“Speech Writing and Sign” in “Speech Writing And Sign”
I. INTRODUCTION
1. “How to Murder English,”The Illustrated Weekly of India, 17 March 1974, p.7. The selection is reprinted from the London Spectator.
2. Excellent discussions of Wittgenstein’s position can be found in Hallet (1967) and C.M. Brown (1974).
3. See Bhattacharya (1978) for a discussion of the paradox that language users must share a linguistic system of signs in order to be understood, while at the same time not fully share a system in order to have new things to say.
4. On the other hand, cf. A.W. Williamson (1881), “Is the Dakota related to the Indo-European languages?” Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences, Bulletin 2:110-142.
5. For a detailed discussion of French missionaries’ linguistic work in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, see Hanzeli (1969).
6. Within the Indo-European tradition, reconstruction was based on written materials as a matter of course. Americanists including Bloomfield (see Hockett, 1970 and Haas, 1969) have addressed the question of whether reconstruction is possible without written records.
7. This trend continues even today. The first written textbook for Cajun French was produced only in 1977 (New York Times, 25 June 1977), although Cajun French has been spoken in the American South for several centuries.
8. See Gelb (1952:206-207) and Basso and Anderson (1973) for some minor exceptions.
II. LANGUAGE AND REPRESENTATION
1. “The essential and characteristic human activity is representation—that is, the production and manipulation of representations” (Rosenberg, 1974:1).
2. For discussions of the question of representation in science, see Wartofsky (1968), including his lengthy bibliographical notes (pp. 489-491). The best theoretical treatment of cartography is Robinson and Petchenik (1976). Good references on artistic representation are the works of Arnheim (e.g., 1967, 1969) and Gombrich (e.g., 1960, 1972), although also see Hermerén (1969). Useful works on political representation are Pitkin (1967) and (1969).
3. See Wartofsky (1968:508-510) for an extensive bibliography concerning the question of what theories and models might be.
4. Toulmin uses the example of the sun casting a shadow behind a wall to illustrate the dependence of models (“diagram”) on theory:
[In our example] the diagram provides . . . something in the nature of a picture of the optical state-of-affairs; a picture with the help of which we can infer things about the shadows and other optical phenomena to be observed under the circumstances specified. But to understand how the explanation works, it is not enough to point to the phenomena on the one hand and the physicist’s diagram on the other. For the physicist uses other terms, having at first sight nothing to do either with shadows or with diagrams, which nevertheless constitute in some ways the heart of the explanation. He talks, for instance, of light ‘travelling’, of rays of light ‘getting past the wall’ or ‘being intercepted by it’, and declares that this interception of light by the wall is what—fundamentally—explains the existence of the shadow. [1953:35]
5. See Wartofsky (1968:112) and Toulmin (1953:13) for discussions of how science alters ordinary language.
6. Chukovsky (1965:11) cites the unsuccessful attempt of a Russian child to replace penknife with pencilknife, a change whose logic was motivated by the realization that pocketknives are now used on pencil points rather than on quill pens.
7. Benveniste has argued that “Saussure was always thinking of the representation of the real object (although he spoke of the “idea”)” (1971:47)—though such a claim is difficult to support on either textual or theoretical grounds, given Saussure’s structuralist presuppositions (see Bhattacharya, (1979).
8. For discussions of early infant perception, see Gibson (1950), Fantz (1961), and Bower (1977).
9. For an excellent discussion of the innatist debate, see Stich (1975).
10. See Winkler (1901), Akerblom (1968), and de Brum (1962) for a more complete discussion of Marshallese stick charting.
11. See Lewis (1972:184-187).
12. This analogy is adapted from Gladwin (1970:183).
13. As far as we can determine, the phonological representations that Wilkins used have the following equivalents:
We should be aware, though, that because the vowel system of seventeenth-century English was undergoing radical change, we cannot be certain of these values.
14. See Emery (1948) for an excellent description of Wilkins’s scheme.
15. There are other problems stemming from the assumption that an immutable and monolithic language would ever be practical. Such a language scheme overlooks the fact that all known natural human languages are continually subject to change. Even if our theories of science, our natural environment, and systems of belief remain largely untouched, from all evidence, human languages are continually subject to changes in phonology, lexicon, morphology, and, to a lesser extent, syntax. Such changes may be introduced by children learning language or by fortuitous variation and may be adopted as part of the standard language if functional and/or structural pressures warrant it.
Consider as well the question of whether the same universal language could ever fill all of the functions envisioned for it. Philosophical languages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were primarily designed as aids to clear thinking, but were also intended to serve as international means of communication. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century auxiliary international languages were also assumed to be more accurate mirrors of reality than natural languages. As Jonathan Cohen points out, the two goals are incompatible: naming, description, classification, generalization, reasoning, explanation, and prediction are the tasks of a scientific language but not of an ordinary language, in which the range of meanings needed is very different. Scientific theory is, Cohen argues, best served by a language
which carries over the least possible irrelevant associations from non-scientific discourse. But an international auxiliary is most easily learnt if its radicals are already familiar and these are therefore best drawn from words already in international currency. [1954:62]
Moreover, it is not clear that a “scientific language” appropriate for one domain of inquiry is necessarily appropriate for another:
while an unspecialised language must be capable of application to all fields of human experience, it is yet to be shown that the ideal of a systematic terminology can usefully operate not only at the level of each individual science but also at the level of science as a whole, [ibid.]
In fact, Ostwald (in Couturat et al. 1910:55) acknowledges the impossibility of combining a practicable international auxiliary language with an adequate scientific terminology.
Chapter 3 and especially chapter 4 will deal with the question of how an understanding of a language’s functioning may shape our conception of what a language is.
16. Because most of our references are to Katz (1966), which contains an elaboration of the Katz-Fodor semantic model proposed in 1963, I refer to Katz as the exponent of the Katz-Fodor position.
17. This passage is quoted from chapter II, “Of the Nature of Genus and Species” (vol. 2, p.614), in Owen’s edition of the Organon.
III. WHAT IS A LANGUAGE?
1. In most instances, nonhuman primates have been taught individual signs from American Sign Language which have been concatenated using English syntax (American Sign Language actually has a syntax of its own). The differences between English and American Sign Language are discussed in chapter 7.
2. See Mead (1934) for a discussion of how individual monologues develop from social communication.
3. Crystal does not, however, assume that all communication which is auditory or vocal is necessarily linguistic. Sounds not produced by the vocal apparatus (e.g., finger-snapping) may be communicative but nonlinguistic (Crystal, 1971:241). The same applies to heavy breathing and voice quality (ibid., pp.241-243).
4. As Neo-Melanesian begins to acquire more native speakers and to be used in a broader range of contexts, however, it may well enter into the historical analytic-synthetic cycle described by Reighard (1971).
5. Two exceptions are Bhattacharya (1979) and, in a less developed way, Quine (1978).
6. In the case of Sumerian, it has been argued (e.g., Jensen, 1970:83-84) that the reduction in the number of word signs from sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred in Uruk IV (c. 3700 B.C.) to eight hundred by 3000 B.C. reflects increased phoneticization.
7. In Sumerian, for example, we find “the reduction of thirty-one various signs for ‘sheep’ in the early Uruk period to one single form in later times” (Gelb, 1952:115).
8. Verner, believing all sound laws to be exceptionless, maintained that for any apparent irregularity in sound change there must be a rule. Our task is to discover this rule (Verner, 1875, reprinted in Lehmann, 1967:138).
9. See, for example, Sapir (1949). Consider, however, the hypothesis that literacy heightens an individual’s notions of grammaticality (see Chapter 6).
10. Unfortunately, such assumptions have been common in linguistic literature. For example, it is generally believed that young children understand more language than they can produce. Although some experimental evidence has been gathered which supports this hypothesis more narrowly (e.g., Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown, 1963; Huttenlocher, 1974), the hypothesis has not proven correct for all levels of grammar or for all types of children (see Sachs and Truswell, 1976).
Similar overextensions of findings about comprehension and production have been made concerning children who are purported to understand language without being able to speak. In an isolated case study of an eight-year-old anarthric boy, Lenneberg (1962) reported that the child was able to respond correctly to yes/no questions (by nodding or shaking his head) and to carry out commands (“Take the block and put it on the bottle”). Without corroborating evidence, the import of these findings has been blown out of proportion—so much so that linguists write that people who cannot speak can, nevertheless, understand language “perfectly” (Langacker, 1973:14).
11. I am grateful to Nikhil Bhattacharya for developing this example.
12. As in the case of speech, sign language can be transmitted electronically, but the sign language used is derived from face-to-face encounters.
IV. FUNCTIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE
1. Notable exceptions are the work of Halliday (1975), Bates (1976), and Greenfield (Greenfield and Smith, 1976).
2. See Cravens (1978) for an extensive discussion of the debate in the United States over the past century on the relative importance of heredity and environment.
3. E.g., Chomsky (1968, 1975, 1979). In his recent work, Chomsky draws the analogy between linguistic development and the development of a human limb:
It is a curious fact about the intellectual history of the past few centuries that physical and mental development have been approached in quite different ways. No one would take seriously a proposal that the human organism learns through experience to have arms rather than wings, or that the basic structure of particular organs results from accidental experience. Rather, it is taken for granted that the physical structure of the organism is genetically determined, though of course variation along such dimensions as size, rate of development, and so forth will depend in part on external factors. From embryo to mature organism, a certain pattern of development is predetermined, with certain stages, such as onset of puberty or the termination of growth, delayed by many years. [1975:9]
4. Ranging, for example, from Paul (1880) to Bloomfield (1933) to Samuels (1972) or Anttila (1972).
5. A good example here is the case of postvocalic /r/ (car, four) in New York City. Historically, the postvocalic /r/ has gone from being a nonprestigious feature to becoming a prestigious one (see Labov, 1966).
6. I should mention that functional explanation in phonology is possible in the restricted sense of lending social value to an arbitrarily selected phonological feature (see figure 4.1). Arbitrarily selected features are, however, not the sort that we are concerned with.
7. See J. Lyons (1968:350-371) for a clear explanation of the differences between nominative-accusative languages and ergative languages. The basic difference is that while nominative-accusative languages assign the same grammatical case (nominative) to all surface subjects, regardless of their semantic role (“He opened the door”; “He fell”), ergative languages give a special case marking to subjects which have the semantic function of agent (“He opened the door”).
8. See Snow and Ferguson (1977) for extensive discussion of how adults speak to children.
9. For a classical discussion of reduplication in early child language see Leopold (1947).
10. See Hymes (1973) for a refutation of Chomsky’s position.
V. SPOKEN LANGUAGE
1. For the most complete discussion of speech surrogates now available, see Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok, 1976.
2. Should one wish to maintain that the productivity of whistling (for example) is dubious, we can still eliminate nonspeech vocalizations from the domain of language by placing physiological restrictions on the way in which the vocal apparatus is used to produce speech.
3. I am grateful to Nikhil and Lalita Bhattacharya for this example.
4. See Home (1966) for an excellent survey of the literature on typological classification of languages.
5. See Greenberg (1963) for an initial statement of how one identifies language universals and Greenberg (1966) for a more detailed analysis.
6. The journal American Speech is a rich source of information here, providing data on the language of tireworkers (Shuy, 1964), of skiers (Jarka, 1963), or of traffic policemen (Dempsey, 1962).
7. My thanks to Angus Rockett and Peter Oppenheimer, for providing much of the information that appears in this section. In ordinary English, “Wipe the bugs off your plates” means “Watch out for police coming from behind.”
8. Linguists (e.g., Nida and Fehderau, 1970:147) have sometimes pointed out the inconsistent use of terms like pidgin, trade jargon, Creole, koiné, and lingua franca and the lack of formal characterizations of each of these language types (although see Samarin [1962] for one attempt at definition). The situation is particularly confusing in an area like Hawaii, where the same term, pidgin, has been applied to a whole linguistic spectrum ranging from knowledge of a few English words to near total mastery of the language (see Reinecke, 1969:144; Tsuzaki, 1971:326).
9. Bateson, for example, states that “[Neo-Melanesian Pidgin] is a systematic fitting of English vocabulary to Melanesian grammar and syntax” (1943:138).
10. See Hall (1966:xii); although, as an increasing number of linguists are recognizing, the presence of a few native speakers does not automatically transform a pidgin into a creole (see Todd [1974] and the work of Sankoff).
11. Voeglin and Voeglin write:
A remarkable feature of all modern European-based pidgin/creoles of the C-type is the location of their speakers: all are spoken on or near seaboards. [1964:43-44]
Samarin claims that
when located on a map, another significant fact appears, every [pidgin] is located adjacent to a marine expanse. The history of these pidgins is therefore somehow to be connected with oceanic travel. [1962:667]
12. The importance of these variables has been raised at several points in the past. Reinecke has noted that
the master-and-dependent relationship . . . does not obtain very strongly in trade situations. Between trading peoples there must be a modicum of mutual respect and freedom of action. [1938; reprinted 1964:537]
Reinecke has also posed the general question of whether
the vocabulary of pidgins [by which he seems to mean what we are calling trade jargons] (as contrasted with Creole languages) [by which he means what we are calling pidgins] reflects to any considerable extent the circumstances under which they arise and the activities for which they function. [1969:16]
He nevertheless points out that “no study has yet been made inquiring into such a connection between milieu and expression” (ibid.).
Grimshaw, in trying to determine how creolization occurs, mentions as a relevant variable
the pattern of conflict relations, first between the dominant group of prestige language speakers and the subordinated population . . . [along with] . . . the industrial and commercial contexts within which contacts have occurred, viz. trading or agriculture, farm or plantation, and so on. This variable also includes the social organization of work—indenture, slavery, contract, free. [1971:432]
Similarly, Voorhoeve (1962), Mintz (1971), Alleyne (1971), and others have commented on the importance of studying the kind of social relationship between the two (or more) populations in contact in order to understand—or predict—the kind of language that will emerge.
What still remains is to ask whether the grammatical characteristics of each interface language are determined by the relevant modes of activity and the relative social and political footing of each group. Reinecke has predicted that, while the vocabulary of trade jargons and pidgins may differ, “it is unlikely that the morphology and svntax of [trade jargons] and [pidgins] will differ much” (1969:20). This discussion will examine an alternative prediction.
13. Wolfers provides an example of the difficulty that the Department of District Administration in New Guinea has had in translating majority rule into Neo-Melanesian:
‘Bihainim tingting bilong planti moa pipal’, its final compromise, means no more than ‘supporting the opinion of many people’, and is inadequate for the task. The concept can be explained through lengthy circumlocution and demonstration, but the problem of finding an accurate, short means of translation still remains. [1971:416]
14. Material objects in the experience of the two groups may differ as well, although this difference is not critical when taken by itself.
15. Louis Leakey has found evidence of elementary forms of exchange over one million years old.
16. A topical example is the imposed labor system in New Guinea. As Rowley explains:
Cash can be made essential by government fiat. An example was the German system of head-tax, maintained until the second world war by the Mandate administration. The tax had to be paid by fit adult male villagers in cash; and cash could be obtained by selling coconuts or copra, or by going to work. [1966:99]
17. In some areas (e.g., New Guinea), the society had little hierarchical structure before it was introduced by the Europeans. Therefore,
when [the native] enters the Pidgin World, [he] must take on patterns which are foreign to him,—and he must act out the role of inferiority vis-à-vis the white man, and if he becomes a boss-boy or a member of the native constabulary he must act out the role of superiority vis-à-vis the other natives. [Bateson, 1943:140]
Nonmodernized societies may also have difficulty adjusting to Western notions of time. Referring to the common allegation that Hawaiians are lazy, Daws points out that
it was said that they had no stamina, that they were prodigal spenders of time, investing everything in projects that promised them dividends of excitement without any thought for the future. As a matter of fact the Hawaiians did not share the white man’s view of time. Even after they were taught to count and how to use a western calendar they preferred to call the days, weeks, and the months of the year by the old native names. They liked to celebrate western holidays—the more the better—but they did not see the point of reckoning the year in four financial periods with a settling day at the end of each quarter. [1968:179]
18. Obviously, trading between equals can take place under a variety of social and linguistic circumstances, ranging from silent barter, to weekly markets to which traders bring their entire families, to villagers living side by side, who do not need to wait until market day to see each other. The interface language that may emerge in each of these situations will reflect the amount of contact between groups, the age of the people involved, and the range of topics talked about that do not directly relate to trade.
19. And therefore (except in the case of house servants or slavery), “native” women have no need to learn or use pidgin. Wolfers, speaking of Neo-Melanesian, observes that even now,
few women at all, anywhere in the Territory, speak anything other than their own tokples or local language—probably a symbol of their own generally lower social status traditionally, and now educationally. The women have never needed to learn pidgin as have men, for there is also very little employment available for them outside their villages except as teachers, nurses, etc. [1971:418]
20. In the case of subordinate groups, few of the people have had the opportunity to learn the dominant language. Speaking of the immigrant labor force in Hawaii, Reinecke writes that
the economic and social possibilities of most immigrants do not include positions where the learning of ‘good’ English is obligatory or even very helpful, or possible. . . . The essential reason for learning only the Creole dialect is neither laziness nor dullness or mind but the distinct connection between the work one does and one’s opportunity to learn English. [1969:101]
He also states that among the native Hawaiian population, education in English was originally restricted to the upper classes (ibid., p.33). Members of the dominant group generally did not bother learning the language of the subordinate group since the dominant group was in a position to make that group learn their (dominant) language (ibid., p.34).
21. If more than two groups are involved in trade, more than two so-called trade languages (i.e., jargons) may emerge.
22. Empirically, however, trade jargons seem to lack inflections (see Silverstein [1972:609] on Chinook Jargon).
23. Although according to R.V. Grant, Chinook Jargon does use a large number of compound expressions to translate a single English verb:
Yaka klatawa kopa lapee kopa chuck kopa
boat [he goes on foot in water to boat]
“He wades to the boat”
[1945:231]
We need to determine whether such expressions are widely accepted by all speakers of Chinook Jargon, and if so, whether there are many expressions of this type. We predict that there will be, in comparison with pidgin, a fairly small number of these expressions.
24. Horatio Hale’s An International Idiom notes that
the Indians in general—contrary to what seems to be a common opinion—are very sparing of their gesticulations. No languages, probably, require less assistance from this source than theirs. . . . We frequently had occasion to observe the sudden change produced when a party of natives, who had been conversing in their own tongue, were joined by a foreigner, with whom it was necessary to speak in the Jargon. The countenances which had before been grave, stolid, and inexpressive, were instantly lighted up with animation; the low monotonous tone became lively and modulated; every feature was active; the heads, arms, and the whole body were in motion, and every look and gesture became instinct with meaning. One who know [sic] merely the subject of discourse might often have comprehended, from this source alone, the general purport of the conversation. [1890:18-19; quoted by Silverstein, 1972:381]
Silverstein also observes that the extralinguistic context itself makes syntactic redundancy unnecessary:
from the specificity of conditions under which jargons are employed, we can expect the extralinguistic context to be highly redundant (in the technical sense); hence the verbal code can avoid redundancy by seizing on this freedom from lexical specification. In other words, it can increase the ‘information’ of each unit, [ibid.]
Stefânsson makes a similar observation with respect to Eskimo Trade Jargon:
In a system of speech comprising only a limited number of uninflected words, much depends on circumstances and context as to the interpretation of any set of them. A sentence perfectly intelligible and definite when used in the course of conversation between men who are face to face may become of uncertain meaning, of many meanings, or of no meaning at all, if divorced from its accompanying gestures and set down isolated in writing or print. [1909:221]
25. As in the case of trade jargons, there may be more than two groups—and two languages—involved. Cole (1953:3), for example, notes that Fanagalo (which may qualify as a pidgin by our definition) is used by Bantu laborers from forty or more different language backgrounds. Similarly, Neo-Melanesian Pidgin is used by speakers of a vast number of indigenous languages.
26. One of the reasons pidgins have been regarded as inferior is their comparatively small vocabularies. Cole (1953:7), for example, questions whether a language like Fanagalo, with a vocabulary of under two thousand words, can express anything more than straightforward ideas.
27. Although in some places (e.g., Hawaii), education in the dominant language did become available to everyone.
28. As recently as 1944, Sayer suggested to travelers visiting areas where pidgin is used to “give the native time to ponder and think—his brain works slower than yours” (1944:25). There are numerous instances in the literature (e.g., Hall, 1955:46; Epstein, 1968:322fn) in which “native” populations have received ill treatment for addressing the dominant population in the dominant language rather than in pidgin.
29. Hall (1955:19) describes an incident in which a native laborer’s misunderstanding of the word bihain (which means “later” in Neo-Melanesian but “behind” in standard English) earned him a clout on the head from a European who felt his orders were being disobeyed.
30. For example, in looking through texts of Hawaiian Pidgin English (in Carr, 1972 and Reinecke, 1969) and Chinese Pidgin English (Hall, 1944), I found almost no evidence of circumlocution. We will need to find out whether lack of circumlocution is an idiosyncratic feature of these particular texts or is really characteristic of the language.
31. Possible exceptions are Kituba and Police Motu, although it would be interesting to know how the expansion of Western trade and empire influenced the formation of these languages.
VI. WRITTEN LANGUAGE
1. For a comparative analysis of rock painting around the world, see C. Grant (1965:107-127).
2. For example, the so-called “x-ray” style, in which figures are outlined and then their musculature and some of the viscera are shown as well, is seen in both Europe and India. According to Brooks and Wakankar, the Indian examples “probably developed locally (1976:87).
3. The Codex Nuttall, which had been owned by an Englishman named Lord Zouche, was first brought to the attention of scholars by Zelia Nuttall. For this reason, the codex is alternatively known as the Codex Zouche, the Codex Nuttall, or the Codex Zouche-Nuttall.
4. For more details on the manuscript, see A.G. Miller (1975).
5. This comparison draws heavily upon M.E. Smith’s (1973) discussion of the Bayeux Tapestry and Mixtec manuscripts.
6. Misunderstandings of written Chinese are prevalent, even in the scholarly literature. Writers as diverse as Gelb (1952:203) and Goody and Watt (1968:36) have assumed Chinese to be an impractical written language for the general population to use, given the large number of logograms and ideograms. Gelb has even gone so far as to imply that a language such as Chinese represents an early evolutionary stage in the development of writing.
7. Some authors, such as Havelock, argue that transcription is the ultimate aim of writing:
Strictly speaking, written orthography should behave solely as the servant of the spoken tongue, reporting its sounds as accurately and swiftly as possible. It need not and should not have a nature of its own. [Havelock, 1976:15]
8. To the best of our knowledge (cf. Chadwick, 1958), Linear B was written with a syllabary. That is, a sign represented a phonological syllable. It seems ironic that while this phonetic script was used only for a highly restricted set of purposes, recent research (e.g., Benson, 1975) has suggested the ancient Inca quipus, whose status as writing has long been questioned, may have served a much vaster range of linguistic functions than did (written) Linear B.
9. Webster’s Seventh Collegiate Dictionary. Pronouncing Vocabulary of Common English Given Names.
10. See Weaver (1972:99-109) for an explanation of the Mesoamerican calendar.
11. According to Nicholson,
no two tlacuiloque probably conveyed their messages in precisely identical ways. Their penchant for varying place and name signs, employing different graphemes and grapheme combinations to produce the same results, is abundantly evidenced in the extant sources. Some scribes may well have inclined to greater phonetic use of graphemes to reduce ambiguity or just as a matter of preference, others to confining their use to a bare minimum. Perhaps the expected “readership” might have been a factor. When it was believed that sufficient understanding could be conveyed without phonetic employment of certain graphemes, some scribes might have preferred to omit them as unnecessary—particularly in the histories where a more or less formalized verbal narrative seems to have regularly accompanied use of the pictorial account, whose mnemonic function in this case was obviously fundamental. [1973:35]
VII. SIGN LANGUAGE
1. Another question, although one which we cannot go into here, is whether what we are calling nonlinguistic gestures do indeed have their own identifiable vocabulary and syntax, thus meriting at least the metaphoric label language (see the beginning of chapter 5). Crystal, while admitting that “it is too early to say,” hypothesizes that “a formal grammar of kinesic effort cannot be written” (Crystal and Craig, 1978:155).
2. See Battison and Jordon (1976) for an empirical study of intelligibility in cross-linguistic signing.
3. Within the last few years, a number of studies have been done on the nonmanual components of sign language. See especially Baker and Padden (1978) and Liddell (1978).
4. The following analysis draws heavily on Wilbur (1976) and Bornstein (i973)-
5. See Wilbur (1976) for a more detailed discussion of the morphology of the various signing systems.
6. A popular text for parents is Bornstein et al. 1975.
7. The history of signing and oralism in the United States reads like a comedy of errors. Thomas Gallaudet, who introduced formal sign language into this country in 1816, had actually gone to England to learn oralist techniques for instructing the deaf. For a complex set of reasons, Gallaudet was refused the opportunity to study with the leading oralist experts of the day. While in England, Gallaudet met the Abbé Sicard, student of the Abbé l’Épée, the champion of French Sign Language. Sicard invited Gallaudet to study signing in France, with the result that signing, not oralism made its way to the United States. Hubbard (1867) describes the historical incident in some detail. For fifty years, the only programs for the deaf in America taught signing. It was not until the late 1860s that the first oralist schools were opened in opposition to the pedagogical use of sign (see Bell, 1894).
8. Of course, there are many teachers who do know and use signing systems closer to ASL. Facility with ASL is especially high among counselors and therapists who work individually with deaf students.
9. There are some others as well, such as that the Plains Indians learned the language from the Spanish in Mexico. This, as Taylor points out, is hardly likely,
since the earliest Spanish penetration of the Plains area, that of Coronado in 1541-42, encountered Indians who were using signs [Winship, 1896:504, 527; Taylor, 1975:330]
10. Diglossia has also been identified among users of American Sign Language (see Stokoe, 1969).
11. Although compare Dorothy Lee’s (1960) article on “Lineal and Non-lineal Codifications of Reality.” She argues that the Trobriand Islanders have a nonlineal encoding of their experience. The issue, of course, is what implications such as nonlineal encoding has for syntactic ordering within the sentence.
12. Interestingly, West suggests that the iconic properties of Plains Sign Language help “throw considerable light upon the ease of learning and communication characteristic of the sign language” (1960, vol. 1:89).
13. It also seems that gestural communication precedes speech among hearing children in oral households (see Locke, 1978; Bates et al. 1979).
14. The data were collected and analyzed by Barbara Medeiros as part of her Honors Thesis in Psycholinguistics at Brown University.
15. See Rock (1979) for more information on the project.
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