It was in the sixteenth century that Geronimo
Cardano,a
physician of Padua, in northern Italy, proclaimed that deaf people
could be taught to understand written combinations of symbols
by associating them with the thing they represented. The first book
on teaching sign language to deaf people that contained the manual
alphabet was published in 1620 by Juan Pablo de Bonet.
In 1755 Abbe
Charles Michel de L'Epee of Paris founded St.
Mary's School for the Deaf; the first
free school for deaf people. He taught that deaf people could develop
communication
with themselves and the hearing world through a system of conventional
gestures, hand signs, and fingerspelling. He created and demonstrated
a language of signs whereby each would be a symbol that suggested
the concept desired.
The abbe was apparently a very creative
person, and the way he developed his sign language system was by
first recognizing, then learning the signs that were already being
used by a group of deaf people in Paris. To this knowledge he added
his own creativeness which resulted in a signed version of spoken
French. He paved the way for deaf people to have a more standardized
language of their own--one which would effectively bridge the gap
between the hearing and non hearing worlds.
Another prominent deaf educator
of the same period (1778) was Samuel
Heinicke of Leipzig, Germany.
Heinicke did not use the manual method of communication but taught
speech and speech reading. He established the first public school
for deaf people that achieved government recognition. These two methods
(manual and oral) were the forerunners of today's concept of total
communication. Total communication espouses the use of all means
of available communication, such as sign language, gesturing, fingerspelling,
speech reading, speech, hearing aids, reading, writing, and pictures.
In America the Great Plains Indians
developed a fairly extensive system of signing, but this was more
for intertribal communication than for deaf people, and only vestiges
of it remain today. However, it is interesting to note some similarities
existing between Indian
sign language and the present system.
America owes a tremendous debt of
gratitude to Thomas
Hopkins Gallaudet , an energetic Congregational
minister who became interested in helping his neighbor's young deaf
daughter, Alice
Cogswell (Read
about thier Encounter). He traveled to Europe in 1815, when he was
twenty-seven, to study methods of
communicating with deaf people. While in England he met Abbe
Roche Ambroise Sicard, who invited
him to study at his school for deaf people in Paris. After several
months Gallaudet returned to the United
States with Laurent
Clerc ,a deaf sign language instructor from the
Paris school.
In 1817 Gallaudet founded the nation's
first school for deaf people, in Hartford, Connecticut, and Clerc
became the United States' first deaf sign language teacher. Soon
schools for deaf people began to appear in several states. Among
them was the New
York School for the Deaf, which opened its doors
in 1818. In 1820 a school was opened in Pennsylvania, and a total
of twenty-two schools had been established throughout the United
States by the year 1863.
An important milestone in the history
of education for deaf people was the founding of Gallaudet
College , in Washington, D.C. in 1864, which remains the only liberal arts
college for deaf people in the United States and the world.
Thomas
Hopkins Gallaudet passed
on his dream of a college for deaf people to his son, Edward
Miner Gallaudet, who with
the help of Amos
Kendall made the dream a reality. Edward Miner
Gallaudet became the first president of the new college.
Today we are fortunate to have one
of the most complete and expressive sign language systems of any
country in the world. We owe much to the French
sign system, from
which many of our present-day signs, though modified, have been derived.
It might be noted here that many
deaf people use a different grammatical structure when signing, usually
among themselves, known technically as American Sign Language, or
ASL. But signing in English word order continues to grow in popularity
and is widely used by both deaf people and hearing people. It is
easier for a hearing person to learn sign language in English syntax
than to learn signing with the grammatical structure of ASL.