A Linguistic Remark on Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language

Winter 1986 A LINGUISTIC REMARK ON Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language Yau Shunchiu Groce is a gifted narrator; she succeeds in transforming a remote and relatively unknown island off the coast of New England into a locality as familiar to me as le Mont Saint Michel on this side of the Atlantic. She knows how to blend scientific information with vivid narration. In order not to steal her thunder, I will quote only one passage from her book to show my appreciation and leave future readers to discover more for themselves: Signs were also used when distance made it impossible to be heard. One man remembered, "Jim had a shop down on the shore of Tisbury Pond, and his house was a ways away, up on the high land. When Prudy, his wife wanted to tell Jim something, she'd come to the door, blow a fish horn, and Jim would step outside. He'd say, "Excuse me, Prudy wants me for something," then she'd make signs to tell him what she needed done. (p. 64) On the other hand, as a field researcher investigating isolated sign languages, I feel obliged to express some reservations on a particular aspect of the book that bears directly on my discipline. For me it is a pity that only two signs are described in the whole book: HORSE -- [he] (the informant) looked at the space between the hip bone [sic] and did this [holding his hands out in front of his body, indicating great width and making a vigorous chewing motion], meaning the horse eats a lot. ENGINE -- a circular movement with the right hand away from the body at chest level in a clockwise direction, suggesting the cranking of a motor. (p. 89) I would like to have, and I was expecting that the author would provide, more lexical examples than this. But my dissatisfaction is not just a question of professional concern -- a great number of this book's readers are probably not linguists. My complaint is that a reasonable quantity of lexical description is required to justify the title of the book, as well as to make it fully persuasive. It is true that the last hereditarily deaf person on the Vineyard died in 1952 (p. vii); yet it should not be too difficult to draw up an inventory of basic signs of the language -- even better to include a few gestural sequences. If the use of sign language was so pervasive, 1. Hereditary Deafness on Martha's Vineyard, by Nora Ellen Groce; Harvard University Press, 1985. SLS 53 Winter 1986 so spontaneous in the daily communication of deaf and hearing alike, as the author avers, then we must assume that many of the author's elderly hearing informants were participants in this communication. One of Groce's informants remembered, I learned it when I was a kid. Everybody in town knew it... Everybody'd talk with 'em -- just like you'd do to a person who could speak... and there would be deaf mutes there, and there would be plenty of people who could talk and hear, and they were all part of the crowd. They had no trouble, no trouble at all. (p. 60) In the field, I have on several occasions encountered hearing members in the entourage of an isolated sign language creator who could sign fluently even years after the creator had passed away. True, this experience of mine is like Kuschel's findings (1973) and counter to the following remark by Groce: But hearing individuals rarely seem willing to learn the idiosyncratic signs of a single deaf person in their community. Most isolated deaf individuals have very little real communication with those in their immediate families and virtually none with those outside the family. (p. 68) [There is no indication either of an enumeration of isolated deaf individuals nor any measure of how much "real communication" they have. Ed.] I think that we cannot generalize from the individual and his companions studied by Kuschel. The eventual propagation of a sign language among hearing persons depends upon the deaf sign creator's personality, family status, and involvement in social interactions (See Yau 1985). The Vineyard...