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Signuno is signed 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.

Some proponents of Signuno repeatedly confuse such a coding system with a language. It is very important to note this distinction: This encoding system is analogous to the Latin script used for writing Esperanto (and English and many other languages), as it simply encodes the words of the language Esperanto; it is not a sign language, but a visual mode of the spoken language Esperanto.

In 2010, the rights to Signuno are to be handed over to the Akademio de Esperanto.

See also

* Gestuno
* Manually Coded Language
* List of sign languages

External links

* Signuno
Category:Sign languages
Category:Constructed languages