Library Collections: Document: Full Text

ON THE NATURAL LANGUAGE OF SIGNS: AND ITS VALUE AND USES IN THE INSTRUCTION OF THE DEAF AND DUMB.

By Rev. T.H. Gallaudet,

Former Principal of the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb.

THERE is scarcely a more interesting sight than a bright, cheerful deaf-mute, of one or two years of age, in a family composed of an intelligent, feeling father and mother, and group of older brothers and sisters who can hear and speak. The strangeness of his condition, from the first moment of their discovering it, has attracted their curiosity. They wonder at it. They sympathize with it. Perhaps they lament over it. By degrees, they become familiar with it. They feel a peculiar attachment to this object of their regard. They do all which their love and ingenuity can invent to make him happy. They rejoice to see that he seems more and more to understand and appreciate what they say to him and do for him.

But the greatest delight is yet to come. He is constantly struggling to make his wants and wishes known, and to convey his thoughts and emotions to those around him, by those various expressions of countenance, and descriptive signs and gestures, which his own spontaneous feelings lead him to employ. His originality and skill in doing this, -- his talking eye and face, -- his graphic and beautiful pantomime, -- his occasional pleasant mimicry, -- his gladsome satisfaction when he finds that he has made himself understood, -- his constant and rapid progress in this singular language which nature has taught him, and which is the only one as yet adapted to his insulated condition, -- the gradual development of his intellectual and moral powers, the greater and greater ease with which the members of the family, he being the teacher and they the pupils in this novel mode of intercourse, find that they can communicate with him, -- and the increasing stores of useful knowledge which he is thus accumulating, all conspire to throw an interest, and even charm, over such family scenes, of which those who have not participated in them can form but a faint conception.

The wind has been kindly tempered to the shorn lamb. The great principle of compensation has been effectually at work. Much substantial good has come out of apparent evil, and we feel almost constrained to conclude that one deaf-mute child in such a family -- taking into account the spring which is thus imparted to the inventive powers of their minds and the kindliest charities of their hearts, with the acquisition by all of a novel, highly poetical and singular descriptive language, adapted as well to spiritual as to material objects, and bringing kindred souls into a much more close and conscious communion than that of speech can possibly do -- is to be regarded rather in the light of a blessing than of a misfortune.

It would he a grievous misfortune, however, if one redeeming principle had not been at work: the natural, spontaneous facility with which the deaf-mute child is able to make his thoughts and feelings known to those around him by the expressions of his countenance and appropriate signs and gestures -- and if those around him, especially the mother and the younger members of the family, were not capable of easily understanding this language of the deaf-mute, and of rapidly learning it from him, and being able, in their turn, to use it.

This natural language of signs, spontaneously employed by the deaf-mute, and gradually enlarged and rendered more and more accurately descriptive by himself, and sometimes by the ingenuity also of the members of the family, develops itself with a remarkable similarity of features in all such families. Its similarity is so great that two uneducated deaf-mutes, who have never had any intercourse with others in a similar condition, can, at their first interview, communicate with each other on a considerable number of common subjects. Let them be together a few days or weeks, and the freedom and extent of this communication will be found to be constantly increasing, as they become familiar with each other's somewhat peculiar and dialectic modes of expression. They will be found, too, constantly and readily resorting to explanations and illustrations by the language of signs, and even to the invention of new ones by which to convey their thoughts and feelings, and which prove to be, at last, perfectly intelligible.

The universality of this natural language of signs is manifested also in the striking fact that the instructors of the deaf and dumb, who have become familiar, by their, habitual and long continued intercourse with their pupils, with this language in all it varieties and peculiarities, find it easy, as they meet in different parts of the country with the uneducated deaf and dumb, to converse with them on a considerable range of common subjects. The writer of this article, some years ago, was requested, with a fellow-laborer of his at the time in the American Asylum, to visit a deaf-mute in a neighboring town, about eighty years of age, possessed of some property, and desirous of making a will. He could not read nor write, nor use the manual alphabet. He had no way of communicating his ideas but by natural signs. By means of such signs, exhibiting a great deal of ingenuity on the part of the old man, myself and companion were able to understand definitely the disposition which he wished to make of his property among his relatives and friends, and thus to enable him to carry, his views into effect under the sanction of the law.

Page 2:

There is still another illustration of the universality of the natural language of signs in the immediate facility with which an intelligent, uneducated deaf-mute, arriving at the Asylum, is always found to hold communication with its inmates. After a short residence in the family, he makes rapid progress in this natural language of signs, enlarged as it is by culture into greater copiousness, and marked by more precision and accuracy than in those detached families throughout the country in which insulated deaf-mutes exist, and improved into a somewhat regular system by the skill of those who have been engaged for a long course of years in tit is department of education. . Yet it retains its original features. It is not an arbitrary, conventional language. It is, in the main, picture-like and symbolical, corresponding, in these respects, to the ideas and objects which it is used to denote. The newly arrived deaf-mute has been well acquainted with its elements in the home of his childhood. He recognizes them as the same which constituted the basis of those very signs which he and others around him have already invented, and used, and sometimes they prove to be identically the same with his old ones, or so nearly so that they are at once intelligible to him. He finds himself, as it were, among his countrymen. They use his native language; more copious, indeed, and elevated than that to which he had been accustomed, but yet virtually the same; so that, perceiving at the outset that he understands others and that they understand him, he is encouraged to proceed, and, to his surprise, in a comparatively short space of time, slides into a familiar acquaintance with the language of natural signs in its full extent, as employed by the more advanced pupils and by the instructors themselves in the little community of which he has become a member.

The contentment which this throws around his new lot, removed as he is from the endearments of his native home; the pleasure which he derives from the acquisitions that he is constantly making, in the varieties of a more enlarged medium of social intercourse adapted to his peculiar condition, and of interesting and useful knowledge, from his better instructed associates and from the teachers; the delightful consciousness of his expanding powers of thought and feeling; the hope of future progress; and the ability, all the while, to make his wants and wishes known, and thus to obtain sympathy, counsel, and aid, -- all these things go not only to show what the natural language of signs is, a much more definite, copious, and effective language than many may suppose it to be, but to prove and illustrate its immense value to the deaf and dumb, especially to those who have just arrived at an institution for their benefit and are commencing the course of instruction, and to those, too, who are concerned in giving this instruction.

To show how nature, when necessity exists, prompts to the invention and use of this language of signs, and to exhibit from another interesting point of view the features of its universality, a fact is worth mentioning, to be found in Major Stephen H. Long's account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, in 1819. It seems, from what he tells us, that the aboriginal Indians, west of the Mississippi, consist of different tribes, having either different languages or dialects of the same language. Some are unable to communicate with others by speech; while they have fallen into a language of signs to remedy this inconvenience, which has been long used among them.

Major Long's work contains an accurate description of many of these signs, and it is surprising to notice how not a few of them are almost identically the same with those which the deaf and dumb employ to describe the same things, while others have such general features of resemblance as to show that they originate from elements of this sign-language which nature furnishes to man wherever he is found, whether barbarous or civilized. Such are the following:

Sun. -- The forefinger and thumb are brought together at tip, so as to form a circle, and held upwards towards the sun's track. To indicate any particular time of the day, the hand with the sign of the sun is stretched out towards the east horizon, and then gradually elevated, to show the ascent of that luminary, until the hand arrives in the proper direction to indicate the part of the heavens in which the sun will be at the given time.

Moon. -- The thumb and finger open are elevated towards the right ear. This last sign is generally preceded by the sign of the night or darkness.

Seeing. -- The forefinger, in the attitude of pointing, is passed front the eye towards the real or imaginary object.

Theft. -- The left forearm is held horizontally, a little forward of across the body, and the right hand, passing under it with a quick motion, seems to grasp something, and is suddenly withdrawn.

Truth. -- The forefinger is passed, in the attitude of pointing, from the mouth forward in a line curving a little upward, the thumb and other fingers being completely closed.

Page 3:

Love. -- The clenched hand is pressed hard upon the breast.

Now, or at present. -- The two hands, forming each a hollow, are brought near each other, and put in a tremulous motion upwards and downwards.

Done, or finished. -- The hands are placed, edge up and down, parallel to each other, the right hand without; which latter is drawn back as if cutting something.

-TO BE CONTINUED.-