So where is ASL from anyway?

Carl Schroeder posits the idea that we have no concrete evidence that ASL is descended from la langue des signes française (LSF), and cites one source that is rife with grammatical and spelling errors. It is an interesting supposition and one that may have some credence. I, however, beg to differ.

Schroeder is right in that we have no record of what ASL looked like in the early- to mid- 1800s, neither taped nor written, so it is difficult if not impossible to determine what it looked like. We have no way of knowing what the pidgin mix of LSF and Martha's Vineyard signs looked like.

However, I believe plenty of evidence, both linguistic and historical, exists that clearly demonstrates beyond a doubt that ASL and LSF are linguistic relatives.

Sign "with."

Really. Go ahead and sign "with."

Okay. Look at your hands. What handshape are you using to sign "with?"

That's right. A.

And the French word for "with" is...
*drumroll*
avec.

And the LSF sign for "with" is a cognate of ours.

There are more examples. Sign "see" as in "I see something."

What handshape are you using? V. The French word for to see? voir

Want another? Sure... sign "search" or "look for." Handshape? C. French word? chercher

And all of these signs have LSF cognates (if I remember my LSF right... my LSF book isn't handy at the moment). There are many ASL-LSF cognates that do not have English-French cognates, such as the sign for "excuse me," which is a near-perfect cognate of the LSF sign that corresponds to "pardon."

Another factor pointing to the idea that LSF existed first and was one of the progenitors of ASL is that there was a deaf school in Paris for close to a century before there was a deaf community in America, not counting Martha's Vineyard. The Institut National des Jeunes Sourds is where Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc went to school and later taught. This is where Gallaudet was taken once he had decided to check out the French way of teaching deaf children. (aside here: if you ever get to visit the school, head to the right rear stairwell. There's this stone engraved passage talking about how Gallaudet came to the school and brought Clerc to America, and started a school for the deaf in America. In their definitive French deaf history book, Les Pouvoir des Signes, or The "Can" of Signs, they speak of Gallaudet and American deaf education in very reverent tones.) LSF was already in existence and in use when Gallaudet talked Clerc into leaving everything he'd ever known for the American wilderness. There was a book of LSF in existence as early as 1779, written by Pierre Desloges. (The site is in French, but the info is in the first paragraph.) In Nora Ellen Groce's book (by the by, Schroeder's source quotes from this book as well), it discusses the differences between ASL and Islander signs. One of the eldest islanders said in an interview that he could never understand young deaf sign language because the signs used on the island were so different. Ergo, Islander sign language is probably not the most significant source of ASL. We've established that LSF existed before ASL as much as possible and that it is substantially different from Martha's Vineyard signs without concrete evidence of what ASL looked like a century and a half ago.

Another clear indicator is the grammatical construction found in ASL and in spoken/written French. One oft-quoted example of ASL grammar is CAR RED, in which the adjectives occur after the noun, unlike English, where the adjectives precede the noun, as in red car. Care to hazard a guess which construction spoken/written French uses? Yup, you got it. Same as ASL - la voiture rouge. The linguistic similarities are much deeper than simple word order, however. There's an idiom in English which reads, "It's clear as mud." If this were to be translated into French, it would read "Il est clair comme boue." If we translate word-for-word back from French into English, it would be "It is clear how mud." Feel familiar? It should if you use ASL, because this is a construction that often comes up in ASL, but never ever in English. As a Francophone, I've found I have a much easier time translating between written French and ASL because their grammatical constructions are more similar than those of English and French. There are more examples, but you get the idea.

While this is probably not sufficient evidence to satisfy everyone out there, it is way more than enough to satisfy me that ASL is directly descended from LSF, with other influences thrown in and time and distance have helped to separate the two languges as well.

"I wanna go to Gally, but I don't wanna sign."

There is an interesting discussion going on at DeafDC.com. Christopher Brown wrote this thoughtful article designed to spark discussion about how to fix Gallaudet, but the discussion has strayed to other items. I actually feel sorry for the dude, 'cause his article was thought-provoking and deserves to be discussed. I was very surprised by one discussion thread. Apparently there is a small but very strong and vocal group that believes that Gallaudet should NOT require everyone to learn how to sign - not students nor faculty. I don't think fluency should be required to enroll at Gallaudet, but I do think fluency should be the goal upon graduation. I thought everyone agreed. But nope, apparently not. Here's what I posted in response.

(#32170) | 2006-11-04 14:59:45
Christopher, I apologize for not answering your question at this point. I just need to respond to this phenomenon of people who actively resist learning ASL and about deaf culture who still attend Gallaudet. As people who read my blog know, I’m very accepting of various backgrounds and communication modes. I didn’t grow up in a deaf school, I didn’t grow up signing ASL, my family is hearing, and so on, so a militant Deaf Culture stance is not where I’m coming from.

I’m not going to criticize or attack this stance - that would undermine the open dialogue we all need to have. But I really, really do not understand this perspective. If people don’t want to learn ASL, that’s okay. They have hundreds of other options for college, and some of them have sizable numbers of deaf students. So it is possible for these people to find a community and socialization opportunities outside of Gallaudet. Why, then, would they want to go to Gallaudet at all? What does Gallaudet have to offer them that they can’t find elsewhere if they aren’t interested in signing/learning how to sign or interacting with deaf people who want to sign?

Furthermore, why can’t we be allowed to have just ONE place where we sign, can expect professors and other employees to sign with some level of competence, and where we welcome those who did not grow up signing but are willing to learn, and so on? Why do we have to give up the only option we have if we want sign?

Again, before anyone flames me, I respect people who don’t want to learn how to sign. I’m just confused at the idea, “I don’t want to sign, but I want to go to the only college that has signing everywhere, even though I could go just about anywhere else.” Please help me understand rather than shooting me down.

So what do you think, Teeming Millions? Any thoughts? Any nuggets that can help me understand this phenom?

What if Alexander Graham Bell never existed?

One of my favorite TV shows of all time is Sliders, a sci-fi show about an unlikely quartet that is stuck wandering the multiverse, landing on parallel/alternate earths in a perhaps vain attempt to return to their home Earth (known as Earth Prime.) They travel the Einstein-Rosen-Podolosky wormhole between Earths over five seasons. During their five seasons together, they encounter a wide array of parallel Earths that we can only imagine. Take, for example, the world where the colonies lost the Revolutionary War, George Washington was beheaded in 1779, and we are all British subjects. Or the world where the Sino-Soviet Empire swept the globe in the 1950s, and the U.S., the lone holdout, was annexed into the Soviet Union in 1961, resulting in a world full of communism except for pockets of resistance here and there. Nueva España, the world where the Anglos lost the war and Candians flee the poverty of their country for the riches of La California is a fascinating one. One of my favorites is the one where JFK was assassinated by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1963, so J. Edgar Hoover took over the presidency, declared martial law, and abridged the Constitution. For more worlds, visit the Travelogue.

As someone who loves history and science fiction, Sliders has always captured my imagination and I enjoy imagining possible alternate Earths, where there was some divergence at some point in history, trivial to major. Today I started wondering what if Alexander Graham Bell never existed. A partial description of the damage Bell hath wrought on our community can be found here.This man was a strong proponent of eugenics and wanted to eradicate deafness from the earth. (By the way, note how the Wikipedia section on eugenics closes with how he was a kindly grandfather in an attempt to water this powerful section down?? How infuriating!) Bell's work, as well as those of his contemporaries, led to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, according to Patrick Boudreault's research. He was one of the more instrumental forces during the infamous 1880 Milan Conference banning sign language in deaf education. Bell was one of the most successful colonizers of our people and his destructive influence continues to this day. This has led me to ponder what an Earth without Bell would be like.

What would a world without Bell be like? Would oralism have been marginalized, with manualism gaining primacy, or would it have retained its stronghold where it was strong before yet failing to gain much footing where manualism was the norm? Would Adolf Hitler still have risen to power in the 1930s, and if the answer is yes, would der Führer have written Mein Kampf with the same arguments he made in our world? Would Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps have claimed as many lives, or indeed any lives at all? Would cochlear implants and genetic engineering have become the perceived threat they are today? Let your imagination run wild!