Sutton SignWriting comes from Sutton DanceWriting. It stems from a "movement notation system" called Sutton Movement Writing. It was not invented from a prior knowledge of signs or sign languages. Nor is it connected to any one sign language, but instead records all sign languages with the same symbols.
In other words, you do not have to know what signs mean to write them, since the system records "body movement". With SignWriting, signers can not only record their own sign languages, but foreign sign languages as well.
SignWriting was first invented in Denmark in the Fall of 1974 for research use at the University of Copenhagen by Valerie Sutton, at the request of researcher and professor Dr. Lars von der Lieth and his student Jan Enggaard Pedersen, and others on the research team, at the Audiologopædisk Forskningsgruppe at the University of Copenhagen.
At the University of Copenhagen, Sutton was asked to work on a research project writing hearing person's gestures, and comparing those gestures to real Danish Sign Language signed by Danish Deaf people.
Sutton was given an office at the University of Copenhagen with reels of videos of two groups: Group 1 were videos of hearing people sitting on a couch chatting with each other in spoken Danish. Group 2 were videos of Danish Deaf signers, conversing with each other soley in Danish Sign Language with no sound or spoken language. Sutton's job was to transcribe the movements (gestures) of both groups in Sutton Movement Writing (sometimes called Gesture Writing), without prior knowledge of any sign language. The resulting 2 transcripts, which were solely written by Sutton, were then compared.
This research project was conducted by Jan Enggaard Pedersen, who received his Ph.D from this research project in 1978, and the results showed that Danish Sign Language was a rich language but the gestures of hearing people were not connected with language. The project could not have existed without Sutton's transcripts.
Sutton's work writing Danish signs and sentences at the University of Copenhagen inspired Sutton to independently work with Deaf people from her own non-profit organization in the USA, not connected with the University of Copenhagen. She initiated contact with Deaf people around the globe to write their sign languages. She gave the writing system the name "SignWriting", and Sutton SignWriting became one of five sections of Sutton Movement Writing.
So, the first sign language to be written in Sutton SignWriting was Danish Sign Language. Sutton returned to her homeland USA, and started her own independent research project from 1981-1984, called the SignWriter Newspaper, which was the first newspaper in history to be written in the movements of sign languages - in American Sign Language and Danish Sign Language. 11,000 copies of the SignWriter Newspaper were distributed four times a year to many countries. |