Sign languages

Q. What's the history of sign languages for the deaf

A. In the sixteenth century Geronimo Cardano, a physician in Padua, Italy, proclaimed that deaf people could be taught to understand written combinations of symbols by associating them with the thing they represented. Some decades later, in 1620, the first book on teaching sign language to deaf people and containing the manual alphabet was published by Juan Pablo de Bonet.

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In 1755 the Abb� Charles Michel de L'Ep�e founded the first free school for deaf people in Paris. Hear deaf people were taught to develop communication by 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 rather than the word to be expressed.

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The Abb� developed his sign language system by first recognising, then learning the signs that were already being used by a group of deaf people in Paris, then adding elements of his own which resulted in a signed version of spoken French. From his system developed French Sign Language (FSL), still in use in France today and the precursor of American Sign Language (ASL) and many other national sign languages.

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Q. How did it get to America

A. FSL was brought to the United States in 1816 by Thomas Gallaudet, founder of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. The new sign language was combined with the various systems already in use in the United States to form ASL, which today is used by more than 500,000 deaf people in the United States and Canada, it is the fourth most common language in the United States.

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Q. Are any of these languages mutually intelligible

A. National sign languages such have more in common with one another than with the spoken languages, since their signs represent concepts and not words.

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Q. Any other systems

A. One system, Cued Speech, first developed by the American physicist R. Orin Cornett in 1966, employs hand signs representing only sounds, and is intended to be used in conjunction with lip-reading. It has been adapted to more than 40 languages.

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Q. What about British Sign Language

A. It is estimated that there are 70,000 'speakers' of BSL in the UK, more than either Scots Gaelic or Welsh, so making it, in a sense, the second indigenous language of the British Isles. BSL has evolved naturally over hundreds of years, and is a language in its own right with its own grammar. It is not based on English, nor is it an international language, and it is at least as complex and sophisticated as any spoken language. The use of BSL is so central to the lives of many deaf people in the UK, that English may only be their second or even third language.

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Q. But sign languages aren't a modern idea, are they

A. Evidence of the use of sign languages to communicate between speakers of mutually unintelligible languages exists for Africa, Australia and North America. One of the best-known examples is that developed by the North American Plains Indians. Although their languages were dissimilar, the mode of life and environment of all the different tribes had so many shared elements that finding common symbols was easy. This sign language became so well understood that long and complex narratives in monologue or dialogue could be signed within large groups of Indians otherwise unable to communicate.

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Members of religious orders who have taken vows of silence, as well as others who for reasons of piety or humility have forsworn speech, have traditionally needed sign languages. Famously, the 7th-century English cleric the Venerable Bede worked out a coded sign language based on manual signs representing numbers, with the numbers in turn signifying letters of the Latin alphabet in sequence, so 1 for A, 2 for B, and so on.

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By Simon Smith