundamentals

There are a number of decisions that need to be made before commencing work on a 
Fingerspelling system. Although these are interconnected, we will list them separately below:

+---+-------------------+---------------------------------------+---------------------------+
| # | Topic		| Notes					| Issues		    |
+---+-------------------+---------------------------------------+---------------------------+
| 1 |Inherent Vowel	|Shoray-O is pronounced but not 	|Should these be 	    |
|   |			|written in Bangla text.		|signed or not?		    |
+---+-------------------+---------------------------------------+---------------------------+
| 2 |Irregular vowel 	|Some vowels are written 		|Is it important to 	    |
|   |forms		|differently according to which 	|reflect this in the sign   |
|   |			|consonant they follow.			|system?		    |
+---+-------------------+---------------------------------------+---------------------------+
| 3 |  Vowels		|Vowels are written differently 	|Is it important to 	    |
|   |			|according to whether or not the 	|reflect this in the sign   |
|   |			|follow a consonant.			|system?		    |
+---+-------------------+---------------------------------------+---------------------------+
| 4 | Conjuncts		|When consonants occur next to 		|How do we sign 	    |
|   |			|one another in a sentence, their 	|conjuncts – is it	    |
|   |			|written form often changes to 		|enough just to sign	    |
|   |			|show that there is no inherent 	|the component letters?     |
|   |			|vowel in between.			|			    |
+---+-------------------+---------------------------------------+---------------------------+
 
A sign for the inherent vowel (and one for halant – to signify the absence of an inherent vowel) 
would provide a mechanism for conveying pronunciation and would solve the ambiguities 
surrounding vowels (3) cited above. Although important to have it for exceptional cases, the 
expectation is that in general use (e.g. for deaf & dumb) it would be rarely used, since 
omitting it would allow users to increase signing speed by about 20%. 

Irregular vowel forms (2) are an ambiguity of writing, not of meaning, and are different for 
each Indic language. The system aims to transmit meaning, not necessarily writing, so it 
should not make different signs in this case.

Conjuncts (4) occur relatively infrequently and it is usually not important to treat them 
separately, as it is rare that this could lead to a miscommunication. Again, however, the 
system should contain a mechanism for purposes such as dictation. We propose to represent 
conjuncts not by introducing a separate gesture for them but by establishing a standard as 
regards the gesturing process. When signing a conjunct character, the user makes the gesture 
just below the previous gesture to indicate that it is part of the same character.


4. Compromises

The human hand can only make so many different gestures, and relating them to any written 
alphabet is more an art than a science, but there are plenty of general principles. The design 
of any Finger Spelling system involves managing the following trade-offs:

			 Easy to Sign <-------> Easy to Interpret
			Easy to Learn <-------> Easy to Use


The easiest signs should be reserved for letters that occur most frequently, while more 
laborious ones are allocated to less common letters. Frequent letters should also be the 
clearest, but the clarity of a gesture cannot be defined in isolation; a sign is only as clear as it 
is unambiguous – a gesture is clear if the alphabet contains no others that look similar to it.

In the case of a multi-language system another level of compromises has to be made, which is 
worth illustrative with a pictorial example. Suppose we are devising 5 gestures for two 
languages, each of which has 2 letters of its own and 1  in common with the other language. It 
should be intuitively clear that the most distinctive gesture of the 5 should be used for the 
letter that is common to both languages. The situation could be depicted as shown on the 
right, using symbols to represent gestures:

What should also be clear by now is that the clarity within both languages could be greatly 
improved by swapping a pair of the signs around, as shown below.

The fundamental idea of the multi-language system remains that each letter should have a 
unique gesture. The observation that certain gestures are unlikely to ever be used in the same 
context does not compromise this – it merely allows for greater clarity within each individual 
language.

Letter frequency data is important to determine which ones occur more frequently and should 
therefore be given which signs. Such data for Bengali shows a very wide spread of frequency 
(from 14% down to below 0.01%) and we are looking to collect if for the other major Indic 
languages. Although a considerable degree of similarity is to be expected across languages, it 
will no doubt vary to a certain extent and so some compromises will have to be made.

Some compromises will have to be made as regards clarity and ease of signing but a lot can be 
done to minimize their effect. Moreover, the inter-language operability of a pan-language 
approach will produce a more convenient system that is a much better aid to communication 
than any sets of individual language-specific systems.


5. How to Help The Project

We are looking for volunteers with a heart for the project and with the following skills:

Pilot Project Coordination	-	Drawing up guidelines and feedback forms for institutions 
					to participating in the pilot project

Publicity & Communications	-	Liaison with the appropriate authorities and preparation of 
					press releases and other publicity material (web 
					development skills would be an advantage).

Information Technology		-	The system will be distributed over WWW by incorporation 
					into a piece of training software. We are also planning to 
					make and distribute a free Indic Sign Language font.

We also need letter frequency data of the major Indian languages. If you can help with this, or 
any other matter, or you would like more information, please contact the project coordinator, 
Robin Upton on if@altruists.org. 

More information is available at www.altruists.org/projects/if/.

©Altruists International 2003 www.altruists.org