Re: Please escuse my ignorance

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Fri, 13 Oct 95 00:34:44 EDT

This thread is really about manual sign languages.

This recent and helpful posting reminded me that someone had
recently referred to sign languages (there are many) as 'based
on speech', which does not seem to be the case, though exactly
what this might mean is perhaps pretty vague. As I've suggested
before, it is pretty hard to exclude language (in its pervasive
spoken form) from influencing almost anything in communities
where it exists. I believe some of the European sign languages
had some input from hearing persons in their origins, but this
may be a hearing-centric distortion. At least, one can say that
these forms of communication not only posess most of the semiotic
features deemed central for spoken languages (and are thus truly
_languages_, whatever their origin or medium), but also possess
numerous features which are quite peculiar to the opportunities
of the kinetic-spatial-visual medium and do not occur in spoken
languages. These features tend mainly to be found in spontaneous
signing among fluent native (and so usually deaf, especially
congenitally deaf and raised in signing families or peer groups)
signers. They are sometimes missed by academic studies, ignored
by hearing-centric models, and are not as easy to describe or
gather naturalistic data on, compared to systematic 'linguistic'
types of studies and descriptions (which are politically valuable
to overcome prejudices that signed languages are not as systematic
as spoken ones).

It seems possible that signed languages had some spoken language
(or at least hearing persons') input in their origins, but soon
evolved (rather like creole dialects, but more so) into semiotic
systems with their own logic. Frankly, I don't see tongues and
fingers as all that different as motor media of articulation for
a language (with all that implies for the neurological integration
of language and general motor action, ala Vygotsky's thesis). But
the channel difference (visible space vs audible frequencies) has
led to different internal structuring principles in the two kinds
of language. If we want to reason further about spoken language
as itself only one integral component of more general bodily
communicative systems of practices, integrated with still more
general social action practices, sign languages are probably a
very important case to study in some detail -- not so much for their
special channel-dependent properties, but for the ways in which they
are functionally integrated with other sorts of semiotic and social
interaction -- from signing and drawing, signing and gesturing,
to signing and cooperatively 'doing' practical tasks. It would seem
to provide a natural laboratory for studying the Vygotskyan fusion
of language and action in a case where the phenomena are more
nearly strictly commensurable (i.e. we can describe them both in
the same sorts of terms from the same sorts of data, e.g. videotapes)
than is the case with tongue-and-ear languages. JAY.

PS. I'd love to hear from people who know the literature of
Vygotskyan studies of the deaf, and those with a better sense
of the historical origins of signed languages.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
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