Class News
Gerald Shea '64 speaks at Yale on sign languages and the mind
Gerry Shea '64 spoke at Yale on Nov. 9, 2018, on sign languages and the mind. Just below are some details of the event, followed by videos of the talks. Below those videos is the text of Gerry's talk.
In celebration of the introduction of American Sign Language (ASL) to Yale’s curriculum, the Department of Linguistics hosted a panel discussion on Friday, Nov. 9, 2018.
Titled “Sign Languages and the Mind: Their History, Science, and Power,” the event brought together three researchers, two of whom are deaf, who discussed the importance of sign languages in the cognitive development of deaf children, what they reveal about the human mind, and the history of attitudes toward the deaf and sign languages.
The event was held in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall. ASL interpreters were available for the entirety of the event.
Yale’s ASL program — originally established as a pilot program — has been allocated resources by the Teaching Resource Advisory Committee to hire a lector in ASL for a three-year appointment beginning in summer 2019.
The panelists for the Nov. 9 event included Annemarie Kocab, Harvard University, who spoke on “How a New Language Is Created: What Homesign and Nicaraguan Sign Language Tell Us About the Human Mind”; Amber J. Martin, Hunter College, who discussed “The Impact of Late Language Acquisition on Cognitive Development”; and Gerald Shea ’64, who explored “The Sounds of Silence: A History of the Deaf and Signed Languages in Europe and America.”
Below are videos of the talks. The video lengths are 96 minutes and 67 minutes, respectively. The second video includes Gerry's talk followed by a panel discussion.
Notes used by Gerry to give his talk
1. Introduction
My thanks to Steve Anderson for his very kind words, and for his extraordinary help in making my new book a reality. My especial thanks to Raffaella Zanuttini for being so receptive to the idea of this conference and for working so hard with her staff to make today possible.
I originally became familiar with the history and languages of the Deaf when I was looking for information about the partially deaf for my first book, my memoir, Song Without Words.
As I discuss at length in that book, I am partially deaf, a condition that arose following an extended childhood illness, a combined case of scarlet fever and chickenpox. When others speak, I hear an elusive language to which, in the rapid course of conversation, I endeavor to give meaning. The words of this language, what I call its “lyricals” — a term of my invention — are transitional words, wrong words, that, in lieu of those actually spoken, register in the minds of the partially deaf.
The high-frequency consonants are usually missing. The vowels and the occasional consonant aren’t enough, and my life, and the lives of the partially deaf like me, are a constant unscrambling of language punctuated by masquerades of understanding. I communicate fairly effectively using the hearing I’ve retained, lipreading, hearing aids, and an assortment of assistive listening devices — like this magical pen!
I have no fluent understanding of the signed languages of the profoundly deaf (known as “Deaf” people, with a capital “D”), but the grace and visual clarity of those who communicate in signed languages are to me a wonder, and I feel a close affinity to it and to them. Theirs is not an unplanned but a natural, visual poetry, at once both the speech and the music of the Deaf. Though I live in the realm of the hearing, a part of my life, in the form of my search for communicative grace and clarity, is quartered in my understanding of the world of the Deaf, and I feel as if a part of it.
As I mentioned, I originally became familiar with the history and languages of the Deaf when I was looking for information about people like me, the partially deaf. I found that history to be so rich, and intriguing, and fraught with pathos, that I decided to write about it.
2. Overview
The Language of Light covers a long history, from the classical period through our own day, in about 200 pages.
I can’t talk about all of that in about half an hour! Thus I would like to focus on what I consider the centerpiece of the history of the Deaf and signed languages, i.e., the accomplishments of the great French teachers of the early 19th century. Notably, Auguste Bébian. This is also the heart of the book.
I call this period the Enlightenment, or The Age of Bébian. But I’ll also mention, in unforgivably nutshell form, the time before, and the time after, that era. The Age of Bébian, as we shall see, was an island of eloquence and wisdom in a wide, rapidly running river of ignorance and prejudice on the part of the hearing.
A brief note, first, on what history and linguistics have taught us about signed languages. Children who are born profoundly deaf, of course, hear virtually nothing at all. They are also unable to speak because their ears can’t transmit to the brain the information it needs to shape the imitative speaking patterns of the voice. These children thus turn instinctively to gestures in order to communicate with others.
They do so extraordinarily efficiently once they are exposed to a signed language, which they learn quickly and naturally. They very soon become able, exactly like their hearing counterparts, to express a limitless number of ideas in well-formed sentences with impeccable syntax.
The discourse of the Deaf is not, as in the case of spoken languages, configured by the tongue and other organs of speech arranging molecules in the air for the ear, but by the motion of hands and other gestures that are transmitted by light to the eyes of their interlocutors. Hence my title, the “language of light.” Signed languages are just as sophisticated as our spoken tongues. They have their own linguistic units, just as our oral languages do. When Deaf individuals render or interpret signs, they use the same regions of the brain that the hearing do when they speak and listen to speech. They are “hearing” their language.
Deaf people, like the hearing, have their own national or regional signed languages, shaped by tribe, nation, boundaries, culture, and history. French and Italian sign language, for example, are no more a common tongue than spoken German and Spanish. Moreover, signed languages are neither obvious nor iconic. Signs may have an origin in an iconic representation, but it is an evanescent one, language-specific, generally not transparent, and in any event tends to be effaced as a signed language develops over time.
There is little historical record of the Deaf, or of their language, before the sixteenth century, but signed languages in various forms and degrees of sophistication have probably existed for at least a hundred thousand years — for as long as has mankind and thus have Deaf people. Signed languages were not “invented” by anyone. Nor was French, English, or German!
3. The Time Before Bébian
Aristotle found the blind “more intelligent” than the deaf because the blind could hear. He believed that all rational discourse had to be audible. Saint Augustine thought deaf people could never learn to read. The Justinian Code in 522 provided that if a person was deaf from birth and couldn’t speak, he had virtually no rights. Diderot thought that to teach the deaf abstractions was an insurmountable task.
Juan Pablo Bonet in 17th-century Spain called the congenitally Deaf “monsters of nature and human only in form.” His goal was to “cure” them by teaching them how to speak. He failed, of course, as did all of his Spanish, British, Dutch, French, German, and American oralist-successors. It was virtually impossible for a person to speak distinctly if, since birth or early infancy, he or she had not been able to hear.
Lipreading is just as difficult. While I and other partially deaf people lipread a bit, you have to be able to hear in order to do it. And even for us it doesn’t work that well. When an English teacher at Andover asked me one day about The Doll’s House, Ibsen’s play, “What happens after Nora leaves?” I thought he said “Water happens after coral reefs.” And there I was in the classroom, floating in the turquoise waters of the Caribbean instead of thinking about whether Nora would ever come back to her husband. So forget about those deaf characters reading lips for the CIA in spy movies — they’ve just memorized a script! Though I did manage to succeed once, watching Bill Clinton without a mike on TV ...
And what did Bonet think about sign language? If you “place two deaf mutes in each other’s presence, meeting for the first time,” he wrote, “they can communicate because they use the same signs.” But he, like others, was not interested in trying to understand these signs, or to ask himself what the Deaf were saying to each other, or where their signs came from, or whether these “communications” might be a form of language. Indeed, because it interfered with their “learning” the speech they weren’t learning, he found it important, as alas many speech therapists and doctors do today, “never to let the mute use it.”
Torturous, so-called “medical” treatments, went hand in hand with the tyranny of oral teaching in the centuries before the enlightenment. These amounted to trials by ordeal, yielding considerable suffering, illness, and sometimes death. The premise was that drilling, cutting, fracturing, scorching, or poisoning would “open up” the ear and the brain to sounds.
4. The Enlightenment: The Age of Bébian
It was into this oral world that arrived the abbé de l’Épée, a hearing priest, about to make history. Observing Deaf twin girls signing to each other (in 1755), he suspected that their signs were mutually recognizable representations of ideas. Going a step further, he wondered whether, just as hearing children are taught to write what they hear, so these children might be taught to write what they see — i.e., to be taught in their own signs the meaning of written words, and to learn how to read and write those words.
The idea was at once simple and profound, a natural step, but one that had taken centuries. Before l’Épée, no individual or institution had sought to teach reading and writing to the Deaf using their own language as the instrument of their instruction.
L’Épée established his school for the deaf in Paris in 1755, and the royal government ultimately granted him a substantial annual stipend to run it.
For all his perceptiveness, however, l’Épée didn’t become fluent in sign and never understood that it was a complete language. He gave his students his own “supplementary” signs, rather than learning from them and mastering their own integral tongue.
L’Épée died in 1789. But in 1794 the French revolutionary government gave his school its imposing home in an ancient seminary on the rue Saint Jacques. The school, named the National Institute for Deaf Children (and known as Saint Jacques), was to become, and today remains, the beacon of the age of the enlightenment.
Auguste Bébian, who was hearing, and perhaps history’s greatest teacher of the Deaf, was born the year l’Épée died. He was sent by his father from Guadeloupe, where he was born, to study at the lycée Charlemagne. His parents were friends of the director of Saint Jacques, who offered to find a place for him to live. Bébian lived near Saint Jacques, and in the afternoons and during his vacations he was constantly at the school, joining the Deaf students in their classes, workshops, and games. Although hearing, he made friends with several of the Deaf students and, thanks to Jean Massieu, a Deaf teacher there, learned to sign as well as those who were deaf from birth, an unprecedented accomplishment.
Bébian’s writings and teaching were to become the cornerstone of the education of the Deaf in Europe and the United States.
What was needed, Bébian realized, in order to teach his students to read and write, was the immediate translation of the students’ own thoughts and images, as expressed in their own language, into the corresponding written words in French. Central to Bébian’s thought and teaching is the reality that words are but the expression of pre-existing ideas: an idea (whether the conception of a material object or an abstract thought) necessarily precedes the spoken word interpreting it. Unlike l’Épée, Bébian fully understood and applied the meaning of John Locke’s observations, in 1689, on the nature of language:
Thus we may conceive, wrote Locke, how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by any natural connection that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the sign of such an idea.
Words are thus but conventions among groups or nations. This room we are all present in has quatre murs, or four walls, for example, but there is no inherent “mur” or “wall” in their structure, or inherent “quatre” or “four” in the number.
It is thus the idea, wrote Bébian, that must give the word meaning before the word can, in turn, become an effective interpreter of the idea, or what Locke interestingly called the sign of the idea. The word has to become part of the fabric of the idea. The hearing ordinarily convey their thoughts by speaking, or by writing down words made of letters that are depictions of the sounds we make with our voices, what Bébian eloquently called the painting of our speech.
While students arriving at Saint Jacques would have at least the rudiments of sign, Bébian in his practical teaching manual hypothesized the case of a new student at Saint Jacques in order to illustrate, for parents and teachers, that even the teaching of individual words should begin with the THOUGHT, not the WRITTEN WORD. The teacher might show the picture of a saber in a book, and then move his dominant hand from opposite waist to shoulder height as if drawing a saber from a sheath, exaggerating the sign (remember they’re not recognizably iconic); the student would invariably do the same.
Bébian would unsheathe the imaginary saber again and have the student show him its picture in the book, whereupon Bébian would point to the written word beneath the picture. He would then have the student fingerspell the word (if he knew fingerspelling — which is not sign language but just a series of handshapes for the letters of the alphabet) and ask him in sign what the word meant (what? — eyebrows raised (showing a question), palms up, fingers open, hands moving quickly, laterally, towards and away from each other). The student would then repeat the gesture and, before long, would understand that this written word and others were a kind of conventional drawing of the idea first expressed in sign.
As to ideas expressed in whole sentences, Bébian knew that the aberrant goal before his time, and continuing to his own day, was to give to the Deaf —
the mechanical faculty of “speech” without enabling them to attach a precise idea to its components, leaving them in the dark not only as to the absolute value of words, but their relative value and the influence they have over each other in the composition of a phrase.
Hence the drill even today of parents and speech therapists hammering home the pronunciation and lipreading of multiple words by Deaf children have of necessity got things backward, for without sign language it is difficult, if not impossible, to convey ideas and syntax, and whole meanings of sentences. Bébian thus correctly emphasized that French GRAMMAR, which he described as the RELATIONSHIP between words in our spoken languages, had to be taught through the medium of sign language:
The deaf student must be able to write the word in order to read it, and to be able to read it he has to understand it; and he’ll be able to understand it only if he understands the whole sentence ... To do that, his instruction must begin in sign.
A complete idea, he wrote, could be expressed in sign language and then given in written French. He observed, for example, that in contemporary French sign language one would normally sign “this table I strike,” for the French phrase “I strike this table.” Sign languages may often start with the purpose or goal of an action and then specify the actor and the action itself. Bébian would require the student to follow the normal construction of the sentence in sign language, and to show that he understood the proposition, before being shown and, on his own, making and showing that he understood, the written inversion required by French grammar in this and in similar sentences (this door I open; this ball I throw; this girl I kiss). This is the way those odd hearing people do it!
Writing, for the Deaf, prima facie, represents nothing at all. It consists of lines or strokes forming meaningless characters — more complex than their painting of sounds for the hearing, and far more removed from the underlying idea than its expression in their native language. And in trying to “read” lips the Deaf are not receiving any idea, but are forced to observe obscure lip movements in order to guess sounds they cannot hear so that they may infer the other sounds the lips fail to show at all — the mental torture of Bonet and his oralist successors:
If the deaf student, Bébian wrote, is brought to a standstill to begin with by the singular difficulty of pronouncing sounds of which the signs fixed on paper lie stationary before his eyes — How is he going to understand the rapid signs that slip through the lips?
It is with their own language that the education of the Deaf must begin, not with the spoken word:
We know, Bébian wrote, that the deaf have a language one doesn’t teach them, although with art and exercise one can offer it the happiest development. It is in a way the reflection of their sensations, the relief of their impressions. We carry the same timeless and limitless principle within all of us: that of the first language of any human being, which gives immediate expression to his thought and is not a translation of any other language, but expresses his intimate connection with ideas. One never looks to his first language with difficulty for the expression of an idea. The thought, born in the brain, bursts forth like a flame sparkling in crystal.
How effective was Bébian? In 1789, at the time of l’Épée’s death, six schools for the Deaf had been established in France thanks to l’Épée’s efforts. By 1858, there were 54 such schools and sign was the language of instruction in all of them. A significant number of teachers of the Deaf were Deaf themselves. Deaf education and literacy were springing up everywhere, with Deaf children in Europe reading Racine, Cervantes, Goethe, and Pushkin, as well as Augustine’s Spiritual Dimensions proclaiming that the Deaf would never be able read the very book they were reading, or any other.
On the more practical side, the potential of the Deaf in the arts and sciences and in commerce was now realizable, and signed languages were becoming the motor of their equality. Together, Bébian and his Deaf colleagues and students were changing the world. Students were entering the professions of the hearing, including work in lawyers’ offices, banks, trading companies, shipping firms, railroads, government ministries, and large manufacturers. Some were accomplished painters and poets. It was not a perfect world, but they now had two languages, sign and the written language of the hearing, and they were succeeding in the hearing world.
What happened in America? Well, we were, of course, seeking solutions too. In 1816 Thomas Gallaudet of Hartford came to France looking for a solution, leaving London after the British wanted to charge him for teaching him their ineffective oral methods which they maintained were “secret.” He went to Saint Jacques, and took back to the States with him a prominent Deaf teacher named Laurent Clerc.
Clerc and Gallaudet brought Bébian’s teaching with them to the United States, where they formed the Deaf corps of American teachers. English immigrants had given us our spoken and written language, but the French, in the person of Laurent Clerc, enriched American sign language with French sign, and used the new combined language (ASL) to teach the American Deaf the written language of France’s rival across the channel.
By the 1850s, some 250 of the 550 teachers and administrators in the burgeoning national network of schools were themselves Deaf. By the 1860s, there were 26 schools, and sign was the language of instruction in all.
5. The Banquets of the Deaf
But for a variety of reasons, the champions of speech teaching would never let go. Bébian’s Deaf pupil, Ferdinand Berthier, the greatest Deaf teacher of the Deaf, and Deaf leader of the 19th century, was well aware of it.
So what did he do about it? Lots, as a teacher and public figure. But he also decided to hold banquets every year in honor of the abbé de l’Épée, whom he re-created as a symbol for the Deaf, in spite of l’Épée’s serious limitations. The banquets were held all over Paris. Dinner! Wine! Everyone’s invited! He called his dinners the “Olympics” of the Deaf, four times more frequent than those of Greece, and a hundred times more curious and engaging.
He invited both hearing and Deaf to attend, with interpreters who were hearing children of Deaf parents and who thus knew both languages. Berthier’s goal was to make the Deaf, their language, and their abilities visible to all. He invited public figures, including Louis Daguerre, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, and many others. Hugo wrote to the banqueters, “What matters deafness of the ear, when the mind hears.” Lamartine wrote a poem for Pélissier, a Deaf poet and teacher at Saint Jacques (and another Bébian pupil) —
It is through the senses
that light descends upon us;
but I see in the strains of your verse,
in your captive heart it enters first,
thwarting nature, and making sense of itself.
Lamartine was in effect transforming light into a kind of sixth sense.
The Phoenician alphabet (about 1000 B.C.) is the source of virtually all modern alphabets. Berthier himself referred to the point in his own poem, pronouncing in sign language, interpreted by another, at one of the banquets —
We do not speak, it is true; but still
do you think us unable to express ourselves as well
with our eyes, our hands, our smiles, our lips?
Our most beautiful discourse is at the tips of our fingers,
and our language is rich in secret beauties
that you who speak will never know.
And have we not our own art of Phoenicia
to paint the words that speak into our eyes?
Your arts and sciences, save for sound,
are they not open to our ardent minds?
Show us the heavens, ambitious heirs of Icarus,
that I cannot ascend with you.
But as I say, Berthier was well aware of the forces against him. He warned his colleagues and students alike that if they didn’t fight for their education in their own language, they would lose everything.
Never ... neglect the cultivation, ever indispensable, of your maternal tongue. Your instinctive judgment will make you appreciate the reason for this exhortation.
6. After Bébian
The 19th century oralist movement deliberately set out to destroy the languages and educational institutions of the Deaf. In effect, the movement all but ruined the extraordinary accomplishments of the great European and American teachers of the earlier part of the century. The oralists were led by Alexander Graham Bell and by hearing teachers of the Deaf and others in Europe and the United States.
At the 1880 Congress of Milan, a gathering of hearing educators with little knowledge of signed languages, the assembly proudly proclaimed "the incontestable superiority of speech over sign," and resolved that Deaf students should be taught only by "the pure oral method." Before long, throughout Europe, speech became virtually the sole "method" of teaching. By requiring Deaf students to "hear" or "lipread" and to "speak" — impossible tasks — Milan made the sole faculty these students lacked the instrument of their instruction.
What was the motive of the oralists? Why insist on “teaching” a child words he couldn’t speak and staring at lips he couldn’t understand?
For some, notably the oral teachers, the motive was the desire to keep their jobs. As to Bell, he conceded that sign language was "the quickest method of reaching the mind of a Deaf child." But it was not the mind of the Deaf child that interested Bell. "The production of ... a defective race of [signing] human beings," he wrote, "would be a great calamity to the world." If they were deprived of their language of signs, the Deaf would be unable to understand not only the hearing — but each other. They would marry less, have fewer children, and their number would diminish. Even Bell’s prejudiced ideas about eugenics were without foundation — for about 95% of children born Deaf, then and today, are born of hearing parents.
Bell and his allies were extraordinarily successful. In 1867, American Sign Language had been the medium of instruction in all educational institutions for the Deaf. By 1927 it was used in virtually none. Deaf students were graduating from oralist schools in Europe and America as functional illiterates in the written languages of their native countries. Gallaudet College was discouraging its students from becoming teachers. In France, as recently as 2015, a prominent ear surgeon wrote in Le Figaro that “speech is the only language the brain can comprehend.”
7. Finally, Some Brighter Signs
The eminent linguist Noam Chomsky, giving a lecture in Chicago in 1965, mistakenly defined language as "a specific sound-to-meaning correspondence." When asked where this left the signed languages of the Deaf, Chomsky revised his definition on the spot, calling language a specific signal to meaning correspondence.
The distinction was important, for it was offered at a time when William Stokoe and his colleagues at Gallaudet University were re-discovering what had been known in France and America in the early 19th century. Stokoe was a kind of Bébian reborn.
Chomsky's words, and the work of Stokoe and his successors, were of exceptional significance. This was so not simply because the hearing world had forgotten what it had known by the 1820s. But because of the calamitous success of the oralist movement.
Have the thoughts and work of Chomsky, Stokoe, and others now helped to overcome the educational plight of the Deaf? They have unquestionably led to a renaissance of linguistic and educational interest in signed languages, giving new life to the seminal work of Bébian. It is now broadly understood that Chomsky's language faculty operates with equal facility whether stimulated by language heard by the ears of the hearing or beheld by the eyes of the Deaf. The primitive notions of the Deaf and their language espoused at Milan and promoted by Bell are now thoroughly discredited.
But the educational problems of the Deaf persist today. 80% of newborn Deaf babies in the West are being given cochlear implants. The implants are devices that produce hearing, bypassing the ear and delivering electronic signals directly to the auditory nerve. I’ll say just a few words about them.
The benefits of cochlear implants are measured today in a laboratory setting and, alas, appear to fall far short outside of that setting. As with hearing aids, background noise in environments like classrooms greatly impairs understanding. Thus, the real world of daily communication is still a struggle despite the device.
Language can be said to give us — all of us — whether Deaf or hearing, our modern soul in the age of science, and to underpin our rights as individuals. Whether that soul can best be expressed and understood, and can best understand the world around it, in its natural language or with cochlear implants, or perhaps both (but to what respective degrees?) is the heart and soul of the matter. Is a smaller, fully communicative world preferable to a larger poorly communicative one? Is there a “both worlds” alternative? Are the implants a paradigmatic change, or are they an extension of the dramatic course of 19th and 20th century Deaf history and of earlier times?
There are a variety of views on these hotly debated questions. My own views are shaped both by my own research, by careful study of published test results, and, naturally enough, by my intimate acquaintance with the history. I propose no answers here. But I can’t resist the temptation to complete my discussion of the history by leaving these questions with you.
Thank you very much.