1989 - Seeing Voices (13 page)

When I went to visit Charlotte and her family, the first thing that struck me was that they
were
a family—full of fun, full of liveliness, full of questions, all together. There was none of the isolation one so often sees with the deaf—and none of the ‘primitive’ language (‘What’s this? What’s that? Do this! Do that!’), the condescension, of which Schlesinger speaks. Charlotte herself was full of questions, full of curiosity, full of life—a delightful, imaginative, and playful child, vividly turned to the world and to others. She was disappointed that I did not sign, but instantly commandeered her parents as interpreters and questioned me closely about the wonders of New York.

About thirty miles from Albany is a forest and river, and here I later drove with Charlotte, her parents, and her brother. Charlotte loves the natural world as much as the human world, but loves it in an intelligent way. She had an eye for different habitats, for the way things live together; she perceived cooperation and competition, the dynamics of existence. She was fascinated by the ferns that grew by the river, saw that they were very different from the flowers, understood the distinction between spores and seeds. She would exclaim excitedly in Sign over all the shapes and colors, but then attend and pause to ask, ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘What if?’ Clearly, it was not isolated facts that she wanted, but connections, understanding, a world with sense and meaning. Nothing showed me more clearly the passage from a perceptual to a conceptual world, a passage impossible without complex dialogue—a dialogue that first occurs with the parents, but is then internalized as ‘talking to oneself,’ as thought.

Dialogue launches language, the mind, but once it is launched we develop a new power, ‘inner speech,’ and it is this that is indispensable for our further development, our thinking. ‘Inner speech,’ says Vygotsky, ‘is speech almost without words…it is not the interior aspect of external speech, it is a function in itself…While in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings.’ We start with dialogue, with language that is external and social, but then to think, to become ourselves, we have to move to a monologue, to inner speech. Inner speech is essentially solitary, and it is profoundly mysterious, as unknown to science, Vygotsky writes, as ‘the other side of the moon.’ ‘We are our language,’ it is often said; but our real language, our real identity, lies in inner speech, in that ceaseless stream and generation of meaning that constitutes the individual mind. It is through inner speech that the child develops his own concepts and meanings; it is through inner speech that he achieves his own identity; it is through inner speech, finally, that he constructs his own world. And the inner speech (or inner Sign) of the deaf may be very distinctive.
75

75. It is certain that we are not ‘given’ reality, but have to
construct
it for ourselves, in our own way, and that in doing so we are conditioned by the cultures and worlds we live in. It is natural that our language should embody our world view—the way in which we perceive and construct reality. But does it go further—does it
determine
our world view? This was the notorious hypothesis espoused by Benjamin Lee Whorf: that language comes before thought, and is the principal determinant of thought and reality (Whorf, 1956). Whorf took his hypothesis to ultimate lengths: ‘A change in language can transform our appreciation of the cosmos’ (thus, he felt, from contrasting their tense systems, that English speakers would be disposed to a Newtonian world view, but Hopi speakers to a relativistic and Einsteinian world view). His thesis gave rise to much misunderstanding and controversy, some of a frankly racist kind; but the evidence, as Roger Brown remarks, is ‘extraordinarily difficult to interpret,’ not least because we lack adequate independent definitions of thought and language.

But the difference between the most diverse spoken languages is small compared to the difference between speech and Sign. Sign differs in origins, and in biological mode. And this, in a way deeper than anything Whorf envisaged, may determine, or at least modify, the thought processes of those who sign, and give them a unique and untranslatable, hypervisual cognitive style.

It is evident to her parents that Charlotte constructs her world in a different way, perhaps radically so: that she employs predominantly visual thought patterns, and that she ‘thinks differently’ about physical objects. I was struck by the graphic quality, the fullness of her descriptions. Her parents spoke too of this fullness: ‘All the characters or creatures or objects Charlotte talks about are
placed
, ’ her mother said; ‘spatial reference is essential to ASL. When Charlotte signs, the whole scene is set up; you can see where everyone or everything is; it is all visualized with a detail that would be rare for the hearing.’ This placing of objects and people in specific locations, this use of elaborate, spatial reference had been striking in Charlotte, her parents said, since the age of four and a half—already at that age she had gone beyond them, shown a sort of ‘staging’ power, an ‘architectural’ power that they had seen in other deaf people—but rarely in the hearing.
76

76. I was reminded, when they said this, of an anecdote I had read about Ibsen: that once, when walking with a friend through a house they had never been in before, he turned suddenly and said, ‘What was in that room we just passed?’ His friend had only the vaguest notion, but Ibsen gave a most exact description of everything in the room, its appearance, its location, its relation to everything else, and then said, under his breath, as if to himself, ‘I see everything.’

Language and thought, for us, are always personal—our utterances express ourselves, as does our inner speech. Language often feels to us, therefore, like an effusion, a sort of spontaneous transmission of self. It does not occur to us at first that it must have a
structure
, a structure of an immensely intricate and formal kind. We are unconscious of this structure; we do not see it, any more than we see the tissues, the organs, the architectural makeup of our own bodies. But the enormous, unique freedom of language would not be possible without the most extreme grammatical constraints. It is grammar, first of all, that makes a language possible, that allows us to articulate our thoughts, our selves, in utterance.

This was clear, in regard to speech, by 1660 (the date of the Port-Royal
Grammar
), but was only established, in regard to Sign, in 1960.
77

77. Earlier concepts of grammar (as in the pedagogic Latin grammars that still torment schoolchildren) had been based on a mechanical, not a creative, concept of language. The Port-Royal
Grammar
saw grammar as essentially creative, speaking of ‘that marvelous invention by which we construct from twenty-five or thirty sounds an infinity of expressions, which, having no resemblance in themselves to what takes place in our minds, still enable us to let others know the secret of what we conceive and of all the varied mental activities we carry out.’

Sign was not seen, even by signers, as a true language, with its own grammar, before then. And yet the notion that Sign might have an internal structure is not entirely new—it has, so to speak, an odd prehistory of its own. Thus Roch-Ambroise Bebian, Sicard’s successor, not only realized that Sign had an autonomous grammar of its own (and thus had no need of an alien and imported French grammar), but tried to compile a ‘Mimography’ based on ‘The Decomposition of Signs.’ This enterprise failed, and had to fail, because there was no correct identification of the actual (‘phonemic’) elements of Sign.

In the 1870’s E.B. Tylor, the anthropologist, had a deep interest in language, and this included a deep interest in and knowledge of Sign (he was a fluent signer, with many deaf friends). His
Researches into the Early History of Mankind
contained many fascinating insights into signed language, and might have inaugurated a true linguistic study of Sign, had this enterprise not been killed, as was any just valuation of Sign, by the Milan conference of 1880. With the official and formal devaluation of Sign, linguists turned their attention elsewhere, and either ignored it, or misunderstood it completely. J.G. Kyle and B. Woll detail this sad history in their book, remarking that such was Tylor’s knowledge of the grammar of Sign has to make it obvious that ‘linguists have only been rediscovering [it] over the past ten years.’
78

78. Kyle and Woll, 1985, p. 55.

Notions that ‘the sign language’ of the deaf is no more than a sort of pantomime, or pictorial language, were almost universally held even thirty years ago. The
Encyclopedia Britannica
(14 ed.) calls it ‘a species of picture writing in the air’; and a well-known standard text tells us:
79

79. Myklebust, 1960.

The manual sign language used by the deaf is an Ideographic language. Essentially it is more pictorial, less symbolic, and as a system is one which falls mainly at the level of imagery. Ideographic language systems, in comparison with verbal symbol systems, lack precision, subtlety and flexibility. It is likely that Man cannot achieve his ultimate potential through an Ideographic language, inasmuch as it is limited to the more concrete aspects of his experience.

There is, indeed, a paradox here: at first Sign looks pantomimic; if one pays attention, one feels, one will ‘get it’ soon enough—all pantomimes are easy to get. But as one continues to look, no such ‘Aha!’ feeling occurs; one is tantalized by finding it, despite its seeming transparency, unintelligible.
80

80. One must wonder whether there is not also an intellectual (and almost physiological) difficulty here. It is not easy to imagine a grammar in space (or a grammaticization of space). This was not even a concept before Edward S. Klima and Ursula Bellugi conceived it, in 1970 (even to the deaf, who used such a grammar-space). Our extraordinary difficulty in even imagining a spatial grammar, a spatial syntax, a spatial language—imagining a linguistic use of space—may stem from the fact that ‘we’ (the hearing, who do not sign), lacking any personal experience of grammaticizing space ourselves (and lacking, indeed, any cerebral substrate for it) are
physiologically
unable to imagine what it is like (any more than we can imagine having a tailor seeing infrared).

There was no linguistic attention, no scientific attention, given to Sign until the late 1950’s when William Stokoe, a young medievalist and linguist, found his way to Gallaudet College. Stokoe thought he had come to teach Chaucer to the deaf; but he very soon perceived that he had been thrown, by good fortune or chance, into one of the world’s most extraordinary linguistic environments. Sign language, at this time, was not seen as a proper language, but as a sort of pantomime or gestural code, or perhaps a sort of broken English on the hands. It was Stokoe’s genius to see, and prove, that it was nothing of the sort; that it satisfied every linguistic criterion of a genuine language, in its lexicon and syntax, its capacity to generate an infinite number of propositions. In 1960 Stokoe published
Sign Language Structure
, and in 1965 (with his deaf colleagues Dorothy Casterline and Carl Croneberg)
A Dictionary of American Sign Language
. Stokoe was convinced that signs were
not
pictures, but complex abstract symbols with a complex inner structure. He was the first, then, to look for a structure, to analyze signs, to dissect them, to search for constituent parts. Very early he proposed that each sign had at least three independent parts—location, handshape, and movement (analogous to the phonemes of speech)—and that each part had a limited number of combinations.
81

81. A particularly nice confirmation of Stokoe’s insight is provided by ‘slips of the hand.’ These are never arbitrary errors, never movements or handshapes that do not occur in the language, but only errors of combination (transposition, etc.) in a limited set of place or movement or handshape parameters. They are entirely analogous to the phonemic errors that are involved in slips of the tongue.

Besides these errors (which involve unconscious transpositions of sublexical elements), there are among native signers elaborate forms of Sign wit and Art Sign, which involve conscious, creative plays on signs and their constituents. Such signers clearly have an intuitive awareness of the internal structure of signs.

Yet another (if offbeat) testament to the syntactic and phonemic structure of Sign comes from ‘mad Sign’ or ‘Sign salad,’ which may be seen in states of schizophrenic psychosis. Here, typically, signs are split up, deconstituted, reconstituted, subject to neologistic formations and bizarre (but not ‘illegal’) grammatical distortions. This is exactly what happens with spoken language in so-called ‘schizophrenese’ or ‘word salad.’

I have also seen an interesting isolation and exaggeration of different phonemic elements of signs (convulsive alteration of the location or direction of a sign, for example, while keeping the handshape constant; or vice versa) in a nine-year-old deaf girl who has Tourette’s syndrome; similar strange emphases and distortions of spoken words may occur in hearing children who have Tourette’s.

In
Sign Language Structure
he delineated nineteen different handshapes, twelve locations, twenty-four types of movements, and invented a notation for these—American Sign Language had never been
written
before.
82

82. Stokoe’s notation, it should be understood, was precisely this, a notation (like phonetic notation) for research purposes, not for ordinary use. (Some of the notations that have been proposed since are enormously complex: notation of a short sign phrase may occupy an entire page.) There has never been, in the ordinary sense, a written form of Sign, and some have doubted whether a written form would be practicable. As Stokoe remarks, ‘the Deaf may well sense that any effort to transcribe in two dimensions a language whose syntax uses the three dimensions of space as well as time would far outweigh the result—if it could be achieved’ (personal communication; see also Stokoe, 1987).

Very recently, however, a new system of writing Sign—‘SignFont’—has been developed by a group in San Diego (see Newkirk, 1987 and Hutchins et al., 1986). The use of computers makes it possible to give the immense range of signs, their modulations, and many of their ‘intonations,’ a more adequate written form than had previously been thought possible. SignFont tries to indicate the full expressiveness of Sign itself; it is too early to say, however, whether or not it will find favor in the deaf community.

If SignFont, or some other form of written Sign, were adopted by the deaf, it might lead them to a written literature of their own, and serve to deepen their sense of community and culture. This prospect, interestingly, was perceived by Alexander Graham Bell: ‘Another method of consolidating the deaf and dumb into a distinct class would be to reduce the sign-language to writing, so that the deaf-mutes would have a common literature distinct from the rest of the world.’ But this was seen by him in an entirely negative light, as predisposing towards ‘the formation of a deaf variety of the human race’ (see Bell, 1883).