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From:
"Angus B. Grieve-Smith" Date: Wed Oct 6, 1999 2:02 pm Subject: Re: Sandinistas | |
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On Tue, 5 Oct 1999, Joe Martin wrote: > In the US, signing was forbidden and actively suppressed for > generations, yet the the same language creation process took place In > Spite Of a well-enforced, longlasting policy of active repression. > US educational policy did bring deaf people together, though, so by > your reasoning we would have to credit US educational policy for the > creation of ASL. You're misinterpreting my claim. Of course, the intent of US educational policy was the opposite of its effect. That doesn't mean that it didn't have an effect. It might have succeeded in wiping out Deaf culture and ASL if, instead of concentrated indoctrination in residential schools, it had isolated Deaf kids from each other and restricted their peer groups to hearing kids. You could call it "mainstreaming." Conversely, the Sandinistas intended to provide universal Spanish literacy, and they wound up unintentionally creating a new language. However, you could imagine a government deliberately creating Deaf schools with the intention of bringing into existence a new signed language among people who never shared one before. My main issue is with the claim that signed languages have existed throughout time. I do in fact like the idea that Sherman Wilcox and others have proposed that the first languages may have been gestural. But in order for there to have been an unbroken chain of signed languages from then to now, there would have to have been a critical-mass population of Deaf people existing for tens of thousands of years. Remember that we don't have any evidence for towns of more than a hundred thousand until relatively recently. -- Angus B. Grieve-Smith Linguistics Department The University of New Mexico |
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