Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

1. An Idea That Would Not Go Away

CHAPTER 1 An Idea That Would Not Go Away THE IDEA THAT deaf people's signing might be a language aroused bitter opposition in 1960 when I first proposed it, but it wouldn't go away. And when the idea took hold, about a decade later, it began to cause many good things to happen. In its present, developed form, it could be even more beneficial with further research and testing. The belief that signing can be a language is in some respects new, yet is also a natural extension of an old idea. It grows out of the gestural theory oflanguage origins. When it first came to me, however, the idea was very much my own and bound up in my personal history. My colleagues at Gallaudet College at first wouldn't touch it. Indeed, educators of deaf students across America attacked me, sometimes violently, for thinking and saying in print that in their everyday conversation deaf people might be using a language that was obviously not English but was a language nevertheless. The intellectual atmosphere has changed in the last forty years, and so has the idea. At first, I had a hunch that the signing I saw deaf people using as they interacted might be a language, but I had no evidence to support my suspicion. Today scholars are studying, describing, and comparing deaf people's sign languages in many parts of the world. Deaf 2 AI1 Idea That Would Not Go Away people themselves are signing more openly and being admired for it. And no one thinks it strange to see sign language interpreters at public events and on television. It pleases me to see this attention given to sign languages. Besides being good for sign language users, it suggests that I was not as crazy as the experts in deaf education thought in 1960, when my first grammar of a sign language was published, and in 1965, when two deaf colleagues and I finished the first dictionary ofAmerican Sign Language. My pleasure with the current activity is not unmixed, however. To a certain extent many who study signed languages take that first step over and over again, but one step doesn't get us far. We need the second stage of the original idea to move it forward. The First Step It was late August of 1955, and the day was whatever day classes began that fall. The setting was Kendall Hall, a small brick building with a medallion set in its facade, the head ofAbraham Lincoln, who signed the charter of the institution that became Gallaudet College and later Gallaudet University. The time was whatever hour the first class I would teach at the college began-morning, I think, but I had many other things to remember. I was worse than unprepared. I was stepping directly into a foreign world. I was facing a class of eight or ten English majors, none of whom could hear and some of whom had speech I could not decipher . I had earned my graduate tuition by teaching English to Cornell University freshmen, and for eight years I had taught composition and literature to Wells College students-and now I was supposed to teach Chaucer in Middle English to deaf students at Gallaudet. Like other recruits to the faculty of that era, I had been taught the prevailing mode of instruction. We were expected to speak normally, while making some signs with our hands that would represent the English words. When we didn't know a sign for a word, our teacher had told us to "fingerspell it!"To do this we had to form a different handshape for each letter of the word and try to produce them as smoothly linked as the notes of a violin cadenza. An Idea That Would Not Go Away 3 Worse than being unprepared is being misprepared. Some of the old-timers, who considered themselves"dedicated teachers of the deaf," loved to remind us how little we knew. Some of them told me over and over that deafstudents could understand only the simplest language.They explained that a deafperson did not really have any language and so could not achieve full mental development. On one occasion, I must have looked sad when I heard this repeated again because the college nurse who said it tried to reassure me. She added that I would still enjoy teaching deafstudents because they...