Sign Language Structure
Stokoe, Jr.
were doubtless encountered by l’Épée when he met his first uninstructed deaf-mutes; but its
‘vocabulary’ also included many coinages, conventional signs, and signs derived from the
‘methodical’ signs of the schools.
Pelissier’s work, as the title indicates, attempts to use the language as a means of dispelling
the mystery which had surrounded the teaching of the deaf since the middle ages. Does one wish
to teach French to a deaf-mute? Let him learn the latter’s language and proceed from there. This
rationale as well as the language was imported to America, as this resolution of the World Congress
of the Deaf held in St. Louis, in 1904, proclaims:
‘The educated deaf have a right to be heard in these matters and they shall be heard.
‘Resolved, that the oral method, which withholds from the congenitally and quasi-
congenitally deaf the use of the language of signs outside the schoolroom, robs the children of
their birthright; that those champions of the oral method, who have been carrying on a warfare,
both overt and covert, against the use of the language of signs by the adult, are not friends of the
deaf; and that in our opinion, it is the duty of every teacher of the deaf, no matter what method he
or she uses, to have a working command of the sign language’ (Annals, 1904).
American writing on the language itself may be represented by three manuals:
Joseph Schuyler Long, The sign language: a manual of signs, being a descriptive
vocabulary of signs used by the deaf of the United States and Canada, Omaha, 1952; lst. ed., Des
Moines, 1918.
J.W. Michaels, A handbook of the sign language of the deaf, Atlanta, Ga., 1923.
Father Daniel D. Higgins, How to talk to the deaf, St. Louis, 1923.
These all describe the method of making the signs and to some extent of phrasing utterances
in the language. The greatest space in each is devoted to an English-Sign vocabulary using
illustrations and verbal descriptions of the sign that translates the English word. Grammatical
descriptions and prescriptions are implied in the linking of each sign to an English word with its
inevitable relegation to a certain part of speech.
There is a similar kind of manual of the Australian sign language: How to converse with
the deaf in sign language as used in the Australian Catholic schools of the deaf, by teachers of the
schools at Waratah and Castle Hill, N.S.W. (1942). This sign language brought to Australia from
the Dominican School in Cabra, Ireland, has some signs identical with present American signs,
others which seem related, but a great many signs using, as do present American ‘wine’ and
eighteenth century French ‘vin’, a ‘letter’ of the one-hand manual alphabet as an element of the
sign.
Of these four handbooks, the Australian and Michaels’ seem to show a greater adherence
to the methodical sign system; the latter giving signs for ‘verb’, ‘substantive’, etc., in the Sicard
manner; the former rendering such words as ‘the’, ‘he’, ‘is’ by specific signs in a manner foreign
to the ‘natural’ sign language and having signs likewise for prefixes and suffixes of English words.
SASLJ, Vol. 2, No. 2 – Fall/Winter 2018
19