Portal:Constructed languages/Language of the month/November 2007

Signuno alphabet and numerals

Signuno is a manual encoding of Esperanto, derived from Gestuno roots and Esperanto morphology by an anonymous author.

Its alphabet has signs for Esperanto's diacritic letters : Ŝ, Ĥ, Ĝ, Ŭ are derived from their base letters S, H, G, U; while Ĉ and Ĵ (like J) are of Cyrillic origin. H, P, Q are from the Irish manual alphabet, while Z (shaped like an ASL 3) appears to be unique to Signuno. The other letters follow international norms. (That is, similar to ASL but with an Irish T.)

The system works to capture Esperanto grammar rather than exploit the spatial options available to sign language; it faces similar shortcomings as did de l'Épée's "methodical signs" in comparison to French Sign Language. Because of this, it is unlikely to be viable as an independent sign language. In effect, Signuno is a manual, logographic orthography for Esperanto; comparable to Manually Coded English vis a vis spoken English. Find out more...