Sign

Throughout history, Sign languages have been victims of discrimination. 

Though unknown, their origins are certainly ancient. In Plato’s Cratylus, which dates to 360 BCE, Socrates alludes in passing to the systematic use of signs by the Deaf. Presumably, wherever there were groups of Deaf people, Sign languages arose, developed, spread, and evolved -- like spoken languages do. 

And yet, it wasn’t until around 50 years ago that academic linguists decreed American Sign Language (ASL) to be a legitimate language in its own right, with its own grammatical rules, syntax, standards of eloquence, even dialects.  

ASL hadn’t undergone some sort of rapid macroevolution; linguists just came to realize what the Deaf had known all along. 

Before this time, virtually all schools for the Deaf exclusively employed hearing teachers whose primary goal was to teach their students oral speech. Sign was considered to be a primitive form of communication, fitting only for the unintelligent (Exhibit A, discrimination). In such contexts, signing was strictly forbidden and severely punished.

But that didn’t stop the Deaf. 

A few months ago, I read Hands of My Father, a childhood memoir by Myron Uhlberg. Myron is a hearing man with two Deaf parents, both of whom attended boarding schools for the Deaf as children. His mother’s testimony resembles that of thousands more Deaf individuals from this dark era of Deaf education...

“When the lights were turned out, we went to the bathroom, where a light was always on, and we talked till our eyes refused to stay open. We loved to talk to one another in our language. We lived for sign, and the ability to communicate with one another was like the water of life, our oasis of language and meaning, in the midst of the huge expanse of desert silence and incomprehension that was the greater hearing world.” 

Despite the misguided efforts of many over the centuries, Sign languages have survived and are thriving all over the world. Although antiquated assumptions still reign in certain places, the tide has definitively turned: more and more people are recognizing the unique beauty of Sign languages. 

This post is about that beauty. 

From Hands of My Father: “Simply put, it is for me the most beautiful, immediate, and expressive of languages, because it incorporates the entire human body.” 

Just as the human mouth holds seemingly incalculable possibilities of sound, the human body holds incalculable possibilities of movement. But moving mouths are not particularly beautiful. Bodies are. 

Faces, arms, fingers come alive, and the bodies of the hearing suddenly seem dull, dead. 

The articulate Deaf body speaks in a mesmerizing dance. It’s unlike anything else I’ve seen or heard. 

As I become more and more comfortable in Jordanian Sign language, as I develop and practice the possibilities of communicative movement within my own body, I’m having much more fun signing than I generally do when I’m speaking.

I’ll try to flesh this out with an example. 

To perform the sign for “poor” in Jordanian Sign language, place your non-dominant arm across your shoulder, clenching the hand into a fist. Then make a claw out of your dominant hand and draw it up the arm. 

As far as I know, there are no sign synonyms for “poor” -- in contrast, of course, to English. Words like “needy,” “destitute,” and “penniless” all mean more or less the same thing, but each has subtly different connotations that might lead us to choose one over another. Furthermore, we might select one of these synonyms for reasons related to the flow of our words (rhythm, alliteration, etc). 

Doesn’t this mean that Jordanian Sign language is more simplistic than English? Where’s the diversity and depth of expression?

Just watch the claw slowly wind up my arm, suggesting the twists and turns of a poverty-stricken life; or the fingernails on my rigid hand scrape my arm’s skin, suggesting a sudden and urgent crisis; the angst on my face, suggesting sorrow; the anger in my eyes, suggesting injustice.

I might never sign it the same way twice. 

Each body has its own accent in Sign. I’m growing into my own. And it’s fun. 

All of this regards the beauty and expressiveness of Sign, to which Myron refers. But what does he mean by “immediate” in the quote above?

Most likely, he is referring to the fact that Sign languages maintain a closer connection to reality than spoken/written languages do. 

The relation between (almost all) words and their meanings is utterly arbitrary. There is no self-evident reason why the word “war” means war and not play (notwithstanding a word’s etymological roots). Long ago, people just decided to call it “war,” and afterwards, people just went along with it. 

And people don’t just intellectually assent to these linguistic connections (i.e., the connections between words and the realities that they signify); over the course of our communicative development, our minds and hearts come to embrace them, to conceive of them as we conceive of truth. That’s why words have power over us, why the combination of the letters w-a-r can and should actually arouse thoughts and feelings in me. (Yo Nietzsche, holla!) 

But what if the connections between our units of communication and the meanings that they signify weren’t so arbitrary? What if the way we communicated the concept of war wasn’t through three random letters placed side-by-side, but through certain movements of our arms, our faces, our whole bodies? What if the meaning of those movements was unambiguous and intuitive? 

Embracing would come more naturally, for messages and their meanings would seem immediate. 

A final excerpt from Hands of My Father:

“I could read most of the words on the front page for myself. Even the ones I didn’t know, I could sound out. But I much preferred that my father read the front page to me. Words like war and battles, and army, and shell, and bomb were just words to me, as were wounded and dead. But when my father’s expressive hands turned these words into sign, they came alive. In the movement of his hands, I could see the fall of bombs, the flight of shells, and the movements of vast armies; I could hear the cries of the wounded and the stillness of death.”

This post has been long and winding, so thanks for sticking with it. I just had to get these thoughts and feelings out there. 

Grace and peace.