Language in Hand: Why Sign Came Before Speech

4. Signed Languages and Language Essentials

CHAPTER 4 Signed Languages and Language Essentials I\. LTHOUGH SIGNED LANGUAGES use attention-attracting visible symbols, ..n.. and have apparently been used by deafpeople throughout history, it has taken a long time for scientists and the public to acknowledge that they are actually languages. Speech and language have usually been equated. Most laypeople, physicians, and religious authorities for centuries claimed that deaf people were languageless, and as recently as 1966 Hans Furth could entitle his treatise on "the thinking-language relation" Thinking without Language: Psychological Implications ifDeafness. By the eighteenth century, however, European philosophers and some teachers were reexamining the issue ofdeafpeople's capacity for thought and for language.The most important ofthe teachers was a French abbe, Charles Michel de l'Epee. Epee conceived the idea of using the visible signs of deaf Parisians, modified by him to accord with the grammar of spoken French, to teach them French language and culture. His method worked well at the Royal Institution for the Deaf in Paris, astounding Parisians with his success. The Abbe Roch-Ambroise Sicard succeeded Epee at the Paris school and continued his method of using signs and fingerspelling in teaching, often with deaf teachers. As the nineteenth century began, schools for the deaf were opened on a similar model in 52 Signed Languages and Language Essentials 53 many European capitals, as well as the one in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817 by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Sicard's former pupil and lead teacher at the Paris school, Laurent Clerc. A diametrically opposed view oflanguage, deaf people, and deafness was growing at the same time, however. In the seventeenth century Johann Conrad Amman had equated speech with the voice of God, and Epee's intellectual adversary Samuel Heinicke, the German teacher ofdeaf pupils, argued in the 1780s that without speech a deafperson could have no language. Heinicke and his followers, often called"oralists," believed that language is nothing but speech, that speech, and only speech, is language . Thus they demanded that deaf children be trained to decipher speech by looking at speakers' faces and to produce it even though they could not hear their own attempts. These zealots forbade the use ofsign language in their schools, fearing it would inhibit the learning of lipreading and the development of speech. By the late nineteenth century, the oralists had gained the upper hand. In 1880 oralist educators met in Milan, Italy, and decreed that sign language had no place in schools and programs for deaf children. They insisted that only speech and lipreading could expose deaf people to true language and allow them to fit into hearing society. Contrary to evidence and experience, they insisted that clear speech could be learned by all deaf people who were not mentally deficient and could be read on the lips with facility. Hearing parents of deaf children naturally believed the educators' promise that their children could be taught to speak. Sign language was banished from the schools and denounced as barbaric gestures, not language. But of course deaf children and adults continued to use a language, sign language, that they were naturally and fully able to express and understand.1 This was the situation I encountered in 1955. Signing was permitted and employed at Gallaudet, but as a necessary evil, a "visual aid" to the spoken English we teachers were expected to use simultaneously with our signs. The attitude seemed to be "We know that language is really oral or written speech, but to get our students to understand what we say, we have to resort to cumbersome and inadequate manual word and letter codes to teach them English." Several circumstances perpetuated these falsehoods about the authentic signed language used by deaf people. First, hearing people resort to 54 Signed Languages and Language Essentials gesturing when it becomes necessary to communicate across language barriers or where sound does not carry, but this kind of gesturing is definitely not language. Second, for centuries members ofreligious communities used manual signs as codes for spoken language when their orders imposed silence; and deaf people do indeed sometimes use such codes for representing the words and letters ofspoken languages, a kind oflexical borrowing that allowed some observers to argue that signs were not adequate to create their own language. And third, since the middle of the eighteenth century at least some hearing people have recognized, consciously or subconsciously, that educational use of genuine sign language would...