A silent minority: Deaf education in Spain 1550-1835 by Susan Plann (review)

686 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) longs, after all, squarely within the Humanities—the Arts—and is notjust messy Science (despite "mainstream " pretensions ofrecent times)' and proposes 'a kind ofhermeneutic excursion back into the historical morass, a(hopefully) amusingjourney throughlexical time and space thatwill calluponthereader's skills of interpretation'. The book consists of over 200 'prose poems' where the title ofeach piece is an Indo-European root and the body contains as many cognates of the given root as is compatible with the coherence of the poem, each just once, in order to ensure maximal diversityanddensityofmeaning. Etymologyandalliteration take the place ofmetre. Each ofthe pieces can be read as a riddle: what is the original meaning ofthe root? Conventional solutions are listed at the end of the book. The poems exemplify a wide variety of semantic developmentsfromtheproto-languageto contemporary English. The words which are cognate with the root in the title are marked by raised indices which indicate their immediate source language: 1 = Old English, la = Scandinavian, lb = other Germanic, 2 = Latin, 2a = French, 2b = other Romance, 3 = Greek, 4 = other Indo-European. The reader is urged to consultan etymological dictionaryforsuperficially unlikely words which are marked as cognates. The book is great fun, as it should be. It illustrates the wide range of possibilities in diachronic semantics and can be read as a warning against rash conclusions about what can or cannot be expected in the changes undergone by the meanings of words. It shows the comprehensive impact of changing cultural contexts and the ubiquity of multiple routes of transmission. The pieces are surprising webs of connotation and word play around a common semantic kernel. The important lesson of this book is that meanings can develop in a great variety of unexpected ways which must be taken into account when reconstructing earlier stages of a language. If we had not known all we do about the history of the IndoEuropean languages, we would probably be led astray all the time while trying to figure out the earlier relationships. The bookthus contains a series ofpractical exercises in variational semantics (cf. James A. Matisoff. 1978. Variational semantics in TibetoBurman , Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues). It could be used in a course on the methodology of linguistic reconstruction where the emphasis is on the development oflexical meanings. [Frederik Kortlandt, University of Leiden.] A silent minority: Deaf education in Spain 1550-1835. By Susan Plann. Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. 323. Plann presents a history ofdeafeducation in Spain from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She maintains the increasingly accepted view of deaf individuals as members of a linguistic and cultural minority rather than as people with a disability. Although the book ostensibly spans nearly three centuries, its scope is actually far wider. In the 200 body pages and 77 pages of endnotes, the book's contents range from Aristotelian quotes and their misinterpretations to a consideration of the ramifications ofthe history of Spanish deafeducation on current pedagogy. The book is filled with anecdotes involving myriads ofpeople who influenced, or were influenced by, deaf education. One constant thread throughout the book is the struggle between the educational philosophies of oralism, which forbids the use of signing, and manualism, which sees it as a valid avenue of communication. In the sixteenth century , language, which was equated solely with speech, was thought by most to be the medium of reasoning. Ponce de León saw as proof against this, however, that monastic signing could convey thoughts; and he used some form ofsigning, probably a combination of monastic and home signs, to teach deaf children to speak and write. In the seventeenth century, the education of deaf children passed from the monks to the laity. Manuel Ramirez de Carrion taught royal and noble deafchildren to read and speak via phonics and the use of fingerspelling. Juan Pablo Bonet, his less successful colleague, wrote a book on deaf pedagogy which contained this manual alphabet, the ancestor of those used in many countries today. Despite his use of fingerspelling and occasional gestures for pedagogical purposes, Bonet discouraged signing and was the first to propound oralism in print. The late seventeenth and...