Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

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Page At any rate, I accepted the inevitable, and the grants, and set to work compiling a dictionary, working, of course, with Carl and
Dorothy. It was not, after all, so much a diversion as along detour anything we could learn about the grammar and syntax of the language could be built into the vocabulary entries.
I was familiar with the Oxford English Dictionary and renewed my acquaintance with Dr. Johnson's dictionary, from which I
unashamedly borrowed the phrase "on linguistic principles" One concern was much on our minds. With colleagues insisting that a dictionary might "standardize" signing (to the great relief of myriads of classroom teachers, and with the question of dialects open, we tried to get material from as wide abase as possible. Sitting and signing conversationally for our borrowed
(thanks to Eastman Kodak Company) camera (with a homemade motor driveand a transformer from the electric train set I had saved from childhood, we managed to corner many different pairs of signers students from elementary school and the preparatory classes, seniors and graduates, colleagues of several age brackets, native and foreign-born, male and female.
When the films were printed and run many times through our Moviola, Carl and Dorothy transcribed them in Stokoe notation and made an English translation. As in good lexicographic tradition, the "headwords" were written on slips of paper in
Dorothy's precise hand. She later operated the keyboard on the VariTyper machine, with a special type segment for the tab, dez,
and sig symbols. We posted the slips on the blackboard on one wall of my office in the English Department, and the three of us met thereto discuss them. We also had a room where the camera and subject chairs could remain setup for the odd moments of filming we could snatch from our own and our subjects' schedules.
Dorothy learned to use the slow-reacting VariTyper machine to set copy for the dictionary. I tinkered with the Kodak and
Moviola, and Carl, at least for one summer and at other times, visited deaf centers within a hundred-mile radius of Washington,
pursuing dialect differences. The results of

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