The silent eloquence: Historic debates on the intellectual capacity of sign language

“ It is certain that concepts, however formed, can be expressed by other means than sound. One mode of this expression is by gesture, and there is less reason to believe that gestures commenced as the interpretation of, or substitute for words than that the latter originated in, and served to translate gestures. Many arguments have been advanced to prove that gesture language preceded articulate speech and formed the earliest attempt at communication, resulting from the interacting subjective and objective conditions to which primitive man was exposed. ”

“ Tylor says, “the array of evidence in favour of the existence of tribes whose language is incomplete without the help of gesture-signs, even for things of ordinary import, is very remarkable.” [C] A fact which, as he very properly adds, “constitutes a telling argument in favour of the theory that the gesture-language is the original utterance of mankind [as it is ontogenetically in the individual man] , out of which speech has developed itself more or less fully among different tribes.” ”

“ FOREWORD The aim of the present study is to ascertain as far as possible the standing of the deaf, or, as they are so often called, the "deaf and dumb," in society in America, and to examine the treatment that has been accorded to them—to present an account of an element of the population of whom little is generally known. In this effort regard is had not only to the interests of the deaf themselves, but also, with the growing concern in social problems, to the fixing of a status for them in the domain of the social sciences. ”

“ Nor yet again are we to concern ourselves principally with what is known as the "human interest" question, though we should be much disappointed if there were not found an abundance of human interest in what we shall have to consider. Rather, then, we are to regard the deaf as certain components of the state who demand classification and attention in its machinery of organization. Our attitude is thus that of the social economist, and the object of our treatment is a part or section of the community in its relation to the greater and more solidified body of society. ”

“ The same sign stands for ‘walk,’ ‘walkest,’ ‘walking,’ ‘walked,’ ‘walker.’ Adjectives and verbs are not easily distinguished by the deaf and dumb. Indeed, our elaborate system of parts of speech is but little applicable [340] to the gesture-language.” Next, to quote again only one of the numerous examples previously given to show the primitive order of apposition, whereby the language of gesture serves to convey a predication, “I should be punished if I were lazy and naughty” would be put, “I lazy, naughty, no!—lazy, naughty, I punished; yes!” Again, “to make is too abstract for the deaf-mute ”

“ Gallaudet, Peet, and others maybe right in asserting that man could by his arms, hands, and fingers, with facial and bodily accentuation, express any idea that could be conveyed by words.
The combinations which can be made with corporeal signs are infinite. It has been before argued that a high degree of culture might have been attained by man without articulate speech and it is but a further step in the reasoning to conclude that if articulate speech had not been possessed or acquired, necessity would have developed gesture language to a degree far beyond any known exhibition of it. ”

“ In respect to what has been accomplished for the deaf since America has become concerned in them, we have a record that may well be a distinct cause of pride. The work for the deaf in America is hardly a hundred years old. ”

“ The great mass of the people were not deemed worthy of learning, and education itself in any general application did not have a recognized standing in society. After the Renaissance, however, had ushered in a new age, and when the desire for learning was the master passion among many men in Southern and Western Europe, it is natural to suppose that efforts should have more frequently [121] been made to instruct the deaf child; and after this time we are prepared to find an increasing number of instances of the instruction of the deaf. ”

“ There are three such schools in England and I am told that the deaf are even taught to articulate. There is also a school in Paris founded by the Abbe de l'Epee who was the first, I believe, to attempt the education of the deaf. He started a school, and since his death it has been under the Abbe Sicard.
Gal.—My observations have convinced me that the deaf possess normal minds and it is only because of their deafness that they have failed to develop. When we know how to reach them their minds will become awakened.
Cogs.—Yes, that has been amply demonstrated by Gallaudet's success with Alice. ”

“ Let us not fail then to make a suitable improvement of this occasion, by inquiring, whether our benevolence towards men, springs from love towards the Saviour of our souls; whether our humanity is something more than the offspring of mere sympathetic tenderness ”

“ The instruction of the deaf and dumb, if properly conducted, has a tendency to give important aid to many researches of the philanthropist, the philosopher, and the divine.—The philanthropist and the philosopher are deeply interested in the business of education. The cultivation of the human mind is paramount to all other pursuits; inasmuch as spirit is superior to matter, and eternity to time. Youth, is the season in which the powers of the mind begin to develope themselves, and language, the grand instrument by which this developement is to take place. ”

“ What discoveries may be made respecting the original notions of right and wrong, the obligations of conscience, and, indeed, most of the similar topics connected with the moral sense. These hints are sufficient to show, that aside from the leading and more important uses of giving instruction to the deaf and dumb, their education might be made to subserve the general cause of humanity, and of correct Philosophy and Theology. ”

“ Now it is beyond all doubt, that great improvement has been made in the mode of instructing children in the use and power of language. To what extent these improvements may yet be carried, time alone can determine. The very singular condition in which the minds of the deaf and dumb are placed, and the peculiar means which are necessarily employed in their instruction, may furnish opportunities for observation and experiment, and the establishment of principles, with regard to the education of youth, which will not be without essential service in their general application. ”

“ Gesture is a universal language. The mighty burden of meaning in Millet's picture of the "Sower" is carried by the gesture of the laborer as he swings across the background of field and hill, whose forms also are expressive; here, too, the elemental dignity of form and movement is reinforced by the solemnity of the color. ”

“ Humboldt in his journeyings among the Indians of the Orinoco, where many small isolated tribes spoke languages not understood by any other, found the language of signs in full operation. Spix and Martius give a similar account of the Puris and Coroados of Brazil.
It is not necessary to enlarge under the present heading upon the signs of deaf-mutes, except to show the intimate relation between sign language as practiced by them and the gesture signs, which, even if not "natural," are intelligible to the most widely separated of mankind. ”

“ But, like picture-writing, gestures possess the great advantage of standing for the same ideas everywhere and among all men. The expression of pain or surprise, the threatening shake of the hand, the pointing of the finger, have the same message for the Negro as for the European. The [93] traveller in a strange and unknown region is thrown back upon the language of gesture. ”

“ But in the gesture-language the relation between idea and sign not only always exists, but is scarcely lost sight of for a moment. When a deaf-and-dumb child holds his two first fingers forked like a pair of legs, and makes them stand and walk upon the table, we want no teaching to show us what this means, nor why it is done. ”

“ What he thus sketches in only very general outlines is intelligible to one practised in gesture-language. Moreover, there is a marked tendency for such gestures to become permanent within a particular social group. For the word 'house,' the outlines of roof and walls are drawn; the idea of walking is communicated by imitating the movements of walking with the index and middle fingers of the right hand upon the left arm, which is held out horizontally; the idea of striking is represented by causing the hand to go through the movements of striking. ”

“ With the voice man at first imitated the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he exhibited actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, and their derivatives. It would appear from this unequal division of capacity that oral speech remained rudimentary long after gesture had become an art. ”

“ Enough has now been said to show that gesture-language is a natural mode of expression common to mankind in general. Moreover, this is true in a different sense to that in which we say that spoken language is common to mankind, including under the word language many hundreds of mutually unintelligible tongues, for the gesture-language is essentially one and the same in all times and all countries. It is true that the signs used in different places, and by different persons, are only partially the same ”

“ The execution as well as the conception in both cases was the indication of the line of the hat on the forehead, and the position of the fingers in forming the line is altogether immaterial. There is often also a custom or "fashion" in which not only different tribes, but different persons in the same tribe, gesture the same sign with different degrees of beauty, for there is calligraphy in sign language, though no recognized orthography. It is nevertheless better to describe and illustrate with unnecessary minuteness than to fail in reporting a real distinction. ”

“ The Mexicans, as well as the people of the Romance races, are expert in pantomimic gestures which they are in the habit of using while speaking to one another. How natural all the imitative signs are! When I came to school, I had no difficulty in understanding the true deaf and dumb language of signs — the conventional language. The sign language is the universal one. (I do not pretend to say that I am about the best sign-maker in this institution. This must be attributed to the early training of the mind during my ante-speech days.)
My guardian let me go about in the rear yard. ”

“ But he very early becomes quiet and develops for himself, "out of unconscious gesticulation, the gesture language, which at first is not conventional, nay, is not in the strict sense quite a sign-language, but a mimetic-plastic representation of the influences experienced from the external world," since the deaf-mute imitates movements perceived, and the attitude of persons and the position of objects. Upon this pantomime alone rests the possibility of coming to an understanding, within a certain range, with deaf-mutes that have had no instruction at all. ”

“ An original sign for telegraph is given in Natci's Narrative, infra.
An Indian skilled in signs, as also a deaf-mute, at the sight of a new object, or at the first experience of some new feeling or mental relation, will devise some mode of expressing it in pantomimic gesture or by a combination of previously understood signs, which will be intelligible to others, similarly skilled, provided that they have seen the same objects or have felt the same emotions. ”

“ How natural all these imitative signs are. They want no elaborate explanation. To seize the most striking outline of an object, the principal movement of an action, is the whole secret, and this is what the rudest savage can do untaught, nay, what is more, can do better and more easily than the educated man. "None of my teachers here who can speak," said the Director of the Institution, "are very strong in the gesture-language. It is difficult for an educated speaking man to get the proficiency in it which a deaf-and-dumb child attains to almost without an effort. ”

“ The evidence of the best observers tends to prove that they are capable of developing the gesture-language out of their own minds without the aid of speaking men. Indeed, the deaf-mutes in general surpass the rest of the world in their power of using and understanding signs, and for this simple reason, that though the gesture-language is the common property of all mankind, it is seldom cultivated and developed to so high a degree by those who have the use of speech, as by those who cannot speak, and must therefore have recourse to other means of communication. ”

“ To be able to speak is an impediment, not an assistance, in acquiring the gesture-language. The habit of thinking in words, and translating these words into signs, is most difficult to shake off; but until this is done, it is hardly possible to place the signs in the logical sequence in which they arrange themselves in the mind of the deaf-mute. ”

“ The essential independence of the gesture-language may indeed be brought very clearly into view, by noticing that ordinary educated men, when they first begin to learn the language of signs, do not come naturally to the use of its proper syntax, but, by arranging their gestures in the order of the words they think in, make sentences which are unmeaning or misleading to a deaf-mute, unless he can reverse the process, by translating the gestures into words, and considering what such a written sentence would mean. ”

“ In various ways, depending on fixed usages of language, our syntax, as is well known, permits us to separate words that, as regards meaning, belong together, or, conversely, to bring together words that have no immediate relation. Gesture-language obeys but one law. Every single sign must be intelligible either in itself or through the one preceding it. ”

“ We need only refer to the verb 'to bring,' reduced to the form of three verbs, or the concept 'west,' for whose expression there is required not only the sun and the location which we must give it but also its act of seating itself. In all of these traits, then, primitive language is absolutely at one with gesture-language. ”

“ The class of imitative and suggestive signs in the gesture-language corresponds in some measure with the Chinese words which are neither verbs, substantives, adjectives, nor adverbs, but answer the purpose of all of them, as, for instance, ta, meaning great, greatness, to make great, to be great, greatly ”

“ As we saw, “gesture-language has no grammar properly so called;” and we traced in considerable detail the analogies—so singularly numerous and exact—between the forms of sentences as now revealed in gesture and as they first emerged in the early days of speech. In other words, the earliest record that speech is able to yield as to the nature of its own origin, clearly reveals to us this origin as emerging from the yet more primitive language of tone and gesture. For this is the only available explanation of their close family resemblance in the matter of syntax. ”

“ The further a language has been developed from its primordial roots, which have been twisted into forms no longer suggesting any reason for their original selection, and the more the primitive significance of its words has disappeared, the fewer points of contact can it retain with signs. The higher languages are more precise because the consciousness of the derivation of most of their words is lost, so that they have become counters, good for any sense agreed upon and for no other.
“It is, however, possible to ascertain the included gesture even in many English words. ”

“ It is past all reasonable question that, in the earliest communication between human beings, gesture long played a considerable, if not the principal, part, and that our race learned only by degrees the superior capacities of spoken signs, and by degrees worked them out to a sufficiency for all the ordinary needs of expression; when gesture was relegated to the department of rhetoric, to the office of giving individual colouring and intensity to intellectual expression—as, in all well-developed languages, has been the case with tone also. ”

“ Gesture is the direct agent of the soul, while language is analytic and successive. The leading quality of mind is number; it is to speculate, to reckon, while gesture grasps everything by intuition,--sentiment as well as contemplation. There is something marvelous in this language, because it has relations with another sphere; it is the world of grace.
An audience must not be supposed to resemble an individual. A man of the greatest intelligence finding himself in an audience, is no longer himself. An audience is never intelligent; it is a multiple being, composed of sense and sentiment. ”

“ Human word is composed of three languages. Man says what he feels by inflections of the voice, what he loves by gesture, what he thinks by articulate speech. The child begins with feeling; then he loves, and later, he reasons. While the child only feels, cries suffice him; when he loves, he needs gestures; when he reasons, he must have articulate language. The inflections of the voice are for sensations, gesture is for sentiments; the buccal apparatus is for the expression of ideas. Gesture, then, is the bond of union between inflection and thought. ”

“ In the languages of North America, which have not become arbitrary to the degree exhibited by those of civilized man, the connection [pg 351] between the idea and the word is only less obvious than, that still unbroken between the idea and the sign, and they remain strongly affected by the concepts of outline, form, place, position, and feature on which gesture is founded, while they are similar in their fertile combination of radicals. ”

“ The language of gesture and feature in very young children, born dumb and not treated differently from other children, shows also, in most abundant measure, that concepts are formed without words. The child born deaf uses the primitive language of gesture to the same extent as does the child that has his hearing; the former makes himself intelligible by actions and sounds as the latter does, so that his deficiency is not suspected. This natural language is also understood by the child born deaf, so far as it is recognizable by his eye. ”

“ Now it is well known to every one that physical expression by feature, &c., forming a part of the universal gesture-language, thus serves as an important adjunct to spoken language. It is not so obvious, but on examination will prove to be true, that such expression by feature itself acts as a formative power in vocal language. Expression of countenance has an action beyond that of mere visible gesture. ”

“ Gesticulation can hardly form a universal language in the same way that play of feature and modulation of the voice can. Only in part have such gestures the same meaning for all men, and so serve to bridge over the gulf that divides articulate from inarticulate speech. Like play of feature and modulation of the voice, they are common to men and animals; but, unlike the latter, they are capable of receiving an arbitrary and conventional meaning. Helvétius, following in the track of Anaxagoras, asserted that we have become men through the possession of hands ”

“ Such special intellectual in47stinct is that which impels man to the external manifestation by voice or gesture of the mental abstractions which his intellect spontaneously forms, and which are not formed by the lower animals, which give no evidence of this power of abstraction. Language could never have been deliberately invented nor have arisen by a mere accidental individual variation, for vocal and gesture signs are essentially conventional, and require more or less comprehension on the part of those to whom they are addressed as well as on the part of those who use them. ”

“ We do, indeed, see that what strongly affects the emotional nature prompts utterance, as it also prompts gesture: fear, surprise, joy, lead to exclamations; and delight at a new cognition might iind vent in an interjection; but this interjection would express the delight, not the cognition; if language commenced in such a way, the historical beginnings of speech would be names of emotions, not of the qualities of objects. ”

“ As a matter of fact, there are many systems of thought transference or language in the widest sense of the word, as a moment's thought will show, that are independent of the use of the ordinary speech apparatus. The use of writing will occur to every one as the most striking example among ourselves. Among primitive peoples we may instance, to cite only a couple of examples of such subsidiary forms of language, the gesture language of the Plains Indians of North America and the very highly developed drum language of several African tribes. ”

“ WRITTEN and spoken language, the language of which the signs are words, is not the only language which man uses to convey his ideas. There is also the language of forms, which, with no less clearness and force, conveys the conceptions of the intellect and the sentiments of the heart. We study the history and the literature of bygone people for the purpose of acquiring a better knowledge of ourselves, and this knowledge is secured by becoming conscious of the different states of mind, to use a modern expression, through which our ancestors have passed. ”

“ This incapacity of speech to reveal all that the mind contains meets us at every point. The soul of each man is a mystery which no other man can fathom: the most perfect system of signs, the most richly developed language, leads only to a partial comprehension, a mutual intelligence whose degree of completeness depends upon the nature of the subject treated, and the acquaintance of the hearer with the mental and moral character of the speaker.
It not infrequently happens that a variation of phonetic form comes in to aid the variation of significant content of a word. ”

“ Today the greatest need of the world of humanity is discontinuance of the... Today the greatest need of the world of humanity is discontinuance of the existing misunderstandings among nations. This can be accomplished through the unity of language. Unless the unity of languages is realized, the Most Great Peace and the oneness of the human world cannot be effectively organized and established because the function of language is to portray the mysteries and secrets of human hearts. The heart is like a box, and language is the key. ”

“ The Gesture-Language and Picture-Writing, however, insignificant as they are in practice in comparison with Speech and Phonetic Writing, have this great claim to consideration, that we can really understand them as thoroughly as perhaps we can understand anything, and by studying them we can realize to ourselves in some measure a condition of the human mind which underlies anything which has as yet been traced in even the lowest dialect of Language if taken as a whole. ”

“ Secondly, though if we speak of language, we mean chiefly phonetic articulate language, we do not exclude the less perfect symbols of thought, such as gestures, signs, or pictures. They, too, are language in a certain sense, and they must be included in language before we are justified in saying that discursive thought can be realized in language only. One instance will make this clear. We hold that we cannot think without language. But can we not count without language? We certainly can. We can form the conception of three without any spoken word, by simply holding up three fingers. ”

“ The commonly recognized ways of human utterance are gesture and oral speech—the one appealing to the eye, the other to the ear, and each leaving its record probably at different points and in different molecular form in the brain. Hand gesture came in course of time to be the highest type of gesture language, evolving as it did into a highly complex and adaptable type of language, and modern hand writing is simply a form of hand gesture which, by means of ink or lead or chisel, or some other material or instrument, leaves a trail of the hand movement in permanent record. ”

“ In connection with the late international convention, at Milan, of persons interested in the instruction of deaf-mutes which, in the enthusiasm of the members for the new system of artificial articulate speech, made war upon all gesture-signs, it is curious that such prohibition of gesture should be urged regarding mutes when it was prevalent to so great an extent among the speaking people of the country where the convention was held, and when the advocates of it were themselves so dependent on gestures to assist their own oratory if not their ordinary conversation. ”