The creation of a universal language uniting all mankind
is an idea that has interested scholars for several centuries. It is
an exciting idea! Imagine a language which can break down the barriers
that tend to separate the different peoples of the world. The idea has
not been left to gather dust. Various attempts have been made to invent
such a language. The most widely known invented language, Esperanto,
has about one million speakers, but very few speakers use it as their
everyday language. Considering that the world population is already over
four billion, this is not a truly popular universal language. In fact,
no invented language has ever been widely accepted.
The suggestion has been made that a true universal language exists already.
Margaret Mead, among others, recently proposed that sign language is
the universal language par excellence. According to this claim, sign
language is not only universal, but easy to learn. It could, therefore,
be used by anyone for world-wide communication.
This proposal was made also by early writers on sign
language, such as the Abbé de l'Epée, the French priest
who founded public education for the deaf late in the 18th century,
and Remy Valade, who
wrote the first grammar book on French Sign Language in 1854. These authors
believed that sign language imitates objects and events and presents
them as they occur in nature, just as an artist paints the scene in front
of him.
According to de l'Epée and Valade, there is one
Sign Language*, which is a natural language uniting deaf people everywhere
in the world.
They suggested that if hearing people learned to communicate in sign
language, the world would have an excellent, ready-made universal language.
However, even a brief look at the known sign languages of the world
invalidates this contention. American Sign Language, British Sign Language,
Japanese Sign Language, Danish Sign Language, and other sign languages
differ from each other as much as spoken languages differ. Just like
different spoken languages, different sign languages are mutually unintelligible.
For instance, a deaf person from Britain, who knows only his own sign
language, cannot understand two deaf Americans signing to each other
in ASL.**
Today, linguists who study ASL believe that it is "natural" in
the same sense that English, French, and Russian are natural languages.
Every natural language plays an important role in the day-to-day life
of the people who use it, providing a group of people with a means for
communicating with each other as well as a means for passing on knowledge
from generation to generation.*** Constantly changing, natural languages
adapt to meet the new conditions and particular needs of subgroups of
the community. It is through change and adaptation that natural languages
show their life.
On the other hand, a language such as Esperanto, invented to be a universal
system, lacks the community roots so identifiable in natural languages.
With the form of the language determined at the time of its invention,
such a language remains changeless. Like a plastic flower, it has only
the appearance of life.
With the exception of the following digression, the remainder of this
discussion concerns American Sign Language, its structural regularity
and vitality. Pertinent facts about language in general will be introduced
as necessary to clarify the myths and misunderstandings which surround
American Sign Language.
A Necessary Digression
Specific note must be taken of invented sign systems in the field of
deafness because of a recent proliferation of such systems. There has
been interest in such systems for use with deaf persons since the late
18th century, when the Abbé de l'Epée devised a system
of artificial signs for use with students in his school at Paris. Laurent
Clerc, one of the graduates of the Paris school, was recruited in 1816
by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet to become the first teacher of the deaf
in America. Clerc adopted de l'Epée's system for use with American
students. The system was used in most American schools for the deaf
for several decades. Forty years ago, Sir Richard Paget developed a
system for use with deaf children in Britain. Still used today in a
revised and expanded form, it is known as the Paget-Gorman system.
In Sweden, a system incorporating Swedish signs and the spoken language
is on the drawing boards. In America, there are, at the least, four
major published sign systems currently in use: Seeing Essential English,
Signing Exact English, Linguistics of Visual English, and Signed English.
Many educational programs use parts of one or more of these systems
as they see fit.
The historical and current systems are not attempts to
develop an independent universal language. The individual systems are,
in fact, very specific
to a particular spoken language, developers in each country viewing them
as tools to teach the language of the culture to deaf children. At this
time, research results are not available to indicate whether or not this
objective is achieved. It is true that these systems, used extensively
in the classroom, tend to be limited to educational uses. While deaf
people may be aware of such developments, they do not use the "new
signs" to converse among themselves.
A brief explanation of how the American systems work is appropriate
here. Intended to represent English visually, these systems arrange signs
in the order of English words and incorporate in this arrangement invented
signs which correspond to grammatical features and vocabulary items of
the English language. By matching a sign to an English language component,
part-for-part, the systems become codes for English.
For most people, mention of the word "code" brings
to mind Morse code. The comparison is not far-fetched, because in principle,
all codes set up a one-to-one correspondence between a language unit
and a symbol. In Morse code, the dot-dash forms (the code symbols) correspond
with letters of the alphabet. Sign systems are structurally far more
complicated, their code symbols (signs) corresponding to larger units
of the English language.
* It is important to keep in
mind that de l'Epée
and Valade were familiar with only one sign language - that used by
Parisian deaf people.
** These comments refer to true language and not pantomime, a means
of communicating using random gestures. For a discussion of pantomime,
see the Afterword of this book.
*** Because only a small percentage of deaf children have deaf parents,
ASL is passed on through generations of school children. For language,
as for other kinds of social behavior, the peer group has an extremely
strong influence.