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THE SIGN LANGUAGE OF SOUTHERN FRANCE Pierre Sallagolty 0. Introduction. In France, a sign language of deaf persons survives in the traditional Institutes for the Deaf, despite its condemnation by the Congress of Milan in 1880 and the systematically repressive pedagogy in these institutes ever since. In this paper one dialect of French Sign Language (FSL, that used in Marseilles, Toulon, La Ciotat, and Salon de Provence by some 1,000 persons) is analyzed. The AbbA de l'p6e (1776) noted the existence of spontaneous , natural communication by signing in use among the deaf: "Every deaf-mute who is sent to us has already a language familiar to him, and that language is so expressive that it is a natural language which is common to all people" (37). The first half of this statement is straightforward observation of fact; the last half reflects the preoccupation of his century with a search for "the original", and by the same token, "the universal" language. But de l'p6e, while noting the existence of a natural sign language, also worked out a system, both lexical and grammatical of augmenting this natural language; he called it les signes methodiques. His system of conventional methodical signs is antithetical in two respects to our purpose of analysing FSL. First, the system, although of manual signs, is a substitute for the French language. The order of lexical items in a methodically signed utterance and the order of words in a corresponding sentence of French are identical. However the morphological encoding of the spoken language by which tense, mood, person, and number become one word is replaced with strings of "grammatical " signs. These grammatical signs are performed seriatim after the "radical" sign, e.g. to mark the tense, the mood, and the aspect of a verb sign used as surrogate for a French verb root. Such a system has one thing in common with fingerspelling (or dactylology), the substitution of a gestural sign for a language element; though in a long polemic de 1'Epde upheld methodical signing against Perr~ire and his deaf disciple, Saboureux, who championed fingerspelling. Methodical signs and fingerspelling are both secondary systems of the kind that Buyssens (1970) calls substitution codes, but they operate at Sign Language Studies 7 different levels of language. Fingerspelling substitutes a hand configuration for a grapheme. Each methodical sign of de I'Epbe is meant to substitute for a spoken morpheme of French. The second respect in which de lip6e's signs depart from French Sign Language is their didactic purpose: both in lexicon and grammar they are devised as a system for teaching French to the deaf. For this purpose they are too formidable, overloaded E.g. to say j'aimerai 'I'll love' four methodical signs are needed: two for the radical to love, one for 'I', and one for future. Following strictly de 1 analysis, more than ten signs are needed to express 'I believe'" "I say 'yes' with my mind, I say 'yes' with my heart, I say 'yes' with my mouth, but I don't see" (1776:79). Not surprisingly, such an uneconomical code system did not last long. Abbe Sicard, who succeeded de l'pee as head of the National Institute in Paris, unloaded some of the heavy apparatus of the methodical signs for encoding French. Sicard utilized more of the spontaneous signing, the natural FSL, of the deaf, but he kept many of the signs for grammatical formatives . In 1852 Valade-Gabel writes: "The abstract and grammatical means advised by Abbe Sicard in his handbook (1808) are used as a guide in schools . . . among these we think we may name the school of Marseille. " But Lambert, only a few years later, in his dictionaries of dactylology, simple signs, and compound signs (i.e. lexical compounds without grammatical indicators) admits: "We have refrained from including any methodical signs, not presuming to judge or condemn them but believing that they have been more hindrance than help toward that end to which we have addressed ourselves" (1865:65)-that end, be it noted, is bringing natural sign language instruction to those who deal with deaf children not in the Institutes, a considerable number Lambert...

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