In September 2011 I wrote a blog
titled Another Voice that touched upon
my personal experience with sign language. I wanted to learn it as soon as I
lost my ability to speak when I was a pre-teen, around 1960. At the time my
parents couldn’t accept that there was anything wrong with my speech and
wouldn’t let me learn sign language. I, however, accepted my condition from the
minute my voice changed and from that moment on I knew I needed help for it. I
believed that sign language could give me that help. It would never give me a
normal voice, but it would give me what we all want and need. Communication.
(See: http://princessfrogspeaks.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html)
Decades later, I learned ASL and I
have been teaching it to deaf and hard-of-hearing children for the last five
years. In addition, I have the privilege to work with children who are not deaf
but, for one reason or another, cannot or do not speak. When I am with them, I
am reminded of myself as a child – feeling helpless and frustrated because I
lacked the ability to communicate. With this in mind, I try to teach these children
signs as well.
The children that I work with and I
are living proof that sign language helps the voiceless. Yet, although it is a
full, living language, many people don’t understand what it is.
Sign language is not gesturing. A
gesture is a nonverbal way to communicate with the face, hand, or other body
part, but these movements are culture-specific. So, the significance of most
gestures depends on where they are used. In the language of signs, the hands,
arms, face and body are specifically oriented to say something that will be
understood the same wherever that specific sign language is used. About 200
sign languages exist in the world today. Wherever deaf people live you will
find them in one form or other. Some are legally recognized, and others are
not. Like English or any other official language, sign
languages have a complete and unique structure. One can discuss anything using
sign language. One cannot do this with gestures. Gestures are random movements
and, unlike sign language, they are not part of any standardized or official
form.
No one knows who invented sign
language but, according to Deaf scholar Paddy Ladd, “… aboriginal Australians
have the oldest sign languages – some 80,000 years.”
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language,
“One of the earliest written records of a sign language occurred in the fifth
century BC.” This was in Plato's Cratylus
where Socrates says: "If we hadn't a voice or a tongue, and wanted to
express things to one another, wouldn't we try to make signs by moving our
hands, head, and the rest of our body, just as dumb people do at present?”
Aristotle, Plato’s famous student,
thought that the deaf could never speak and that speaking and hearing
originated from the same area in the brain. This led him to assume that, if one
function was impaired, the other must be too. Based on this, Aristotle believed
that a deaf person could not learn. It wasn’t until 700 A.D. when the
archbishop of York officially refuted Aristotle's theory.
Many centuries passed before anyone
noteworthy publicly commented on what the archbishop thought. Finally, in the
sixteenth century, Geronimo Cardano (the first physician to describe typhoid
fever) said that deaf people could be taught without knowing how to speak.
Cardano used a method of writing that involved icons. He taught this system to
his deaf son and this led to the first book on teaching sign language to deaf
people, in 1620.
Then in 1755 the Abbe de L’Epee
founded the first free school for the deaf in Paris. Here the deaf were taught
the sign language system that the Abbe developed, where each symbol suggested
the desired concept. Almost 150 years later, though, a book called Observations
of a Deaf-Mute by Pierre Desloges claimed
that the Abbe wasn’t the inventor he had claimed to be. Deaf since the age of
seven, Desloges wrote that signing, like the Abbe had taught, had been how deaf
Parisians communicated way before the Abbe took credit for his “methodical
signs” and founded his school. However, the Abbe’s prominence and his efforts
in promoting a highly structured sign language served the deaf community
greatly. It paved the way for the recognized sign languages that we have today.
(See: http://www2.uic.edu/stud_orgs/cultures/daa/ASLHistory.html)
Like other languages, sign language is full of
history and all kinds of interesting characters. For me, though, its sheer
nature dramatically points out the power of our instinctual need to
communicate. As Victor Hugo said in 1845, “What matters deafness of the ear,
when the mind hears. The one true deafness, the incurable deafness, is that of
the mind.” I look forward to sharing my future blogs on sign language with you.
I hope these will help to deepen our understanding of the simple truth that all
of us, Deaf and non-Deaf alike, are given a mind and it is the most natural
thing in the world for us to want to express it.
