Symbol Usage
Stokoe coined the terms tab ("tabula" or sign location), dez ("designator" or handshape & orientation ), and sig ("signification" or motion & action). These are used to categorize features of sign-language phonemes, somewhat like the distinction between consonant, vowel, and tone is used in the description of oral languages. A sign is written in the order tab-dez-sig: TDs. Compound signs are separated with a double dashed pipe, approximately TDs¦¦TDs.
A serious deficiency of the system is that it does not provide for facial expression, mouthing, eye gaze, and body posture, as Stokoe had not worked out their phonemics in ASL (Kyle & Woll 1988:29). Verbal inflection and non-lexical movement is awkward to notate, and more recent analyses such as those of Ted Supalla have contradicted Stokoe's set of motion phonemes. There is also no provision for representing the relationship between signs in their natural context, which restricts the usefulness of the notation to the lexical or dictionary level. Nonetheless, Stokoe demonstrated for the first time that a sign language can be written phonemically just like any other language.
In the tables below, the first column is a web-based approximation of the Stokoe symbol using the inventory available in Unicode, and the second is an ASCII substitution for the purpose of citing examples in this article. Proper display of the third column requires the Stokoe font available at the external link below; without that font, you will see the corresponding ASCII character, as used in Mandel (1993).
Read more about this topic: Stokoe Notation
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