Did you know that China had and Korea had movable print 400 years before Gutenburg. Why did it not become widespread?
"Neither movable-type system was widely used, probably because of the enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets."
Movable type - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
All ancient cultures invented their own pictographs / logograms. However, the alphabet was only invented once - all other alphabetic written languages inherited from that original. If ASL would have a written system using pictures, how big will the keyboard have to be? How would you look a word up in a dictionary if there is no "correct" spelling for it, i.e. you could make up your own picture that would be as correct as anyone else's?
ASL is definitely recordable using video capture. So is English using audio capture. Do I look for information on the Internet using my voice? Should we dump those archaic loads of trees at the library for CDs or MP3s? No. The written word is a trade-off. You trade expressivity for simplicity and accuracy. Vocal inflections, pausing, hand and facial gestures all play a part in the English languages. They are only hinted at in English writing, and therefore some ambiguity exists. But the trade is well worth it for most applications.
I have made an alphabetic writing system for ASL called ASLSJ. Please let me know what you think of it.
ASLSJ
